Short Term Gain, Long Term Same? Why Pay-Per-Click Can Come Before SEO
What do you want? I don’t mean to sound impertinent there, but it’s a (if you’ll excuse the pun) pertinent question. From a marketing perspective, establishing what you actually need is vital to ensure that what you’re doing is driving towards the desired goal. If you don’t know what you really want, how can you ever achieve your target?
There is a danger that, when talking to your marketing company, you slip into autopilot. ‘Traffic is up!’ Great! But you don’t fit implants to traffic. ‘I want better rankings!’ Sure! But rankings don’t sign up for Invisalign. So let’s get back to basics. Tell your marketing company what you actually want, in tangible terms, and let them work out how to get to that goal. If that goal is that you need new patients and fast, then maybe a different approach is required.
Traditionally the path to success has always been, get your organic SEO sorted first and then look at pay-per-click options. However, that isn’t necessarily a need-based approach. If you need to fill a diary quickly, then SEO won’t really achieve that. The keyword here is, of course, quickly. SEO has always been the sensible, long-term approach to digital marketing. It’s reliable, consistent and wide-ranging, as well as being pretty cost effective too. However, it’s not going to be a fast acting solution to an empty diary.
PPC’s major attribute is that it’s almost instantaneous. Once the campaign has been researched and created, a process of around two weeks, then it can go live and start paying immediate dividends. Whilst it can be less efficient than working on gradually improvement of visibility like SEO, that doesn’t really matter if your primary need is for speed.
Of course, if the campaign is successful, and stays successful, then there’s absolutely no need to turn it off even if that need lessens. It just provides an opportunity for further expansion. It can even mean then adopting more of an SEO focus as the pressure for immediacy has reduced, allowing you to build towards fulfilling those longer-term needs of more patients requiring high end treatments.
In the end, it all comes down to the need. What do you want and when do you want it? Tailoring the solution to this need requires a flexible approach from your marketing agency, so make sure you’re clear in setting not just your end goal, but how quickly you need that end goal to be met. And if that marketing company is us, why not book in a call with your account manager to discuss exactly that!
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