Dental practices require a reliable way to attract patients that are currently searching for dental services. With Google many potential patients are searching locally for a dentist in their area, but also investigating dental implants, teeth whitening, dental braces or root canal treatment. If your practice is not seen on Google, you are missing out on enquiries to your competitors.
Targeted paid search advertising in PPC allows you to get your message in front of these potential customers through Google Ads and other pay per click ad platforms. Paid search is not only one of the most popular dental advertising options available today, but it is one of the best options for clinics who want to focus on getting clicks. Your dentist PPC company will research, plan, and optimise your ads to attract relevant traffic, enquiry, and booking appointments.
According to my research, effective dental PPC involves far more than setting up a couple of Google Ads. It’s about choosing the right keywords, knowing the right locations, crafting the right ad copy, optimizing landing pages, and monitoring results. Here’s what a PPC company does for a dentist’s practice and how it can help in getting patients.
Table of Contents
1. Researches Dental Keywords and Patient Search Intent
A PPC campaign for a dental practice will begin with keyword research. Your PPC Expert will determine the search terms your potential patients are searching for to find a dental practice. Your practice will also be able to position for these searches because they pertain to services offered by your office.
For example, a general dental practice might be targeting keywords such as “dentist near me” or “dental practice in [location]” or “teeth cleaning appointment.” An implant specialist might be using much more specific keywords like “dental implant consultation” or “cost of dental implant.”
A dental PPC company also factors in search intent when researching keywords. Your potential patient who’s searching for “dental career” is searching for a different purpose than the patient who wants to make an appointment. They analyze search terms and identify negative keywords to eliminate irrelevant traffic. And this work can serve as a guide to advertisers and help them to spend their money on the searches that are more relevant to your clinics.
2. Creates and Manages Google Ads Campaigns
A potential patient needs to know why they should call your clinic. PPC experts will create headlines and descriptions to tie the product that you are selling to the search term being used by the user.
Sample ads for a dental clinic that provides orthodontic treatments could have the following advertisements mentioning the service and the location of the clinic as well as the modes of scheduling appointments for the service. A sample ad for an emergency dental clinic may specify the availability of the clinic space if the ad offers true information.
Good ad copy steers clear of generalised claims and provides a good level of information. The company is testing various headlines and ad descriptions to monitor which messages generate the most targeted enquiries. It also ensures the ad copy is consistent with the clinic’s website content and services.
Social media and marketing platform policies and Professional Rules of Practice apply to dental advertising. Do not use misleading statements, guaranteed outcomes and unsupported claims in your practice advertising and content marketing. Use honest and simple messaging which will help set patient expectations prior to contacting the practice.
3. Writes Relevant and Clear Dental Ad Copy
Why would the patient you want to reach want to call your clinic? PPC specialists craft headlines and descriptions that show the treatment or service you’re advertising is relevant to the searcher.
For instance, an ad for an orthodontic service at a clinic could reference the procedure, clinic and available appointments. An ad for an emergency dental clinic could let consumers know the clinic is available – the key being if it is accurate.
Good ad copy is the opposite. No wishy washy generalisations, just good info. The company is testing different headlines and descriptions to get a feel for what kind of messages generate suitable enquiries. Checks that ads reflect the services and content on the clinic’s website.
Advertise in accordance with the relevant professional standards and rules for the particular advertising platform. The practice and advertising teams need to be aware of any false claims, guarantees, or uncontrolled assertions. Ensure that facts are provided so that the appropriate expectations are set before the first telephone call.
4. Improves Landing Pages to Generate Enquiries
Ad budget Once at the appropriate position, the PPC company will be able to help you work out an ad budget based on your goals, competitor activity, services that you want to focus on, and your capacity to take on new clients.
The team keeps a close eye on spending and checks the results from various campaigns. Should one treatment campaign consume a big chunk of the budget without attracting worthwhile enquiries, the advertiser is able to audit its keywords, search terms, bid approach and landing page.
The company could reallocate budget to higher-converting campaigns, but only if they have enough performance data to make decisions, not a few clicks. Increasing spend doesn’t necessarily equate to more patients, and cheapest clicks aren’t necessarily most valuable to your business.
According to market research, clinics can judge their advertising by the quality and commercial value of any enquiries received, not just the volume of traffic.
5. Manages the Advertising Budget
The impact: Dental clinics must manage advertising budget costs and keep quality leads flowing. A PPC company can advise how much of a target a dentist should aim to spend based on the goals of the campaign, competing companies, service priorities, and capacity to deal with fresh leads.
The team keeps tabs on spend and evaluates how various campaigns are working. If one of the treatment campaigns accounts for most of the spend without generating any valuable enquiries, the advertiser can look at its keywords, search terms, bidding approach and landing page.
Invest more in campaigns that produce higher quality leads, but use enough performance data, rather than relying on a handful of clicks to decide which to eliminate. More money doesn’t guarantee more patients, and the cheapest clicks don’t always equal the best business.
According to market research, clinics should assess advertising by the business value of enquiries as well as volume of traffic.
6. Tracks Calls, Forms, and Appointment Enquiries
Tracking conversions informs a practice about what actions occur after a person clicks on an ad. With less accurate conversion tracking, a practice could know how many clicks you get on an ad but can’t really know if that results in a patient enquiry.
The PPC business sets up tracking for any key actions like website form fills, calls from the adverts, calls from the website, and bookings. Our team will ensure tracking is working and not double-counting actions where possible.
But not every enquiry turns into a scheduled appointment. Someone might fill out a form but not respond to a call back. Or they might speak to the clinic on the phone but not book in. Clinic Perspective Therefore, a clinic should correlate lead quality and booked appointments to advertising conversions. Where applicable and with the right privacy controls, the clinic can transmit aggregated outcome data back to the marketing team to assist better decision making on campaigns.
7. Reviews Performance and Optimises Campaigns
PPC Management is an ongoing process When the campaign is launched, the company monitors data to know what works and where the improvement is required.
Items the team can look at are click-through rate, cost per click, conversion rate, cost per inquiry, search terms and the quality of the leads coming in. From this the team can try altering various keywords, ads, landing pages or bids.
For example, a campaign might get a lot of clicks but would have minimal appointment requests. It could be that people are searching for the wrong things or that the ad copy is not clear or that the landing page isn’t compelling or that booking is too difficult.
The final aspect that your dentist PPC agency should do is the reports that convincingly state how your campaign has turned out, what all you have spent, and how your campaign is planning for the future. By seeing that you can decide with facts and not assumptions.
8. Helps Dental Clinics Reach the Right Local Audience
The majority of dental clinics and practices are within a reasonable distance of travel time. Using your location setting and locally relevant search terms, a PPC company will find people who are searching for your services locally.
For instance, if a clinic is in a specific area, they might be seeking to rank for searches for dentists, dental implants or orthodontics in that area. The business can look at the location performance and refine the targeting as enquiries may be received from locations the clinic doesn’t cover.
Local focus points should be established by the real journeys of patients, not by taking an area-wide catchment map of the whole city or county. The clinic should check that their website contact details and hours of opening are correct for a patient to then decide.
9. Provides Strategy and Clear Reporting
What can a professional PPC partner do for your clinic? A professional PPC partner does not just handle your settings. They guide your clinic through understanding goals, determining service ranking, analysing results and implementing improvements.
When the engagement kicks off, the team can discuss the clinic’s ideal treatments, location, budget, capacity, and expectations while aligning the strategy with insights from an adult SEO company to support relevant search visibility and patient acquisition. Then it can set relevant performance indicators and discuss how it will track its progress.
Campaigns activity linking to business results. Rather than just reporting clicks, the company should state the number of relevant enquiries generated from the ads, the costs of those enquiries and whether the clinic is converting them to appointments. Problems should be communicated to the team as well. If a campaign isn’t performing well due to limited search volume, poor lead follow-up, or website issue, the clinic should know what the problem is before considering the future course of action.
How to Choose the Right Dentist PPC Company
Before switching to a new PPC agency, learn about the proportion of their overall business that they have garnered from local search campaigns, their approach to measuring conversions, reporting style, and customer service. Find out about keyword strategies, handling non-target audience traffic, and how they protect your budget.
Ask for examples of how it reports and what metrics it uses to track success. If the provider presents case studies, look beyond the headline figures to the campaign circumstances and results. While history can be a useful guide, it cannot predict similar outcomes for another clinic.
First up, your right partner must openly explain how they will go about the campaign, show you metrics about it, and give you advice based on what you want to achieve with the clinic. Set your senses too, as nobody should tell you how many patients you will get without looking at market, cost, and your budget.
Conclusion
A PPC specialist for a dental services agency brings more relevant searchers into your clinic, handles your Google Ads campaigns, helps you stay within your advertising budget, optimizes your landing pages, and tracks patient enquiries. But it’s more than just about getting clicks – it should enable you to see if paid advertising translates into a worthwhile business result.
I believe that this is the key to good PPC management: plan;optimise and measure. When you have the right partner, a website that works and the ability to respond to queries quickly, you can be assured that the spend is as effective as possible.
Ultimately, if your campaign generates the right patients to the right services – there is value. Market your practice to the right enquiries and scheduled appointments, on the basis of sustainable results – not just impressions or clicks.
