Whether it’s thanks to clinical interest, business savvy or both, dentists are well positioned for industry growth. By 2040, analysts expect a surplus of dentists — and when supply increases in a market, competition can too.
Search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns are key to helping dental groups acquire patients. Nationally, dental care is one of users’ most-searched specialities, with upward of 15 million impressions per year. For context, primary care providers attract 11 million annual impressions among that same pool.
That kind of scale has all kinds of implications for patient acquisition. SEM could prove central to how well a practice grows going forward. At the heart of this strategy is efficiency, which informs tracking, which informs how to spend a marketing budget. The scale and competition of search engine marketing for dentists renders it a complex task. Those who understand it stand to benefit tremendously.
Here are some quick tips that can help dentists succeed at SEM.
1. Inspect
Get a handle on your cost per acquisition.
Because dentistry is a competitive field both in practice and in marketing, bidding on related keywords within online ad marketplaces can come at a high cost per click (CPC). To get the most out of your advertising dollars, your practice must understand each patients’ value to the practice in order to set an appropriate cost per acquisition (CPA) rate.
Once you’ve settled on the right CPA for your practice, Google’s Smart Bidding will take care of the technical minutiae to meet your targets. This software ensures that your ads are shown to an optimal spread of audiences — and that your reach isn’t too conservative.
2. Rinse
Remove funky queries.
Google’s broad match can bring in some odd keyword queries, some of which are pleasant surprises, while others are just strange. Dentistry especially may be competing with a multitude of products, at-home information and even career listings related to oral health.
Check your search query report regularly and remove any queries that don’t pertain to your practice. For example, queries like “what is a root canal” or “teeth whitening strips” are likely too high-funnel or irrelevant. Even questions like “why do I have bad breath” could be a patient trying to self-diagnose, with no intention of actually going to the dentist.
One easy solution is to negate “what is” and “how do you” or “why do” on the phrase match function.
3. Floss
Play with different targeting levels.
Potential patients may not live in straightforward ad markets. That’s why testing user targeting at different demographic levels can pay off. Consider targeting by zip code, city and even designated market area (DMA). While the most granular targeting doesn’t always mean the most efficient, you might be surprised which level of targeting is best suited to your base.
(Bonus tip: If you have a Google Business Profile, look into location extensions that are affiliated with your practice locations. This enables your ad to show up in situ on Google Maps, which unlocks another spot directed at local users.)
4. Polish
Bid on terms that prequalify a user.
Cut out unwanted traffic by incorporating prequalifiers in your keywords. This means bidding on terms that prequalify a user (e.g., “dentist new york city,” “dentist that takes aetna,” “dentist near me”). For example, a dental practice in New York City that takes Delta Dental, Guardian and Cigna can bid on keywords like “dentist new york city,” “delta dental dentists,” “dentists that take guardian” and “cigna dentist near me.” This ensures that you’re showing your ad to users who can actually convert.
5. Gritty clean
Make your ad copy as relevant as possible.
If your keywords are “dentists in new york city,” make sure your ad copy mirrors that content. Relevant copy not only improves your ad strength, it also leads to a higher clickthrough rate (CTR): Users will naturally click on ads they find hyper-relevant, something they’re already signaling through their queries in the search bar.
6. Rinse (again)
Use your visit reasons as sitelinks.
Sitelinks and other extensions improve your ad rank. If your ad is in position 1, a sitelink will also take up more space on the search engine results page (SERP). This gives your ad more visibility and pushes your competitors down the page. Given a good match with the end user, it could also improve your CTR. Take a look at your current sitelinks and make sure they reflect the reasons patients visit your practice (e.g., emergency dental, dental cleaning).
In competitive spaces like dentistry, every optimization is a potential new patient or new point of market share. SEM is a key lever; optimize it for your practice or risk inefficient ad spend.
Preventive Care
Don’t overestimate how many patients can be captured through SEM. There is a finite number of reachable patients on Google, and many companies are competing for the same pool of searches.
At some point, the only way to get more impressions is to bid more. However, keep in mind that conversion rates typically remain the same or decrease as the cost per click increases. This drives up your CPA. Google also aims to serve ads to as many searchers as possible. As it runs out of available matches, it populates ads under increasingly irrelevant searches. These don’t typically translate into patient bookings, further driving up the cost of acquiring a new patient.
(Learn how a large provider group uses Zocdoc, in addition to search engine marketing, to keep up with its rapid growth.)
At a certain point, spending more comes with higher marginal costs and decaying efficiency. To achieve significant growth after that, you need to explore additional sources of patients. At Zocdoc, this is where we usually meet our clients: as a complement to existing marketing efforts.
Reach out to our enterprise sales representatives to learn more about how Zocdoc can grow your business.