Avoiding AdWords in your dental marketing campaign?

Why it’s time to “pay-to-play”

I’ve long been a proponent of organic SEO, i.e. the quest to get dental websites ranked high in the natural search listings of Google. This is because it is still the primary source for the best-quality, targeted traffic to your website.

Users looking in Google for the services of a dentist are searching there with specific intent and consequently their clicks through to your website are the most likely to result in meaningful enquiries. So organic SEO is still the number one recommendation for new patient enquiries.

However, things are changing; namely Google pushing harder and harder with paid adverts for dentists and businesses in general. Let’s take a look at the effect of this and why we need to take note.

The changing landscape of Google search results

Over the last few years Google has progressively introduced changes to the layout of their search results pages which have given paid ads much more prominence. For example, there are now more ads showing in search results than ever before. They are also less well-defined as ads in their own right, so it’s much harder for a user to distinguish them from the natural un-paid listings. The issue is particularly pronounced on mobile ‘phones where ads will be the only results you see on a Google search page until you start to scroll.

Additionally we are seeing more prominence given to “local/map” results which are taking up more real estate on page one of the search results. Just recently, we are also starting to see Google introduce ads in to this space too!

A few years ago, you might have expected 75% of all website traffic from a Google search results page to be generated from the free listings, but if we now take into account clicks on paid ads and local results, we are seeing this drop to less than 50%. We actually see this quite clearly in the analytics data we generate for some of our digital marketing clients. Even where those clients have excellent organic search results, where they do not subscribe to ads and/or have not focused on their local search search presence, then their traffic starts to slip. This is not down to failing SEO, it’s simply that the space and traffic they used to enjoy via page one of Google is now much more congested with ads and local/map results.

Why is Google doing this?

This is pretty easy to answer. Even though Google insists that ads are a great route for businesses to gain new leads, they are clearly very keen on keeping their significant ad revenues as buoyant as possible. With Facebook also now pushing their own “pay to play” initiative very hard and advertisers spreading their budgets, Google will need to try even harder to encourage businesses to advertise. By limiting the organic (free) search space and increasing the prominence of ads, you can see how the landscape is changing.

How to react?

This absolutely does not mean quitting organic SEO and jumping solely on the paid ads bandwagon. As noted above, organic SEO still delivers the most traffic and highest quality by some margin. So it still needs to be priority. In this I also include the various initiatives needed to ensure a business also appears prominently in the local/map results too.

However, given the increasing levels of traffic going via the paid channel i.e. Google AdWords, and noting the clear direction of travel of this, it now makes sense to allocate a proportion of you marketing budget to paid channels. In terms of priority, I typically recommend AdWords before Facebook, (better targeting and user intent) although Facebook campaigns can deliver good results too. In essence, we should look to utilise all channels where budget allows and after appropriate prioritisation.

This also does not necessarily mean spreading an existing budget more thinly as often this can have negative effects, particularly with SEO. Given that a well-structured and managed ad campaign can yield good returns, it makes sense to try to fund this without diluting other channels. The digital marketing team here at Dental Media can advise on suitable budgets and what you should expect to see in return.

Summary

Paid advertising is becoming increasingly important as part of holistic digital marketing campaigns whether we like it or not. By changing the landscape of search results, Google is “encouraging” users to “pay to play” if they want to take advantage of all the opportunities available to acquire new patient from the web. Whilst an organic SEO campaign was historically sufficient to achieve this, the paid channel is now becoming more prominent, particularly on mobile devices, and here we have to accept that we need to pay Google to take full advantage of their services. Whilst this will almost certainly mean more money spent on advertising, we should not panic as the rewards and returns can still be excellent.

If you are not yet using Google AdWords or Facebook advertising at your own practice, please get in touch with the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 to see how we can help with structured campaigns which deliver.