Are you planning to launch a unique pay-per-click advertising campaign for your medical practice and not sure where to start?
Companies in every industry can benefit from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and this is particularly true for hospitals. As healthcare businesses need to target potential customers at every stage to survive within the industry, PPC advertising for healthcare is one of the quickest and easiest ways to attract and connect with new patients when they’re actively searching for a healthcare provider. PPC or pay-per-click is a unique internet advertising tool to direct traffic to websites in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked. With constant focus, monitoring and optimization, PPC campaigns ensure that a website is on top of the search results page instead of getting lost among millions of results. When it comes to healthcare (perhaps more than any other industry), people search online to find answers for their health concerns. Relying on medical SEO services from a professional company can help implement an effective strategy to target and attract new clients.
Why Is PPC Advertising Important?
In simple terms, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a marketing tactic where a brand places an online ad for free and pays each time a prospect clicks on it. It can be split into two categories – search advertising and display advertising. In fact, this is a perfect solution for a healthcare marketer planning to strengthen online visibility, drive more traffic to their website, generate quality leads, and increase revenue. Other benefits that PPC offers to healthcare practices include –
Makes the practice’s website more visible to potential patients
Helps target very specific group of audiences
Helps identify topics for content marketing
Helps show ads to people who have visited particular pages on a website
As per a recent data compilation by Wordstream, click-through rates in the healthcare industry are 6.7 percent lower than average PPC search campaigns. On the other hand, the cost-per-click on these campaigns is 36 percent higher than the industry average. Overall, this means the medical industry has a cost-per-action that is $126.29, which is 134 percent more than the industry average. Here discussed are some important tips or strategies for healthcare PPC campaigns that help increase the return on investment (ROI) on these campaigns –
Set Advertising Goals – Compared to SEO statistics, PPC statistics are easy to measure, making it easier for healthcare marketers to track return on investment and manage budget. PPC marketing can be used to increase website traffic, patient volume and brand awareness, and generate leads. When planning a PPC campaign, it is important to define the goals that the healthcare provider would like to accomplish as it will help assess the effectiveness of campaigns.
Know the Type of Audience – One of the important aspects of healthcare PPC marketing is that the ads must be tailored or targeted to specific groups and subgroups for maximum ROI. Make sure to use Google Analytics (GA) to understand what kind of users (whether local/global, younger/older, male /female) get attracted to a specific website. For instance, if you have multiple audience groups, consider launching different PPC ad campaigns for each. Before placing a PPC ad, ask yourself these questions –
Who is your target audience?
What type of services are they looking for?
How do they search for healthcare practices or providers?
Finding definite answers to these questions will help analyze the target audience’s traits and characteristics, complete with basic demographic information, as well as their considerations, top priorities, and any obstacles that prevent them from choosing a particular healthcare practice or services.
Revisit Ad Content – Try to make sure that the ads are relevant to the people searching. Even though this may sound a little intuitive, the biggest killer of CTR is serving an ad that a target audience is not looking for in their search results. For instance, if the target audience groups are searching for physicians and the search content is showing a copy for digital imaging, the majority of people won’t click the ad. Having keyword-loaded copy is important. Just be aware about what kinds of ads are showing for a keyword. Make sure they offer something valuable to the people searching.
Pick the Right Keywords –The basic goal of PPC should be to get fresh prospects to discover a healthcare practice online. Identifying the right keywords that are most likely to result in clicks and conversions is an important aspect in this regard. Typically, a well-organized PPC campaign will include a number of different types of keywords with different levels of intent, such as – brand, low-intent, long-tail and competitive keywords. The smart way to find relevant keywords is to use an online tool like Google Keyword Planner. It helps find keywords that have high search volume, relevant to the service that a healthcare practice is trying to promote and that best fits into their budget.
Create a Compelling/Responsive Ad Copy – Search engines always tend to show high-quality ads, whose copy is closely related to the search keyword. Creating a compelling and impactful ad copy will increase CTR, which will in turn increase quality score. Quality score is one of the essential metrics a healthcare practice should be focusing on to run more successful campaigns. Responsive display ads (RDAs) – automatically adjust their size and format to fit whatever ad space is available on a page. These can be used through Google Ads, and helps the healthcare center discover the best headline, description, and even image combination. Most importantly, RDAs are instantly suitable for all types of devices – mobiles, tablets, PCs, etc. No matter how the ads are viewed, they will appear in a presentable and visually pleasing form.
Enable Ad Extensions – Maximize the amount of additional information being shared with audiences by adding extensions. It increases an ad’s click-through-rate by several percentage points, increases visibility, CTR and ROI. Some common ad extensions include –
Callouts – short 25 character descriptions to highlight what is being offered.
Sitelinks – include links that populate under your ad to help direct people to the landing pages you select.
Structured snippets – this extension highlights the services or the type of products offered.
Location – displays your medical business address, contact number and directions to reach you.
App – links that direct users to the app store or provide a link to download link of the app.
Review – includes online reviews which customers tend to trust
It is important to test various extensions and analyze which one works best for your healthcare practice. Keep an eye on the users to know what terms they use for several possible results.
Focus on Geo-targeting – Also known as location-targeting, this is a paid advertising strategy that is designed to target an audience within a specific geographical area. These strategies can help deliver specific healthcare services to prospective customers based on their geographical location. For instance, if the majority of audiences or customers reside in a specific geographical area, it is important to focus the campaign solely on that specific area rather than wasting the ad budget targeting the entire city. With the right geo targeting strategy in place, healthcare practices can reach the right group of people searching for a service which can improve PPC performance and return on investment.
Optimize Landing Pages – Landing pages play a critical role in healthcare digital advertising. For instance, when someone clicks on your ad, they arrive on a landing page and this page must deliver on your ad. If it doesn’t, people will return to the search results, which doesn’t help your healthcare advertising initiative. Analyze your landing pages for different ad campaigns. For instance, if your healthcare practice designs an ad promoting emergency medical care – the landing page need to offer additional information about emergency care, like parking, capabilities, and more.
Optimize Ads for Mobile – As per Statista.com, there are more than 3 billion Smartphone users worldwide. It is estimated that people spent 23 additional minutes per day on their smartphones in 2020 to conduct searches. Setting up PPC Ads for mobile is easier because of the level of intimacy that a Smartphone offers. Optimizing these ads would persuade users to click on the ads – whether on the search networks or display networks.
Take Advantage of Conversion Tracking – Conversion tracking offers a unique platform to gain insight into the type of keywords that drive traffic to the paid ad campaign and prompt people to convert. This report will also provide insight about the negative keywords and help to narrow down the target audience group. Using this feature allows Google to optimize the account with the setting “maximize for conversions,” which will show ads to users who are more likely to convert based on those who have previously done so.
Conduct PPC Audits – Getting the most value out of healthcare PPC requires regular PPC audits. A PPC audit involves a complete analysis of the advertising strategy, ad campaigns, and ads. These audits help to evaluate where the PPC ads are succeeding and where they aren’t, how long these ads stay relevant, and whether users are finding the solutions they need on the site via these ads. This analysis can provide information regarding what is engaging and what changes need to be incorporated to better target the ads.
Research Competitor Campaigns – Competing health centers can also provide insight into the healthcare advertising strategy. For instance, using tools like SEMrush would enable you to see competitor ads. Checking Facebook’s ad library can help view an organization’s Facebook and Instagram ads.
A/B Testing – It is not possible to know and analyze what works best for a healthcare practice without testing. A/B testing for PPC campaigns makes ads more relevant. To test PPC campaign, test the headlines, description, link, keywords, and ad extensions. In addition, testing landing page elements like design, images, CTA, benefits and features is also crucial. Regular A/B testing keeps an eye on CTRs and overall volume but, most importantly focuses on conversions and cost per conversion. However, make sure to test only one element at a time to get proper results as multi elements testing can be convoluted and indeterminate.
Launching and maintaining a healthy PPC campaign for your healthcare practice requires more than a one-time setup. PPC is an on-demand way to strengthen online visibility, increase traffic, and drive profitability. It is also one of the great lead generation strategies for healthcare marketers. However, to get the best results, it is important to follow a strategic approach to set up your health advertising campaigns. An organic SEO company can design the right PPC campaign for healthcare practices to increase website visibility, traffic, and conversions.
Survey reveals that marketers consider Google My Business (GMB) optimization as the most valuable service for local marketing in 2020. That’s insightful for medical website marketing.
GMB Optimization Even Tops Website Optimization
In fact, optimizing for Google My Business is considered even more valuable than website optimization. If you were thinking of placing greater importance on website optimization, this survey would probably make you think twice.
The survey was conducted on 475 local marketers by BrightLocal and covered various aspects such as business practices of the local marketers, the services they offer, the pricing for these services, and the salary they offer staff. Onsite optimization is only considered the 2nd most valuable service for local marketing by the survey participants.
The rest of the most valuable services, according to the survey participants, in the order of their importance, are:
Reputation management
Citation management, and
Website design
GMB Optimization Also the SEO Service Offered Most Frequently
Even in the survey of the most frequently offered SEO services by local marketers, Google My Business optimization takes the top spot. In fact, more marketers are giving preference for GMB optimization over conventional SEO. The next 4 services most frequently offered by local marketers are, in the order of their importance, SEO audits/analysis, onsite optimization, reporting/analytics and citation management. Of particular note is the fact that link building is among the services offered less frequently. Just half of the local marketers surveyed claimed to be offering it.
Google Rankings Most Valued Metric for Local Marketing
In terms of metrics for local marketing, Google rankings are most valued. In fact, the survey also indicates that Google rankings are considered more important than even new leads and customers for businesses. The 4 other metrics that are valued by local businesses the most are, in their order of importance, new customers, new leads or enquiries, organic traffic and the number of fresh reviews.
SEO Still Considered Best Online Method for Attracting New Clients
Though it may not have made it to the top of the list in terms of the services most offered, SEO is still considered by local marketers as the best online method to attract new clients. The other channels considered valuable are, in their order of importance, content marketing, LinkedIn and pay-per-click (PPC).
Surprisingly, in this digital age, the value assigned to word of mouth is still significant. This is still the most valued channel overall to win clients. The other valued channels are also non-digital techniques such as local business groups as well as industry conferences.
These survey results could probably also give you some insight into how you could do things differently for your website. It isn’t necessary to flow with the current. A different approach could perhaps help you stand out from the competition. That’s something innovative medical SEO services would be able to figure out for you.
Technology is constantly evolving and it has brought in various advantages to businesses in all sectors. The healthcare sector for instance, has benefited immensely from technological advancements. It has helped in improving the quality of life by integrating new innovations into healthcare and medicine. Medical technologies like robotic surgery, artificial organs, virtual reality, wireless brain sensors etc have improved patient care, ensured ease of workflow and lowered healthcare costs. Innovative technology also facilitates digital marketing in healthcare, and in this regard, two areas that have seen the greatest impact of technology are social media marketing and healthcare apps. In fact, it has transformed the way business is done and the changes are clearly visible in the way in which social networking venues, instant messaging, telecommunications systems and so on now function. Businesses therefore need to stay updated regarding technology and its impact on social media and also be confident in using such technologies.
Optimizing Social Media Marketing
The world of social media marketing has changed significantly over the past decade. These changes are due to the shift in patients’ behavior, their preferences, and the latest technology. Regardless of the size and speciality of your healthcare business, social media is the best means to reach out to your target audience. Social media offers low-cost tools that combine technology and social interactions with the use of words. These tools are typically internet or mobile-based. Social media serves as a platform for marketers to communicate with peers and potential healthcare consumers and lets you spread any message in a relaxed and conversational manner. Advanced technology benefits social media and is used in social networking, instant messaging and chat, telecommunications, presentation software, video conferencing, Voice over Internet Protocol communications, groupware, online chats, interactive message boards, forums, blogs etc that make interactions with consumers easier.
About 90.4% of millennials, 48.2% of baby boomers, and 77.5% of Gen Xers use social media platforms. In 2020, more doctors will use social media to communicate with potential patients.
To market healthcare products and services, integrate social media with the vehicles of marketing. To excel in social media, healthcare brands should reflect their personality and be themselves. There are no right or wrong rules or regulations, it is best to do what works for you. But make sure that you are active and consistent with your social media posts.
Healthcare Mobile Apps
The advent of medical apps has also revolutionized the healthcare system drastically. Apps have improved communication, efficiency and quality of service. According to some reports by Statista, the mobile health industry is expected to reach a total market size of more than 60 billion US dollars by 2020. Mobile healthcare apps have helped healthcare providers and patients significantly with better patient care. Hospital staffs and pharmacists can also reap the benefits of this technological marvel for online consultation, diagnosis, appointments, and medical supply delivery. Here are some interesting statistics on healthcare mobile apps.
There are more than 318,000 mhealth apps in top app stores worldwide
More than 200 new healthcare apps are added to the store every day
Healthcare mobile apps market is expected to reach USD 111.1 billion by 2025
AI-Powered Healthcare Apps and Consumers
According to Accenture, the number of healthcare consumers to adopt digital technology is rising every year.
75% of US consumers that have been surveyed said that technology is important in managing their health
Patients are open to smart technologies that can improve the self-care process
Patients love self-service digital health tools that go beyond websites
74% of the people who experienced a virtual health care service were very satisfied
Nearly 50% of patients prefer an immediate, virtual appointment over an in-person visit
These statistics show that many healthcare providers and healthcare businesses are investing in healthcare mobile apps. The advantages of healthcare mobile apps are:
They facilitate immediate access to your patients so they don’t have to leave their house and wait in long queues for their appointment.
With mobile apps, healthcare providers can easily be notifiedabout an emergency, and all the necessary information will be sent to the doctor’s device. This saves time and also improves efficiency at the time of emergencies.
Healthcare apps ensure better coordination among doctors, hospital staff and patients. Doctors can directly communicate the prognosis to the patients and prescribe suitable medications. The app will notify doctors and patients about the upcoming appointment, and alert hospital staff if any reports/documents are required for the diagnosis.
Mobile apps can be integrated with wearables to collect data such as the patient’s pulse rate, blood pressure etc.
Technology is revolutionizing businesses. New computer hardware and software platforms are being developed every year that ensure better patient care and enhanced workflow. Healthcare businesses that interact directly with their customers as well as product and service providers need to embrace technology and use it in the best way. With the support of medical SEO services, healthcare businesses can develop custom-made mobile healthcare apps, improve their social media marketing techniques and thereby increase their customer base and brand value.
With access to the Internet 24/7, people prefer to search for healthcare information online and this is transforming the search landscape. With innovative emerging technologies, healthcare businesses and marketers should look for more opportunities to grow their business and digital marketing for healthcare is important to stay competitive. The latest trend is voice search, and spoken commands are quickly becoming the norm for accessing content from search engines. Searches have transformed from text input to voices driven on natural language and conversation. Increasing use of mobile use has led to the adoption of voice interface. The implication for voice search is specifically to deliver the single right answer and to get the single right answer we need Schema.
Schema markup is a structured data markup that helps the search engines understand the context of your website. It organizes and structures information on the website to associate entities with each other. It comes in 414 types with 905 properties and 114 enumeration values. So, it is important to understand which type of schema should be used with your content. Schema makes a significant impact on SEO and voice search devices like Google Home, Alexa, Siri and so on. For SEO, the impact of schemas is usually in featured snippets, rich snippets, and Position 0 rankings.
Testing and Measuring Schema
Google’s
Structured Data testing Tool helps to know whether you have correctly implemented
schema markup or not. This tool evaluates the markup and finds out any errors that
might be on the page so that you can correct them. It helps to ensure that you
get the full benefits of using schema markup. So, to measure the success of
schema deployment looks for the following things:
Position movement
Incremental impressions
Incremental organic sessions
Incremental organic driven
leads
Incremental organic driven
conversion
Speakable Schema for Voice Search
Today text to
speech is on the rise with smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home etc. There
is a need for authors and publishers to be able to easily call out portions of
a webpage that are particularly appropriate for reading out aloud. Speakable
schema helps digital assistants know what you want to be said for the content
on the page. Speakable schema is at present available in beta for news
articles. Marketers can implement speakable schema markup as part of Google News
or Bing News. For this, you must consider the following things:
Follow the Google News or Bing
News guidelines using Google News Producer or Publish Center.
Do not use Schema on the entire
article, use only for important points.
Speakable markup should be for
text content only.
Speakable text should be 2 or 3
sentences only and take only 30 seconds to read.
Break up the story into short
sentences.
At present
Speakable schema is available for news publishers, but in the future, it will
be used by other websites. Now it is used within the news context and it tells
the search engines and the digital assistants what needs to be verbalized.
Implement Speakable Schema
If you wish to
implement speakable schema in the future, then it is important to consider the spoken
content that you would want for a given page. The schema markup tells the
search engine what that content means. It creates an enhanced description,
otherwise known as a rich snippet which appears in search results. Schema
markup is not a determining factor or a ranking factor. If you don’t have
schema it does not follow that your content will never become a featured snippet,
though becoming a featured snippet may be more challenging.
If you want a higher chance of being the single right answer for voice searchers, then you have to understand where digital assistants get the answers from – featured snippets, directory listings, voice actions or chatbots, knowledge graph, and chit chat /persona responses.
Optimizing for Voice Search Means Optimizing for Featured
Snippets
To optimize for
both voice search and featured snippets, then consider the following tips:
Identify the questions where
you are currently ranking in the top 10
Find out the questions related
to that query
Decide how to structure your
answer
Offer a straightforward answer
that adds value
The answers should sound
natural when spoken aloud
Make sure that the character
count fits the mobile screen
Optimizing Different Types of Voice Search
Voices queries
are divided into three types- informational, navigational and transactional.
Most people use voice queries for searching quick facts (68 percent), followed by
asking directions (65 percent), searching for a product or service (52
percent), searching for a business (47 percent) and so on.
Optimizing for information
queries:
Featured snippet optimization
Better page speed
Implement schema markup
Write in simple conversational language
Optimizing for navigational
queries:
Own your directory listings
Get customer reviews
Post location optimized, on site content
Optimizing for transactional queries:
Create focused content
Get customer reviews
Publish FAQs
Create voice action or chatbots
Write in a conversational tone or language
According to the
findings of Microsoft’s 2019 report on Consumer Adoption of Voice
Technology and Digital Assistants:
Adoption: 75 percent of households will have at least one smart speaker by 2020.
Usage: 69 percent of respondents have used digital assistants.
Trust: 41 percent of respondents have concerns about trust, privacy and passive listening.
vCommerce: More than half of consumers expect their digital assistants to help make retail purchases within the next 5 years.
Functionality: Consumers will not divulge PII (personally identifiable information) without a substantial reward.
Schema markup enables
search engines to return more informative results for users. It is a new form
of optimization that is not well utilized at present. A website using schema
markup will be visible to users, and users can see what the website is about,
what they do, and where they are. Such websites will rank better in search
engine result pages (SERPs) compared to websites with no schema markup. It is
surprising however, that only few businesses have taken full advantage of
schema markup. Healthcare businesses looking to rank high and improve search results
can consider hiring reliable medical SEO services that can help implement schema markup as well as other SEO strategies.
Medical SEOcompanies are always busy since Google keeps evolving its search results with algorithmic changes or design innovations.
June 2019 Core Update
The first week of June 2019 could witness yet another core Google update. Google says this will be a “broad core algorithm update”. Google has even named it the June 2019 Core Update. Although minor updates keep coming up now and then, Google claims that the last “core” update happened only in March. But what’s unique about this update is that Google announced this in advance. It is quite unlike Google to announce in advance, while they haven’t even confirmed many of the algorithmic changes Internet marketers, SEOs and webmasters have been observing through the years.
The New “Ad” Change in the Mobile SERPs
The search engine ranking page (SERP) has been the main focus of Google’s innovations. The recent redesign of the mobile SERPs is proof of that. Organic listings will get favicons, and ads will get the black “Ad” label on the top of the listing. Webmasters and Internet marketers are wondering what the impact of these changes would be on search rankings. And there are more changes to come.
Host of Innovations to AdSense Ads
In fact, ads have been something Google has been focusing on. Search Engine Journal reports that Google is not going to display Adsense ads that contain text only anymore. Google sent an email to AdSense publishers that it is “moving towards richer ad formats”. But it’s not text-only ads alone that would get the axe. Google mentioned that display-only ad units would also be phased out. The goal is to “improve user experience” and display the rich variety of ads available in the market. That would help Google to modernize its ads and bring them in step with contemporary media.
The “Text ads only” and “Display ads only” captions will be replaced with “Display ads”. And there are more changes coming the way of AdSense ads. The coming weeks would be pretty exciting, particularly if you look at the email, mentioned by Search Engine Journal, in which Google announced these changes.
By default, ad units will all be created Responsive. But publishers would still be able to create ad units to custom sizes. New ad units will have text ad styling optimized by Google. Publishers won’t be able to get ad styles created for new ad units. There won’t be the option, “if no ads available”. Instead, Google will either reveal a blank space or collapse the space.
All ad unit experiments including active and obsolete ones will cease in the weeks to come. The Reports tab won’t contain the experiments report. You also won’t be able to change ad code type to synchronous from the account settings in AdSense.
Google has been working to really understand the behavior of users in terms of their interest in ads. These changes could be perceived as steps to ensure ads appeal more to users. The more users find ads appealing to them, the more clicks they will make which could potentially result in AdSense publishers securing more earnings.
Hospitals, clinics, healthcare institutions and other businesses in the healthcare field can find the constant changes overwhelming. That’s where medical SEO services can prove resourceful.
