Putting the Dental PPC Puzzle Together in 9 Easy Steps

Dental professionals no longer count on foot traffic to increase consultations and appointments. They use pay-per-click (PPC) to get their brand of care to people who need it the most. PPC for dentists can help improve reach and achieve marketing goals.

This guide is about how to put a dental PPC campaign together. It covers the steps below that can help you create a great PPC campaign:

1. Perform dental keyword research
2. Develop customized landing pages
3. Use local targeting
4. Generate clinic phone calls
5. Evaluate campaign success

Learn how to put the PPC puzzle pieces together. Let’s go!

If you want to learn how Digital Authority Partners can increase your PPC effectiveness, watch this video!

1. Perform Dental Keyword Research

Using the right dental keyword for a PPC campaign ensures success. People looking for dental services or products use specific keywords or search terms. By targeting these keywords and including them in the ad title, description, ad copy, and landing pages, dentists can provide offers that customers seek.

So how do you find the right keywords for a dental PPC campaign? Experts use the following dental PPC strategies that work:

• Use keyword research tools such as Keyword Research Planner, a free Google tool, to find relevant PPC keywords.
• Identify relevant keywords according to dental specialization, such as pediatric dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, restorative dentistry, or dental hygienist.
• Include dental services in keywords, such as dental whitening, teeth cleaning, or dental veneers. Companies that sell dental products use these as part of their keywords.
• Group keywords to create ad groups. Create a topic or a theme. For example, preventive dental care includes cleaning, whitening, and flossing keywords.
• Consider keyword match types to adjust when ads show. Keywords can be broad, exact, phrase-based, or modified broad matches.
• Use negative keywords to keep an ad from showing when the terms appear in the query. For example, teeth whitening should not trigger a related ad.
• Analyze competitor keywords to gather insight into new targeting options, budgets, and strategies.

After research, create a list of the top dental PPC keywords. Use these keywords to create customized landing pages.

2. Develop Customized Landing Pages

Someone interested in a PPC offer clicks the ad to see details about the offer. Clicking the ad takes them to a page known as a landing page, which contains the product or service mentioned in the advertisement, so visitors can easily follow through with the offer. 

For example, a PPC ad for discounts on dental implants must lead to a landing page explaining the procedure and the offer. Optimize the landing page to guide the customer into taking the offer. For a dental landing page, these strategies can help:

• Define the target audience. This can be new patients, patients looking for a specific product or treatment, or patients according to age (school age, teens, adults, or seniors).
• Create specific goals, such as increasing appointment bookings, sales, or email signups.
• Ensure keywords, messaging, language, and offer are the same on the ad and landing page.
• Place the most critical detail about the ad at the top of the fold.
• Develop a short copy for the landing page.
• Get rid of the menu and navigation bar so customers can focus entirely on the offer.
• Keep landing pages mobile-friendly. Use short headlines, improve load speeds, focus on one call-to-action (CTA), and keep sign-up forms simple.
• Ensure the safe collection and management of patients’ protected health information (PHI). Dentists and dental offices that handle and transmit PHI must ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Secure patient consent before using their information, reviews, and photos. Dental practices must establish data storage and contingency plans in case of data breaches.

Regular landing page optimization ensures offers match customers' needs and achieve PPC goals. Another way to optimize landing pages and PPC ads is to use local targeting.

3. Use Local Targeting

Geotargeting is a strategy to enhance PPC reach by showing ads only to people in a specific area. This strategy works for local businesses, such as a dental office or a local dentist. With geotargeting, dentists can maximize their budgets by targeting customers from areas more likely to take advantage of their offer.

Dentists adjust their Google Ads account to use location targeting. They can add or exclude locations and target nearby areas. For example, a San Francisco dental office uses geotargeting to show its ads in the city and the nearby regions of Oakland, San Jose, Freemont, and Sacramento. It can exclude Stockton, even if it is one of the closest to San Francisco.

In addition to manually adjusting location targeting features on ad platforms, these techniques help you apply target options to ads and landing pages:

• Use Google Trends to find regional insights about local customers. This tool shows who is looking for a specific keyword per city, region, county, etc.
• Include local terms as keywords, such as “San Francisco dentists” or “teeth whitening San Francisco.”
• Edit Google Ads targeting to avoid ads showing from outside the target areas. 

Geotargeting ensures the efficient use of PPC ads. But more ways to make ads more effective, such as using a call-only campaign, are available.

4. Generate Clinic Phone Calls

Imagine searching for a dental clinic on the weekend because of a throbbing toothache! Patients do not have time to check out a landing page or scroll through a website. Dentists can use call-only campaigns by adding call extensions to their ads.

A call extension is a site extension that allows the patient to call the dental office by clicking the PPC ad. The ad will not proceed to a landing page but directly to a local business number, so patients can schedule an appointment immediately. Call extensions maximize the campaign's conversion potential, because patients who do call are more likely to book an appointment ASAP.

Aside from call extensions, dental PPC ads can also use structured snippets and site link extensions to showcase their services. In the case of a promotion, dentists can use promotion extensions to encourage customers to take advantage of an offer or discount.

5. Evaluate Campaign Success

PPC can help scale a dentist’s practice by producing almost immediate results. Dentists can improve their campaigns and adjust budgets through regular and frequent monitoring. To measure campaign success, experts turn to analytics. Check out these top PPC campaign metrics.

• The quality score measures keyword relevance. A low-quality score can be due to poor ad relevance and low-quality landing pages. Google uses Quality Score in ad ranking and determines how much advertisers pay for every click.
• The clickthrough rate (CTR) shows the relevance of PPC ads to searchers. Getting low CTRs means marketers must improve their keywords or their ad copy.
• The conversion rate is the number of people who clicked the ad and completed the desired action from the landing page. It can be booking an appointment or purchasing a product. High conversion rates mean the cost of the ads is returning as profits.
• The cost per conversion (CPC) is how much the advertiser spends to convert a customer. It considers the money spent on a campaign divided by the number of people who converted over time. A high CPC means an advertiser pays a lot of money for every click on their ad. It indicates the ads do not engage target customers. Low CPC means the ads are getting more clicks for their money.
• Wasted ad spend measures the ad budget an advertiser wastes on clicks that do not convert. Marketers must reduce wasted ad spending by practicing good keyword targeting, such as using negative keywords.

Summing Up

Dental clinics and dentists can use PPC ads to generate quick and effective results. But for this to happen, they must perform thorough dental keyword research, optimize landing pages, and use geotargeting. They must also use ad extensions, such as call extensions, and evaluate their campaigns regularly.

Dentists must partner with an expert PPC agency. A PPC partner can optimize and monitor their paid ad campaigns so they can focus on more important aspects of their practice. Contact Digital Authority Partners, and let's talk dental PPC today!