As a plastic surgeon, you have a clear understanding of how important it is to be methodical, have a plan, and go into a task with efficiency. Those same principles that have made you successful as a surgeon can also be applied to your marketing and digital advertising efforts to help you get more customers and find new leads.
Digital advertising is a way of getting the word out about your practice, your services, and your areas of expertise. But without a great paid advertising strategy, you won’t be getting the best results. That’s why it’s so important to know the essential paid search best practices for plastic surgeons and implement them into your marketing campaigns.
What is Paid Search Advertising?
Paid search advertising is one of the most common and popular ways of advertising your services to customers. Paid search is a form of PPC, or pay-per-click, advertising. In this method, you set a budget to capture specific keywords and search terms that people enter into a search engine like Google. From there, the platform will allocate your budget to those keywords and generate an ad that will be seen at the top of a search results page.
The more you pay, the more likely you are to win bids against other competitors for top-ranked keywords. However, you only ever have to pay for the clicks you get, so you can carefully plan a strategy for your budget and go after the keywords that are most effective and relevant to your plastic surgery practice.
Paid search advertising is a simple form of PPC that usually uses a simple headline and description to drive home the point of the advertisement. While Google is the biggest platform for paid ads, other search engines like Bing and Yahoo also have paid ad capabilities. Using all search engine ad platforms helps you capture even more clicks and get more attention from people using search engines outside of Google.
What is a Paid Search Ad?
Paid search ads are composed of four main components: a headline, a URL, a description, and potentially ad extensions, which add more context and value to the ad, for a cost. These components are the same across all paid search ads, which means that plastic surgeons and office marketers only have a few key elements to optimize for the part of the ad that is viewed by customers.
- Headline: The headline is the first and most stand-out element of the ad. It consists of a 30-character line that has a larger text than the rest of the ad to draw more attention. It’s important to use the headline to clearly define what your ad is promoting and entice searchers to give it a click.
- Display URL: The next element is the display URL. This is the specific page link that you are guiding potential visitors to when they click the ad. You want to make sure that that URL is simple, clear, and avoids lots of numbers and backslashes. The URL needs to appear legitimate in order to get clicks from searchers so it needs to display the same domain name as your company name.
- Description Text: Next is the description text of the ad. This element allows you to add more detail to the offer explained in the headline. You have between 80 and 150 characters for the description, depending on which search engine you are using for the paid ad.
- Ad Extensions: The final element of paid search ads is an ad extension. This allows you to add more links, information, or details to the ad. For example, you might add a phone number, a location, or a link to a more specific page than the one listed in the actual ad. These extensions increase the ad’s visibility and help you get more clicks.
Most ad platforms allow you to build out a few different headlines and descriptions, which will then be used to populate and fill out the ad for each view. The algorithm of the search platforms will help find the most effective headline and description combinations and promote those to get you more views and, hopefully, more clicks.
Benefits of Paid Search Ads
Now that you know a little more about what a paid search ad is and what they look like when they appear on a search engine results page, let’s talk about some of the key benefits they provide that can help plastic surgeons and practices get more out of their investment.
More Visibility
The first major benefit is an increase in visibility across your brand. When you use paid search ads in your digital marketing strategy, you are more likely to get discovered in local search results. By having the location of your business on the search engine profile, you can be discovered for “plastic surgeons near me” or “plastic surgeons in [area]” searches that help connect you to relevant customers.
More Traffic
Another benefit of paid search ads is that they help you get more traffic to your website. Your website is the filter through which your leads will funnel in order to become patients at your practice. Ads will guide your potential leads directly to your more relevant website pages that are geared toward conversions and bringing in new business. Not only does this boost traffic numbers, which helps with SEO, but it can get you more customers at the same time.
Higher-Quality Leads
When someone uses a search engine to look for a specific type of business or service, odds are they are looking to get that completed. Most people don’t spend a lot of time searching for plastic surgeons if they aren’t in need of one. By targeting keywords that relate to your services and are tied to your area, you can get higher-quality leads who are looking for what you provide at the exact moment they search for it.
Detailed Analytics
Finally, paid search ads use search engine platforms as the power behind the advertisement. This means that you gain access to the detailed analytics and metrics that these engines can collect. You can get more insights, more details on the success of your ad campaigns, and more direction on where to improve by using paid search advertising for your plastic surgery practice. These details can also help you save time trying to run your own audits or ROI reports.
Paid Search Best Practices for Plastic Surgeons
In order to have a successful campaign for paid advertising, you need to know the best practices and tips for conducting paid search the right way. Here are some of the most valuable tips and tricks you can use to boost your paid search advertising efforts and get better results from your investments:
- Define your audience: know who your specific targets are, so you can capture the right people looking for plastic surgery options in your area.
- Choose the right platform: not all search engine platforms are going to be effective for you. Know where your audience spends time and devote your ad spend to those channels.
- Optimize your headlines and descriptions: make your headlines and descriptions stand out with keywords, clever turns of phrase, and unique arrangements.
- Use a devoted landing page: rather than sending audiences to a standard web page, create a specific landing page for the ad campaign that maximizes conversions for each campaign goal.
- Make your offer compelling: have a clear and distinct offer in each ad that draws searchers in and adds value to their click and conversion.
- Use unique keywords: rather than competing for the most common search terms, use long-tailed keywords that are unique to your area or your business.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
At Surefire Local, we understand that running a successful plastic surgery practice relies on many different factors. That’s why we developed our platform to help bring those dissonant elements together in a single place to make digital marketing and advertising easy and reliable. Our platform is a business intelligence and marketing tool that helps plastic surgeons get more out of their marketing efforts. With the help of Surefire Local, you can boost your ads, review results, and make improvements to your bidding strategy all from one location.
To learn more about Surefire Local and how it can help your plastic surgery practice improve advertising at a fraction of the cost of other marketing platforms and agencies, book a demo today. There you’ll learn about the specific tools that can boost your business and take you to the next level. Click the link above to sign up today.