ALERT! 5 Things You Need to Know About the Recent Google Changes

Welcome to Practice Treatment Plan’s Bi-weekly New Patient Marketing Tips! Delivered to you every two weeks.

At the end of February Google made some big changes to how they display search results. They removed Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements from the right hand side of the results page, and added a fourth Pay-Per-Click ad at the top of the search results. You are probably asking yourself… what does that even mean??? You will have to take our word for it, IT IS IMPORTANT FOR ANY DOCTOR OR DENTIST THAT USES THE INTERNET TO GET NEW PATIENTS! Here are 5 things you need to know:

This change further diminishes the value of traditional, organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you are paying an SEO company lots of cash each month to get you to the top of the organic search results, you should know that the value of that service is somewhat diminished. Why? Because the first organic search position (the coveted #1 spot when someone searches for your service) is now “below the fold”. “Below the fold” means that someone now has to scroll down to see the result.

You better have a mobile friendly website. How is that relevant? The reason Google made this change is simple: more people conduct searches on Google each month on a mobile device than do a desktop or laptop computer. The Pay-Per-Click ads never did show up on the right side on mobile devices, so Google made the change to align the desktop/laptop experience with the mobile experience. If your website is not delivering a good mobile experience, then you are offending more than half of the people that search for dentistry each month online.

If you are using Google Pay-Per-Click today, you need to make sure your results are in the top 4. Being in the number 5 or 6 position now means your ads are pretty much invisible. After position 4, your ads fall to the very bottom of the results, at the very bottom of the page. Make sure you are bidding aggressively to be in the first four spots.

If you are using Google Pay-per-click today, make sure you are using ad extensions. Now that you are going to be bidding more aggressively to be in one of those top 4 positions, make sure you are effectively using ad extensions (one of the benefits of showing up at the top). Location, sitelinks, callouts, etc. These are all good ways to get additional attention to your ads.

If you are not using Pay-Per-Click as part of your marketing plan, YOU SHOULD BE! This change only reinforces what we have been telling our medical and dental clients for years now. Google is trying to push more businesses to their Pay-Per-Click platform by making it harder to succeed through traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They would rather you paid them to get new business rather than pay an SEO company.

Have you tried Pay-Per-Click as a marketing strategy? Call us and we can help. PPC marketing is generally the highest ROI (return on investment) channel that we use for our clients. It does not cost much to get started, and clients can see results in the first few weeks of the campaign.

If you would like to learn more about our Pay-Per-Click service contact us at 888-412-8820 or visit https://newpatientsflow.com/.

Practice Success,