SEO vs. PPC for Your Medical Practice

What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Each Approach? Which Is Better for Your Medical Practice?

You’re looking to build your patient base, and you know you need to develop an online strategy. You’ve talked to other medical practitioners, some of whom insist that you need to use pay-per-click (PPC). Others tell you that PPC isn’t necessary—you just need to take the time to ensure that your online content is fully optimized, that up-to-date principles of SEO have been applied to your web presence. What are the differences between PPC and SEO? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy? How can you determine which approach is best for you and your practice?

What Is PPC?

PPC is an online marketing and advertising method where the person or business placing the ad pays a specific fee each time a web user clicks on the advertisement and goes to the advertiser’s site. PPC works through a bidding process, where advertising buyers bid on keywords. When a search is conducted on the keyword, the ad of the highest bidder is displayed at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

For example, if your medical practice is focused on treating people with high blood pressure, you might bid on keywords such as “hypertension” and “blood pressure.” When a user searches on one of those terms, the highest bidder is automatically determined, and their ad appears at or near the top of the user’s SERP or social media feed.

What Are the Advantages of Using PPC?

• It’s fast—The primary benefit of a PPC campaign is that it can produce results almost immediately. Unlike an SEO campaign, which can take weeks or months to be fully effective, a PPC campaign will bring you online visibility as soon as your ads appear.
• It’s certain—PPC can guarantee you visibility, as the ads you pay for will appear at or near the top of the page.
• It’s efficient—By focusing on specific keywords, you can effectively target patients for your practice.

What Are the Potential Disadvantages of a PPC Campaign?

A PPC campaign can be expensive, especially if you’re not getting a good return on your investment. Even if you’re not getting any quality patients, you’ll keep paying for ads every time someone clicks. Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that simply because someone clicks on your ad that they’ll become a paying patient. It’s essential that your landing page (where potential patients go when they click on your ad) is attractive and engaging and that it encourages them to call or contact your practice.

Of course, once you stop paying for PPC, the online visibility it provides will go away.

A PPC campaign can also be fairly time-consuming, as you (or your online marketing professional) need to continually monitor performance.

Also, studies show that PPC lags behind both SEO and email marketing in terms of conversion—the percentage of website visitors who actually become customers.

What Is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a marketing strategy for maximizing your visibility with search engines. As with PPC, SEO also uses keywords, but advertisers do not pay directly for them. Typically, an SEO marketing specialist will do research to determine the words and phrases consumers are inclined to use when looking for particular goods or services. As part of an overall SEO strategy, you then incorporate those keywords and phrases into the content on your social media platform or website. SEO also uses linking strategies and other approaches to help advertisers perform well with search engines, i.e., ranking highly or appearing at or near the top of a SERP.

What Are the Advantages of SEO?

There are a number of benefits to search engine optimization:

• It’s generally cheaper in the long run—With SEO, you’ll pay to have your site optimized and may pay for periodic tweaks, but you won’t pay every time a web user clicks on your ad.
• SEO-generated leads are usually better—Research shows that organic search (driven by SEO, rather than PPC) consistently creates not only more leads but also higher conversion rates.

What Are the Disadvantages of SEO?

An effective SEO campaign won’t produce results overnight. It takes weeks or months for search engines to find and index new content. However, once results start, they tend to remain steady and even improve.

An effective SEO strategy requires both a knowledgeable search engine marketing specialist and a qualified writer or other content creator. Good SEO writers are, unfortunately, not that easy to find, and writing for SEO is not typically something you can do well yourself.

Which Is Better for Your Practice—SEO or PPC?

As with anything, that depends. If you’re willing to be patient, you’ll ultimately get better results with SEO. A PPC campaign, though, can kickstart your practice while your SEO campaign is gaining traction.

Visit InjuredCarePracticeBuilder.com to Start Effectively Marketing Your Medical Practice Online.

To learn more about how we can help you market your medical practice, contact us online or call our offices today at 866-952-7045.