So, your medical practice is moving forward with digital advertising and it’s time to put a plan together. But what should this plan include? This blog serves as a “checklist” which contains healthcare paid search best practices to better guide the planning stage of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
1. Adhere to Regulatory Guidelines
Most aspects of healthcare are subject to rules and regulations, and so is PPC advertising for healthcare. Google has in place a set of strict guidelines for health-related products and services to follow when running ads. Not only will following these rules keep your Google Ads account in good standing, but it will also help you maintain ethical practices that promote trust with the public and prevent legal troubles. Here are the basic areas of medical advertising guidelines:
- Language use – Healthcare ads should be careful in wording so that the language is factual, clear, and not misleading. Avoid making false claims or exaggerations about products or services.
- Automatic disapproval – Certain words and phrases can trigger automatic disapproval of PPC ads for healthcare. Terms like “cure,” “guarantee,” or “miracle” may be flagged by ad platforms and regulatory bodies.
- HIPAA compliance – The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects patient privacy and requires healthcare providers to safeguard personal health information.
- Consent and testimonials – Patient testimonials in healthcare ads require proper consent and adherence to HIPAA regulations. Practices must obtain written permission from patients before featuring their experiences in advertisements.
- Transparency and disclosures – Clearly disclose any affiliations, sponsorships, or financial relationships that may influence the content of healthcare ads.
Third-party claims – Healthcare ads that contain claims made by third parties, such as endorsements from medical professionals or studies should be verifiable and supported by credible sources. 
2. Choose Relevant Healthcare Keywords
Medical practice advertising keyword selection strikes a balance between effectiveness and nuance to ensure that your campaign reaches the right audience while maintaining ethical and responsible marketing practices in the healthcare industry. Here are some key factors to keep in mind:
- Relevance – Start by identifying keywords that align with the specific healthcare topic or service you’re promoting.
- Search intent – Are users looking for information, seeking medical advice, or searching for specific healthcare products or services? Tailor your keywords to match the user’s search intent to improve your chances of reaching the right audience.
- Specificity – Include “long-tail” keywords that are more specific. For example, instead of targeting a general term like “therapist,” consider more targeted keywords like “pediatric occupational therapist.”
- Patient-friendly language – Use the natural language that patients would use to search for care versus the terms medical professionals use. The patients are conducting these searches, so you want to match the way they phrase their queries.
- Monitoring and optimization – Continuously monitor the performance of your chosen keywords and make tweaks as needed.
3. Implement Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are an enhancement that provides more information to consumers. For example, healthcare providers can attach a phone number, physical location, or website link. Here’s why ad extensions are important and how they can help you reach a wider audience:
- Increased visibility – Ad extensions provide additional information and make your ads more prominent on search engine results pages (SERPs). By including extensions like sitelinks, callouts, or location information, you can occupy more ad space and stand out from your competitors in search results.
- Enhanced user experience – Ad extensions offer valuable information to potential patients, making it easier for them to find what they’re looking for. Including extensions like phone numbers or location details allows users to quickly access important contact information or directions to your medical practice.
- Click-through rate (CTR) improvement – Ad extensions have been shown to significantly improve click-through rates. They provide additional context and encourage users to act by providing direct links to relevant pages on your website or calling your practice directly from the ad.
- Mobile-friendly experience – Ad extensions are especially valuable for mobile users, who make up a significant portion of internet traffic. Extensions like click-to-call buttons or location information are particularly effective on mobile devices, enabling potential patients to easily contact or locate your medical practice with just a few taps.
4. Utilize Clear Messaging
Patient-centric, action-oriented language is more likely to convert and perform better in healthcare PPC advertising. With clear messaging, you can effectively communicate the benefits of your healthcare service, better resonate with patient desires, and drive meaningful engagement with your ad campaigns. Here is some PPC advice for crafting more effective campaign messaging:
- Focus on benefits – Highlight the benefits of your healthcare service or product rather than focusing solely on its features. Clearly communicate how it can improve patients’ lives, solve their problems, or meet their healthcare needs.
- Be action–oriented – Strong and clear calls–to–action (CTAs) include verbs that prompt immediate response, such as “Schedule an Appointment,” “Learn More,” or “Call Now.”
- Use testimonials and social proof – Real-life experiences and positive reviews can validate the effectiveness of your healthcare service and resonate with potential patients. Testimonials provide evidence of the positive outcomes of your services.
- Keep it concise – In the limited space of PPC ads, brevity is key in communicating your value proposition. Find creative ways to say more with less. You can use bullet points or short phrases to communicate the most important information.
- Monitor and optimize – Continuously monitor the performance of your ads and analyze the response of your target audience. Test different messaging variations to determine what resonates best.
5. Tailor Ads to the Target Patient Demographic
By tailoring your ad content to your intended demographic, you will capture their attention, address their needs, and drive conversions to yield a higher ROI. The more time you take to understand your target audience – such as their “pain points” and concerns – the better equipped you are to create compelling ads.
Also, tailored content helps to create a personalized experience for potential patients. When they feel understood and catered to, they are more likely to trust your healthcare practice and follow through with setting up an appointment.
6. Strategize Budgets and Bidding for Maximum Reach
Effective budget allocation and bidding strategies are key to optimizing the reach and impact of healthcare ads. By monitoring and adjusting your campaigns, conducting thorough keyword research, and implementing targeted bidding strategies, you can make the most of your budget while driving meaningful results for your medical practice.
The following tips will help allocate budgets effectively and implement strategic bidding for healthcare advertising.
- Determine your budget – Start by determining how much you are willing to spend on medical paid search campaigns. Consider your overall marketing goals, the competitive landscape, and the potential return on investment (ROI) you can expect.
- Keyword research and bidding – Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant and high-performing keywords for your healthcare ads. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or third-party platforms to find keywords with sufficient search volume and relevance.
- Experiment and test – Continually experiment and test different bidding strategies to find what works best for your specific healthcare campaigns. Test different bid amounts, targeting options, and ad variations to optimize your budget allocation and bidding strategy over time.
7. Align Landing Pages with Healthcare Marketing Ads
When potential patients click on a healthcare PPC ad, they expect to be taken to a landing page that aligns with the ad’s messaging and medical practice brand. Creating landing pages that are relevant, informative, and in sync with the ad’s message creates a seamless experience that helps maximize conversions and minimize bounce rates. Consider the following when creating landing pages.
Consistent Messaging
Ensure that the messaging on your landing page aligns seamlessly with the ad that brought the user there. Use the same language, tone, and value proposition to maintain consistency and reinforce the message from the ad.
Clear and Concise Information
Provide clear and concise information about your healthcare services or products on the landing page. Highlight the key benefits, features, or unique selling points that were mentioned in the ad. Make it easy for potential patients to understand what you offer and how it can benefit them. Keep the ad copy specific to the audience you are targeting rather than mentioning all your services and medical practice information.
Engaging Content and Design Elements
Use a compelling headline that grabs attention and conveys the main value proposition. Support it with subheadings that provide additional information and guide users through the content on the landing page. Also, include visually appealing elements such as high-quality images or videos that are relevant to your healthcare services, such as specialties or urgent care.
Landing page design should be clean and user-friendly. Ensure that the navigation is intuitive and straightforward, allowing users to easily find the information they are looking for. Avoid clutter and visual distractions that could lead to confusion or frustration.
Built for Conversion
The ad copy prompted the click, but the landing page finishes the job of converting the lead. Having a CTA on the landing page should compel users to take the desired action.
For healthcare ads, that desired action is usually completing a new patient appointment request form. Forms that ask for minimal information are more likely to be completed as patients may leave the page when the form wants information they don’t have on hand or don’t feel comfortable providing yet.
8. Ensure Your Website is Mobile Optimized
More and more patients are searching for healthcare services on their mobile devices. In fact, 53% of search queries are on smartphones. Mobile optimization can impact a practice’s overall SEO rankings and provide a better user experience for potential patients. When your website is optimized for mobile, you maximize your conversion potential.
9. Analyze Your Campaigns and Optimize Your Ad Strategy
Check in on your PPC advertising campaigns regularly to identify areas for improvement. Metrics such as click-through rates, conversions, and bounce rates determine what’s working and what’s not. Based on that data, you can optimize your paid search ad strategy, including adjusting keywords, ad messaging, and targeting to improve campaign performance.
Summary: Healthcare Paid Search Best Practices
Creating effective paid search for healthcare advertising involves careful planning, strategic targeting, and a commitment to following paid search marketing for healthcare best practices. It is recommended that your planning checklist includes:
- Considerations for regulatory compliance – Know the rules so that your ads won’t violate them.
- Take the time to identify your best keyword opportunities – Choosing keywords may seem like a quick task, but it takes time and research to pinpoint the keywords that will add the most value to your campaign efforts.
- Look into ad extensions – Take advantage of Google’s ad enhancements to make your ads more appealing to consumers.
- Use clear messaging – Wrap your value proposition with copy that speaks to patients needs and desires.
- Create a budgeting and bidding structure – Putting controls and monitoring in place optimizes your PPC efforts so that they maintain cost-effectiveness.
- Tailor your ads to your audience – The more time you take to understand your audience, the better informed your digital marketing strategy will be. For example, use natural phrasing that a patient would use rather than the usual medical terminology you are accustomed to.
- Continuity with landing pages – With the aim of generating conversions, landing pages support this process when they promote an easy transition from clicking the ad to completing the desired action. Tactics such as consistency in messaging, consistency with your medical practice brand, and a clear CTA create a seamless experience that keeps patients engaged and encourages conversions.
- Mobile-friendly experience – Test your ads via mobile device to see it from the patient’s perspective, including how the ad appears, if the expected functionality is there (like click-to-call), the loading time for the landing pages is fast, and that the navigation is smooth overall. If you have a contact form, quality check that for usability as well.
- Track performance to discover improvement opportunities – With the right tracking measures in place, you have the insights you need to make informed decisions to make changes that ensure results from your campaigns.
By utilizing healthcare paid search best practices, medical practices can run campaigns that resonate with potential patients, lead to more conversions, and increase overall ROI.
Help Potential Patients Find Your Practice with Healthcare Paid Search Experts
As patient loyalty seems harder and harder to retain, many medical practices are turning to digital marketing to rebound from declining appointments. One of the most common questions to come up is whether digital marketing is something that can be handled by your internal staff, or if you need to hand off the responsibility to another resource.
If healthcare paid search marketing seems like a lot to handle, that’s because it is. PPC experts work full-time to manage all the factors of medical practice ad campaigns. Our teams at iHealthSpot are not only prepared to find ways to make your budget accommodate Google Ads, but they will also create a customized digital marketing strategy that brings you more patients. Contact us today to learn more.
