As a physical therapist, you might be wondering how you can get more patients to hear about your clinic and the services that you have to offer.
You started your physical therapy clinic, built an engaging website to draw traffic to your site and started implementing a traditional marketing strategy to bring in new patients by sharing fliers, relying on word of mouth referrals and posting occasionally on your clinic’s social media, but you still aren’t seeing the results that you want.
When you are just starting out, it can be very difficult to drive organic traffic to your website. It takes Google time to properly index your site and rank it in google search. As a result, it is likely that your clinic’s website isn’t showing up on the first page of Google results or even the second page when people are searching for physical therapy in your clinic’s area. And if your clinic isn’t showing up as a top result, you are most likely not going to get traffic to your website.
Paying to advertise on Google is one of the best and fastest ways to get your website to the top of search results.
If done right, Google Ads are 110% worth it for bringing in potential clients to your PT clinic.
But doing Google Ads takes effort and can be an expensive waste of time if done incorrectly. Google Ads must be set up properly and effectively to actually bring in results for your clinic.
For example, Jennifer Penrose from Penrose PT in Rochester, WA invested just $608 for her paid advertising on Google in June and received 26 calls from running her ads.
Jennifer’s huge success for her clinic would not have been possible if she hadn’t taken the initiative to build her digital marketing strategy for her clinic.
And she’s just one of many other physical therapists who have seen success using Google Ads to bring in patients to their PT Clinics.
She understood that when it comes to Google Ads, you cannot “fake” your way to success. You have to know how to “play the game” and do it well.
The Most Successful PTs Pay An Expert to Do Google For Them
Part of the reason Jennifer was so successful was because she hired Google marketing experts to take charge of her Ad account.
If you didn’t know, Google makes changes to their ad strategy almost on a DAILY basis. It is quite literally a full time job to make sure that your Google Ads are optimized with the correct bidding strategy, match types, calls to action and more.
Google ads are the most popular form of advertising for private practice owners, so in order to be successful, you want to stand out so that people actually click on your ads.
Most physical therapists are busing running their clinics on a daily basis and don’t have the time or expertise to make sure that their google ads account is constantly updated and optimized for these changes. (And honestly, you shouldn’t have to!) Check out services like the Private Practice Marketer Program who are a team of Google Experts that work with physical therapists and can truly maximize your profits if you invest in Google Ads for your physical therapy clinic.
The most successful physical therapists making over a a million in revenue every year outsource their Google Ads to marketing experts so that they can focus on being a Physical Therapist and the leader of their clinic.
Google Ads are one of the BEST ways to get more patients to your clinic, and here are some of the ways to improve your performance on this advertising platform.
Use a Landing Page NOT Your Website
Hopefully you (or a web developer) have created an effective and engaging website for your physical therapy clinic that highlights what you have to offer.
It’s a common misconception that you should send your Google Ads audience to your website.
It is actually more beneficial to create a specific landing page instead.
Why?
A landing page is specific, stand alone webpage that focuses on a certain intent to draw in new patients.
For example, if you are running a Google Ad for people searching for “back pain relief,” you can create a landing page specifically addressing patients that are experiencing back pain and invite them to book a discovery visit with you to help ease their back pain.
Landing pages will keep your potential patient directly interested in what you have to offer. They won’t be able to get distracted by other information on your site that is not relevant to them (like “neck pain”).
Landing pages also allow you to be more targeted with their specific pain point. It makes you appear to be an expert in their pain point, even if you happen to be running several other Google Ads with landing pages created for “neck pain” and “shoulder pain” since they will only see your landing page for “back pain” as this was the only ad they clicked on.
This specific targeted approach with landing pages is proven to increase conversions and therefore bring more patients into your clinic.
Devote Time to Doing Keyword Research
Google Ads are run as pay-per-click marketing campaigns, sometimes referred to as “ppc campaigns” or “ppc ads.”
This means that you only pay when a potential patient clicks on your ad.
However, this also means that you are competing with hundreds of other clinic owners in your area for that “top” coveted #1 spot on Google Search Results.
Google Ads runs by using a “bidding” strategy to decide whose ads are shown first.
You need a good keywords strategy in order to optimize your clinic’s ppc advertising so that you are shown at the top of keyword searches for what you perfect patients are searching for.
A “keyword” is something that one of your perfect patients will type into Google when looking for your services. So an example of a keyword might be “best physical therapist in my area.”
Generally, the more often the keyword is searched, the higher the competition and the higher the cost to bid on that keyword.
You will need to decide which keywords to bid on and how much to bid on them based on a number of factors such as:
- Who your perfect patient is
- What pain points your perfect patient needs help with
- Where your clinic is located
- Who your competition is and what they are bidding on
Invest in Your Success
Running Google Ads effectively requires a monetary investment, but can bring in HUGE returns for your clinic.
If you want Google Ads to be the most successful you need to give it at least three months to see results.
If you commit $1,000 a month and only bring in 5 new patients, consider the long term customer lifetime value of these patients. That $1,000 investment could be turned into $100,000 over the course of your patient’s lifetime working with you. What other stock investment produces that kind of return?
Track and Monitor Your Ad Groups
To be successful, you should be constantly monitoring and tracking your ads to make changes and stay up-to-date with anything new that Google rolls out.
These tests and results tracking should be done at least twice a month if not more in order to be most effective and bring in the return that you are hoping for.
Just imagine if Google made a major update to their Ads and you didn’t realize it until months later while your ads are still spending your money (with no return).
This is why constant monitoring is so important.
Could You Benefit From Working With Paul’s Team to Improve Your Google and Facebook Marketing?
Is your business reaching its online potential when it comes to digital marketing? Just how many patients can you reach if you start using Facebook and Google?
Book a free call with our online marketing expert to discover just how many patients you can get in front of and how you can improve your online presence and ultimately get a higher number of leads and more patients each month coming to you via online marketing.
We have 4 FREE discovery calls available, click to book now!