One of the best ways to increase your visibility online is through search engine marketing, or SEM for short. With SEM, you can shoot up to the top of the search results (above your competitors’ listings) and then grab the attention of your prospective dental patients.
SEM is a fast and affordable way to build awareness for your dental practice. But SEM can also be complicated if you’re not familiar with this form of marketing.
In this post, we’ll provide you with a beginner-friendly introduction into SEM, specifically Google’s pay per click ad model. By the end of this post, you’ll have a good understanding of search engine marketing and how to harness the power of Google to grow your dental practice.
Let’s get started.
What is a PPC Ad?
Pay per click, or PPC for short, is a type of online advertisement. PPC falls under the umbrella of SEM, although PPC is not limited to search engine marketing. And to make matters even more confusing, PPC is not the only type of SEM available.
Are your eyes starting to cross yet?
Online marketing can definitely be confusing, especially if you’re not familiar with all of the terms and advertising models.
To simplify the process, let’s focus specifically on the PPC ads that are available through Google Ads.
Google Ads is an advertising tool for promoting your business online.
You can bid for ads through Google. Your ad can then appear on Google search results pages, on YouTube (which is owned by Google), and on other websites.
The ads on Google search results pages show up in text form. These ads appear when a Google user searches for a product or service.
The ads on YouTube show up either before or during a YouTube video. These video-based ads are either 6 or 15 seconds in length.
The ads that are displayed on other websites (not your own) are typically image-based.
There are several types of ad campaigns available on Google, but the above three are the most common.
From those three ad campaign types, we’ll focus on the first one—the ads that appear on Google search engine results pages. These types of ads tend to offer the greatest level of engagement with dental patients.
With a search ad campaign, you can target a specific keyword or location. Then your ad will show up when people search for the targeted keyword or search from that specified area.
It’s also important to note that Google Ads use the PPC model.
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