Google Ads Guide for Healthcare: How to Create Google Ads in 10 Easy Steps

Would you like to consistently attract new patients from Google? Want to learn how to create Google Ads or make a Google advertisement?

Based on our patient surveys, the top two sources of new patients to your dental, medical or healthcare practice are patient referrals and Google. If people don’t know where to refer, they search on Google.

Nearly all consumers (97 percent) now use online media when researching products or services in their local area… Among consumers surveyed, 90 percent use search engines.

BIA/Kelsey, 2010

When a person uses Google, they enter a ‘search query’ into the search box, which is the combination of words that they use to find what they’re looking for. For example, if a person is looking for a local dentist, they’ll likely use any of these search queries:

• Dentist near me
• Dentist [city]
• Downtown dentist

The results people see in Google vary depending on the keywords that are used, and the location of their search. Keywords are the groups of words that trigger your website to be displayed in Google Ads, Maps or Search results. Sometimes the keywords might match your search query exactly, other times it’s a similar phrase match.

Once a user sees their search results in Google, they likely click on the first few websites and almost always on the first page. In fact, according to Smart Insights 2023 data, ranking in the top three web page results gets 68.7% of all clicks:

1. First place: 39.8%
2. Second place: 18.7%
3. Third place: 10.2%

If your healthcare website is not found on the first page of Google, your patients will have a hard time finding your practice. So, how do you get on the first page of Google?

When a person types a search query into Google, they usually see three results:

1. Google Ads: Pay Per Click
2. Google Maps: Local SEO
3. Google Search: Organic SEO

The results that users receive in each of these three sections are based on completely different factors.

How to Get to the Top of Google

In this 3-part guide, we’ll review how to get your dental, medical or healthcare website found on the first page of Google. Here’s what you’ll learn:

Part 1 – Google Ads: Pay Per Click

Google Ads for doctors and dentists are text, image, or video advertisements displayed by Google in their search engine results page, on websites and apps, as well as in Gmail or YouTube. Get your business website found on the first page of Google instantly using Google Ads, and use their powerful analytics to focus your ads to a specific audience of people interested in your healthcare services.

Part 2 – Google Maps: Local SEO

Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of tactics to increase the position of your website ranking in local search results, such as Google Maps. Many people use Google Maps when looking for a new dental or medical provider, so attract more patients to your healthcare clinic by increasing your rankings in Google Maps using local SEO for doctors and dentists.

Part 3 – Google Search: Organic SEO

Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of tactics to increase the position of your website ranking in organic Google Search results. Dental and medical SEO for doctors and dentists often provides the best long-term value for growing your practice with new patients compared to paid advertising.

After reading this guide, you’ll understand how to grow your healthcare practice by being on the first page of Google. Let’s get started!

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Part 1 – Google Ads: Pay Per Click

When a person is searching on Google to make a purchase, 64.6% of all clicks are on Google Ads.

WordStream Research

The primary benefit of using Google Ads is that you can get your healthcare website found on the first page of Google instantly. This attracts potential new patients to your website, wanting to learn more about your dental or medical services.

Do Google Ads work? Do people click on Google Ads?

According to WordStream Research, when a person is searching on Google to make a purchase, 64.6% of all clicks are on Google Ads.

Benefits of Using Google Ads

For every $1 a business spends in Google Ads, they will earn an average return on investment of $2... [and] they receive $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads.

Google

In addition, there are also many other benefits of using Google Ads, such as:

1. Return on investment: according to Google, for every $1 a business spends in Google Ads, they will earn an average return on investment of $2 in revenue and “$8 in profit through Google Search and Ads”. In other words, if you spend $1,000 in Google Ads in one month, you may get new patients into your practice that will purchase an average of $2,000–8,000 in healthcare services, or more. These new patients may also return to your clinic for additional services, further increasing your return on investment.

2. Measurable analytics: traditional forms of marketing and advertising, such as television, radio, or direct mail (Canada Post) flyers, make it difficult to measure the performance of your campaign results. Google Ads provides extensive data analytics to measure every detail, including how many people view your ad, how many click on the ad to arrive at your website, and how many contact you to book an appointment.

3. Audience focus: using Google’s extensive database of information, you can focus your ads to a very specific type of person based on their location, demographics, devices used, and the exact words that they use in their Google search query. Instead of wasting your marketing budget displaying ads to people who aren’t interested, focus your ads on people that are actively looking for your dental, medical or healthcare services.

4. Intent to buy: according to Unbounce, Google Ads visitors are 50% more likely to make a purchase than non-Google Ads visitors. In other words, when a person clicks on an ad, they often have a higher intention to make a purchase than when a person clicks on an organic search result. These Google Ads visitors are actively looking for a new product or service to purchase, and have a high “intent to buy”.

5. First page instantly: any changes that you make to your website to increase your organic search engine rankings may take several weeks or months to make an impact to your results. With Google Ads, you can see your dental or medical website on the first page of Google on the first day. Regardless of your business size, every website is competing on an equal playing field using Google Ads.

Google Ads visitors are 50% more likely to make a purchase than non-Google Ads visitors.

Unbounce

How to Create Google Ads?

The first step in creating a Google Ads campaign is to setup a Google Ads account. First, visit the Google Ads homepage. Then, click on the button that reads: “Start Now”.

This takes you to Google’s sign-in page. Google uses one account for all of their products, including Google Ads, Analytics, Gmail, YouTube, and more. If you already have a Google account for any other product, type in your email address and password to login. If you don’t have a Google account setup, or if you want a separate account for Google Ads, click on the link below that reads: “Create account”.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

It’s important to set specific and measurable business goals to evaluate and improve your performance. An effective framework for goal-setting is creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (S.M.A.R.T.), which helps you quantify your results so that you can measure your marketing return on investment (ROI).

For example, if your baseline results are about 20 new patients per month, then you may decide to set a goal of increasing your new patient results by 50% within 3-6 months, or an additional 10 new patients per month. The average cost per acquisition for a new patient in healthcare is about $80-$120, depending on the services. In order to produce 10 new patients per month, it would require approximately $800-$1,200 in monthly ad spend.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

The next step in Google advertising is to imagine your existing or ideal patients. Imagine this ideal patient as one person with a name, age, gender, profession, etc. This is often called a “customer persona” or “patient avatar”. This exercise helps you imagine who your patients are, their demographics (age, gender, profession) and psychographics (interests, hobbies, lifestyles), as well as how your dental, medical or healthcare services can help them.

The key is to learn who your existing and ideal clients truly are and how you can find more clients like them. By learning about your clients, their challenges, and how they use Google, you can position your practice to deliver the right message, to the right audience, in a way that resonates with them.

A patient survey is an effective method of learning about your patients, their challenges and how they find healthcare providers. Instead of spending your advertising budget promoting your practice to people who aren’t interested in your services, focus your time and budget on finding the right people who are actively looking for your dental or medical services.

Step 3: Know Your Benchmarks

It will cost you an average of about $78 to get one new client into your practice.

WordStream Research

In addition to knowing about your clients, you also want to know about your competitors. This helps you measure the success of your Google advertising campaigns relative to your industry. By comparing your performance metrics against industry averages, you can benchmark your results and determine how to improve your performance.

According to WordStream Research, the average Google Ads performance metrics for the health and medical industry are:

• Click-through-rate (CTR): 3.27%
• Conversion rate (CVR): 3.36%
• Cost-per-click (CPC): $2.62
• Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): $78.09

In other words, if 10,000 people view your Google Ad and your click-through-rate is 3.27%, then you’ll get 327 people to click on your ad to view your website landing page. If your conversion rate is 3.36%, that means that out of 327 people that arrive on your website, 11 will “convert” from a website visitor into a new client that books an appointment.

If your average cost-per-click is $2.62, to get 327 people to click on your ad will cost you $856.74. If you were able to get 11 new clients, then your average cost per acquisition is $77.89. In other words, it will cost you an average of about $78 to get one new client into your practice (based on these averages).

Step 4: Structure Your Account

Next, it’s important to decide how to structure your Google Ads account. How your account is structured will have an impact on your performance metrics, Google’s Quality Score, your cost-per-click (CPC), and your results.

Your Google Ads account is structured in a three-level hierarchy:

• Campaigns: organize your ads into campaign themes, based on how you want your budget allocated. If you want to allocate 50% of your budget into two different products, services, client types, or treatment options, then you want to have two different campaigns setup.
• Ad groups: these are held inside each campaign and can be used to focus on a specific audience segment. Each ad group contains its own set of keywords, ads, and website landing pages that your visitors will see.
• Ads: the advertisement that is triggered based on the keywords found in the ad group, which provides a link to your website landing page. You can test several different ads within each ad group to get the best results.

Step 5: Keyword Research

Now that you have your account setup and properly structured, you’re ready to conduct keyword research. Keywords are the key words or phrases that people enter into Google’s search box to find a website. These keywords trigger your ads to be displayed. But, where do you find the keywords to use?

In your Google Ads dashboard, click on the “Tools” button in the top navigation bar. Then, under the section “Planning”, click on “Keyword Planner”. Selecting “Discover new keywords” helps you look at the average monthly search volume for all related keywords in your local market, city or province.

Once you’ve found 10-20 keywords that are similar to each other, you’ll want to place them inside the same ad group. This keeps your ads relevant to the audience segment that you’re focusing on. You’ll add the keywords when you create your ad group.

Step 6: Create Campaign

After deciding on a list of keywords to use for each ad group, you’re ready to create your first Google Ads campaign. In your dashboard, click on the “Campaigns” tab on the left navigation bar. Then, click on the “+” button near the centre-left to create a “New campaign”. You can organize your campaign based on several goals, including:

• Sales: encourage sales online, by phone, or by visiting your clinic.
• Leads: encourage people to express interest by subscribing to a newsletter or providing their contact information.
• Website traffic: encourage people to visit your website.
• Product and brand consideration: educate people about what makes your products and services unique.
• Brand awareness and reach: introduce people to your company to increase their awareness of your products and services.
• App promotion: encourage people to download your mobile app.

These goals help Google provide recommended features and settings to help you attain your campaign goals.

Next, you’ll be asked to select a campaign type, which determines where people will see your ads displayed, including:

• Search: text-based ads displayed at the top of Google’s search engine results page; best for promoting links related to user search queries.
• Display: image-based ads displayed on websites and apps that are part of Google’s Display Network; best for reaching users on sites they already visit.
• Shopping: text or image-based ads that promote your products; best for advertising your physical inventory of products.
• Video: short videos that are displayed before or during YouTube videos; best for reaching visually and aurally engaged users.
• App: ads displayed in side of Play Store, YouTube feeds, Google Discover and SERP; best for promoting app downloads.
• Discovery: ads displayed inside of Google Discover feed, YouTube home page and Gmail Promotion and Social tabs; best for finding purchase-ready users.
• Local Services: ads displayed in Google SERP and Maps; best for generating local leads from approved industries.
• Performance Max: ads displayed across all Google advertising channels; best for using automated tools to drive campaigns.
• Smart: ads displayed in Google Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and partner sites; best for goal-centred, cross-channel campaigns, similar to Performance Max, but more limited.

Finally, Google asks you to select how your campaign goals will be measured. In other words, what are the main actions that you want a person to take, including:

• Website visits
• Phone calls
• Store visits
• App downloads

Once you select your goals, Google will then ask you to setup your campaign. This includes your campaign name, the networks where your ad will be displayed (e.g. search or display), your audience focus, budget and bidding options, and other ad extensions.

Step 7: Setup Ad Groups

Once you’ve setup your campaign settings, you’ll want to create ad groups to focus your ads on a specific audience segment, or “customer persona”. You can segment your audience based on demographic and psychographic factors.

For example, if you offer healthcare services for young adults and for seniors, or for individuals and for couples, then you’ll want to create different ad groups that focus on your different audience segments. This ensures that your ads, keywords, and landing pages are all relevant to your specific audience segment.

This is the section that you’ll add the keywords that you researched earlier. Try to only use about 10-20 keywords for each ad group to ensure each ad is relevant and focused to each audience segment.

Your keywords can be triggered based on three categories:

1. Broad match: this is the default match type for your keywords that triggers your ad to be displayed. This category triggers ads for your chosen keywords, as well as for any other similar keywords, including misspellings, synonyms, related searches, etc. This keyword category will trigger your ads to be displayed the most, increasing the total views (impressions) of your ads. But, it may not be relevant to the people searching.
2. “Phrase” match: this keyword category triggers ads that match a phrase, or a close variation of that phrase, with additional words before or after. This keyword category will trigger less ads to be displayed than broad match, but will likely be more relevant and focused to your audience segment.
3. [Exact] match: this keyword category triggers ads that match the exact search term or are close variations of that exact term. This keyword category will trigger your ads to be displayed the least, but will likely be the most relevant to your audience segment.

Step 8: Create Ads

After setting up your ad groups, you’re finally ready to create your ads. First, enter the “Final URL”, which is the website landing page that you want people to view after clicking on your ad. So, how do you write compelling ads?

Successful Google Ads usually have three elements:

1. Features: highlight the features of your dental or medical practice, what makes your services unique, what makes your clinic different from your competitors, etc.
2. Benefits: focus on the benefits that your healthcare services will have on your patients, and how those benefits are unique to your clinic.
3. Call-to-action: the action that you want your audience segment to take after viewing your ad, such as: “call us today” or “visit our website to learn more”.

There are thousands of recommendations for how to write the most compelling ads. There is no one winning formula for all businesses, as each business and their clients are unique.

The best Google Ads managers for doctors and dentists don’t take guesses, they take a scientific approach by testing everything. In other words, test different variations of headlines, descriptions, keywords, landing pages; then, collect data to evaluate which combination performs best.

Step 9: Design Landing Page

On average, people will evaluate your web page within 10 seconds.

Nielsen Norman Group

Now that you’ve created your ads and your audience is clicking on them, what do they see when they arrive on your website landing page?

Your website landing page is the first page that your visitors “land on” when they arrive to your website. According to the research agency, Nielsen Norman Group, on average, people will evaluate your web page within 10 seconds.

In other words, you have 10 seconds to capture your prospective patients’ attention and encourage them to explore the rest of your web page. If your web page loads slowly, or isn’t relevant to their search, they will click to go back to Google.

Many businesses make the mistake of sending Google Ads visitors to their home page, or to another landing page that isn’t relevant to their search. For example, imagine searching in Google for “Invisalign benefits” and you read a Google Ad headline that reads “Invisalign Features & Benefits”, so you click on the ad. Then, you arrive on a landing page that reads “General Dentistry Services”. Your first thought might be, “this web page isn’t what I’m looking for,” so you click to go back to Google.

In order to keep your Google Ads visitors engaged with your web page, they have to be assured that your web page is relevant to their search and provides valuable information. Many experienced businesses create a separate website landing page for each Google Ads campaign that they conduct. This ensures complete relevancy for each audience segment.

Step 10: Analyze and Optimize

Once you’ve launched your campaign, you’ll want to monitor the performance of the campaign regularly. Google provides a tracking code or tag that you can embed on your landing page to track user behaviour on your web page, including session duration, button and link clicks, form completions and more. Install this tracking code on your landing page to get the most comprehensive data on your Google Ads performance.

Compare your campaign performance to industry averages to benchmark your results (see Step 3 above). Then, test everything that you can. Try to maintain all variables consistent and only test one variable at a time. This helps you determine the best combination of headlines, descriptions, keywords, landing pages, call-to-actions and other elements.

How to Create the Best Google Ads for Healthcare: Conclusion

Google Ads for doctors and dentists is easy to learn, but challenging to master. Although it’s relatively easy to create an account and launch your ads, it’s far more challenging consistently getting a positive return on investment. You have to ensure you’re collecting and analyzing data to optimize your results and minimize losing your ads budget to inefficient campaigns.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How do I create my own Google Ads?

To create your own Google Ads, follow these steps:

1. Go to ads.google.com and click “Get Started”
2. Provide your business information and website URL
3. Google will help you create Smart Campaigns to manage yourself
4. If you need help, or want to improve your results, contact Optiimus

Can I create Google Ads for free?

Yes, you can create Google Ads for free if you build and manage the advertising campaigns yourself. Creating a Google Ads account is free and easy, as it only takes a few minutes to get started.

How much is it to create a Google Ad?

For most Canadian small businesses in healthcare, Google Ads costs about $100-$10,000 per month, depending on your business size, budget and goals. However, your total costs will vary depending on your ads’ cost per click (CPC), which is the amount you pay to get one user to click on your ad. Most Canadian small businesses in healthcare pay about $0.01 – $1 per click, depending on how competitive the keyword is in each local market. In other words, if your average cost per click is $0.50, it’ll cost about $50 to get 100 users to click on your ad and view your website’s landing page.

How to run Google Ads for beginners?

You can use Google’s Smart Campaigns to have Google build the ads for you, but the results may not meet your expectations. To improve your results and have complete control over your ads campaign settings, it’s better to manually build the ads campaigns using our simple process:

1. Define your goals: set specific, measurable goals for each campaign
2. Know your audience: understand your target audience of patients
3. Know your benchmarks: explore industry benchmarks for results
4. Structure your account: setup and organize your ads account effectively
5. Keyword research: find high volume keywords relevant to your industry
6. Create campaign: build ads campaigns that resonate with your audience
7. Setup ad groups: segment your audience into user groups or client personas
8. Create ads: write compelling headlines, descriptions and calls to action
9. Design landing page: design a conversion-optimized landing page for each campaign
10. Analyze and optimize: analyze your data weekly and monthly to improve results

How to use Google Ads for small business?

You can create Google Ads for small business by setting up a new Google Ads account, adding your business information and website, and following Google’s Smart Campaigns settings to let Google build the ads campaign for you. To improve your Google Ads results, you can manually build your ads campaigns to have more control over the settings, improving the efficacy of each ad campaign to connect with your target audience.

What is the minimum for Google Ads?

There is no required minimum budget for using Google Ads or advertising on Google. On average, most Canadian small businesses spend about $100-$10,000 per month on Google Ads, depending on their business size, budget, and goals.