Recently, we signed on a new client who had been paying a company to do his chiropractic marketing program. In the nine months he had been using this company’s services, he said he hadn’t received a single patient from his website. We researched what they were doing for the doctor and found:
- They were running a basic AdWords campaign
- They were targeting the wrong keywords! People were clicking on his ads, but they were getting sent to a website that had nothing to do with the keywords they were searching for.
- They had written ZERO original content for his site.
- They had added ZERO citations for his practice.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with AdWords for marketing your chiropractic clinic. It can be very effective, if optimized correctly (and if you actually target the correct keywords). But to simply run AdWords as the sole “marketing” you’re doing for someone is short-sighted and ineffective over the long haul.
Here are seven reasons why this is a terrible idea:
- With an AdWords-only campaign, you’re visible to your patients only when you’re running ads. If you stop your pay-per-click campaign, you’re instantly invisible.
- If your entire marketing budget is being spent on AdWords, you’re not spending money on content for your site. Google uses the actual content you have on your site to determine how to rank you and how highly you’ll appear in the search rankings. If you don’t have any content, Google’s not going to take your site seriously.
- An Adwords-only campaign isn’t going to help you build backlinks, because people link to compelling content.
- If you’re focused completely on AdWords, you’re probably not building citations. A good citation profile is the best way to improve your Google Maps ranking.
- The longer you depend on AdWords, the longer you’re going to be dependent on AdWords for your site traffic and new patients, because you haven’t spent any time on organic ranking.
- You’re going to end up spending more and more money as time goes on. AdWords is an auction system. If you’re currently spending $15 a click now for a specific keyword and you’re #1, eventually another chiropractor is going to come along and pay $16 to ranking higher than you. If you want to regain that #1 position, you’re going to raise your bid to $17. They cycle continues while the price for a keyword gets higher and higher. Google’s stock price benefits, but at the expense of your budget!
- Some people won’t click on something marked as an ad, as AdWords now does in the search results. Your patients are more likely to trust your site if you’re appearing in the Google Local Business section or the organic search results.
When we’re doing work for our Expert SEO clients, we focus on building content, creating backlinks to your site, creating a healthy citation profile, and getting your message out through social media. These are all proven methods of building your organic search ranking.
This approach isn’t as quick as simply running AdWords, and it actually takes real work. Setting up a generic AdWords campaign takes about 10 minutes. Building your site’s organic credibility takes longer, but a real marketing campaign will pay dividends for your business for many years.
What is Your Marketing Firm Doing For You?
Before you hire a marketing agency (or if you already have one), make sure you check and see what kind of work they do. If they simply run AdWords, you will want to look elsewhere.
If you want actual new patients from your website, we’d be happy to talk to you about the work we do. See examples of our chiropractic success stories, and give us a call at (800) 295-3346 or check out our different levels of service here.
