Best practices to make pay-per-click advertising work for you

By Stephanie Chen

In today’s ever-changing and evolving Internet landscape, there lies a tremendous opportunity for chiropractors.

The opportunity to reach people who are actively looking for services online — through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

If you’ve got a Web site, PPC advertising is an essential way to drive prospective patients to your site in order to increase your patient base.

Internet search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing) host PPC advertising by displaying ads on the top and right-hand side of the screen when a keyword search is performed. Advertisers bid on keywords that are relevant to their services and compete for traffic to their Web sites.

With PPC advertising, you pay only when people click on your ad and are sent to your Web site, and you can easily control your costs by setting daily budgets. What’s even more important is that, unlike some more traditional forms of advertising, every cent can be accounted for with the PPC model.

One of the best known and most used search engines is Google. Its AdWords PPC advertising platform is the leading online advertising program. With more than a million searches performed for the word “chiropractor” in May in the U.S. alone, can you afford not to advertise on search engines?

Here are some of the best practices to show you how this ocean of opportunity can benefit your practice, no matter how big or small.

Targeting local patients

Use geo-targeting to target your local prospective patients only. You’ve got to make every advertising dollar count. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use a geo-targeting feature like the one in AdWords. This allows you to target your ads to specific geographic locations only.

This feature allows great flexibility over how big of an area you want to target. For example: You could opt to target your city, an entire metro, and/or neighboring cities.

A common practice is to target a 15-mile to 30-mile radius around your office, or however far your patients are willing to travel for your services. You can also create a custom “hand-drawn” geo-targeting area to include or exclude any specific areas and neighborhoods.

It’s easy to allocate your advertising funds efficiently and spend more where you will be the most profitable with geo-targeting. By using a program like AdWords in conjunction with Google Analytics, you can determine exactly where the most profitable traffic is coming from and create a separate geo-targeted campaign with a higher budget and bids.

Likewise, you can also create a separate campaign for areas that aren’t as profitable and set a lower budget and bids.

Build a keyword list

Put yourself in the mind of the patient when you’re building your lists — what are the queries they’ll type when they are in need of chiropractic services?

The most obvious and high-volume searches are for “chiropractic,” “chiropractor,” and all of their variations; however, don’t forget about conditions such as “back pain” and “lower back pain,” and even more motivated queries such as “back pain relief” and “lower back pain treatment.”

A great tool to find relevant keyword variations are programs like Google’s free Keyword Tool provided in the AdWords interface. This tool also provides statistics for each keyword such as estimated average cost-per-click (CPC) and local search volume in order to help you set individual bids.

When you’re setting your maximum CPC bid for each keyword, or the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay for each click, it’s important to remember that each account differs and you don’t necessarily