Guide to Plastic Surgery SEO and Digital Marketing
In the field of Plastic Surgery, first impressions mean everything. The entire basis of plastic surgery is for people to improve how the world sees them so that they can make a better first impression. That same principle holds true when it comes to marketing your plastic surgery practice. You only have one chance to make a first impression and that impression matters.
Consider that between 75% and 95% of users don’t look beyond the first page of search results and that 94% of a user’s mistrust of a medical website is based on their impression of various design elements and you can begin to see how important it is to ensure the effectiveness of your marketing approach.
With the competitive nature of the plastic surgery field and the wide range of individual services available, it is particularly important to have a marketing approach that makes your practice stand out and properly highlights your particular services.
With that in mind, we’re providing this updated guide to help answer your basic questions and give you some “pro tips” about effective digital advertising for your plastic surgery practice. The guide includes several “tactics” that we use for plastic surgery lead generation that we feel can help you market your services more effectively.
1. Integrated Marketing Strategy
Integrated marketing strategy is the process of ensuring a unified and omnipresent marketing approach. The most effective marketing plans are not just a website or SEO or just utilizing paid ads. An integrated marketing strategy delivers a consistent message that helps develop brand awareness across multiple channels and targets an audience wherever they are online.
That means implementing everything from pay per click ads to social media, display, and your website so that your prospective customers will remember your name when the time is right. This can be the key difference between initially drawing a customer’s interest and converting that interest into a sale, which is the ultimate goal of any successful marketing strategy.
2. SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most powerful forms of online marketing when done effectively. SEO means following Google’s best practices to get your website ranked in the top search results. An effective SEO strategy starts with keyword research and understanding what relevant terms people are searching for in your area and designing your website content around these keywords. There are two basic types of SEO, “on-site’, which improves your marketing approach by optimizing the use of various elements on your own website, and “off-site”, which involves building your online presence besides your own site. Off -site SEO is a lesser used tactic by inexperience SEO’s but it influences a large part of how Google ranks websites.
Pro Tips:
1. Make sure your website loads in under 3 seconds and is secured.
2. To grow rankings make sure your website has a depth of content on each subject you want to rank for.
3. Utilize digital PR or “link building” to get your website linked from relevant articles around the web to grow your websites authority.
3. Link building
Search engines like Google use a variety of elements in order to rank websites on their results pages. While keywords are certainly important, links are also a valuable marketing tool and one that often gets overlooked in digital marketing strategies. Clickable links, which can be embedded in the text of one page to direct users to another page, are the digital equivalent of a word of mouth recommendation. As a successful plastic surgery practice, you undoubtedly understand the importance of good word of mouth. By placing your website link on their page, a site is telling their readers that your business is worth checking out and that can help to dramatically increase traffic to your site.
Search engines pick up on these links and use them to discover new websites and to determine how well an individual site should rank in their results. While the content of your site is an important factor in determining search engine results, the number of quality links pointing to it from other websites is equally important. With a strong network of links, you improve your chances of drawing the attention of both search engines and potential customers. Google’s algorithm uses “backlinks” to determine just how authoritative your site is on a certain topic.
Pro Tip: If you find that your website is ranked low on page one or page 2, link building could be the secret sauce to increase your rankings.
4. PPC/Google Ads
When it comes to advertising in the highly competitive plastic surgery field, pay per click ads such as Google Ads can be an extremely effective marketing tool. Google Ads can help to position your business at the top of search engine results, an advantage that cannot be emphasized enough.
Brand awareness is certainly important for any practice but it is only the first step in the digital marketing process. It is also crucial to ensure that potential customers are being directed to your website through search engines and Google Ads is one way to achieve this. Google’s #1 revenue producer is search ads and if you are not running google ads you are most likely missing out on a large percentage of market share.
As with any type of marketing avenue, though, the ultimate value of Google Ads depends on how effectively they are used. Google Ads carries a fairly high cost per click for plastic surgery related keywords, which translates to a high cost per lead. As such, you need to be sure that you are getting the most return on that investment.
Pro tip: To maximize your return, put your emphasis on the specific keywords that are generating the most leads and ignore lower performing keywords. With the competitiveness of the plastic surgery market, you have to do everything you can to make your practice stand out and to generate leads. By increasing the percentage of clicks that ultimately lead to phone calls and form fills, you’ll see dramatic results in your bottom line.
5. Responsive Web Design
Statistics show that a majority of adults are using mobile devices to do their web searching and this makes it extremely important to focus on mobile web design. Responsive web design simply means a website design that translates successfully on mobile devices, so that if a potential customer is accessing your site on their phone or tablet, they have a smooth, easy experience. It’s interesting to note that Google favors mobile-friendly sites over non mobile-friendly sites, so a responsive design can translate into higher rankings.
Even if you draw traffic to your site through other marketing tools, if potential customers are faced with a site that is difficult to read and navigate, they are more likely to lose interest and that means losing potential conversions.
You can avoid this problem by employing design elements such as CSS media queries, layouts and grids properly so that your website looks its absolute best on every type of device.
6. Facebook + Instagram Ads
Any effective advertising campaign begins with identifying and approaching your target audience. For the plastic surgery field the largest segment of that audience is women aged 35-60+, who can often be most effectively approached through paid ads on Facebook, Instagram and other social media.
While daily posts can help to boost your “organic” social media presence, the importance of paid ads cannot be emphasized enough. As a matter of fact, when used properly as part of an overall digital marketing strategy Facebook can be one of your best ROI tools in terms of lead generation.
You can help to maximize your use of Facebook by keeping these specific points in mind:
- Know your audience. Again, Facebook ads are particularly effective for reaching the female audience aged 35-60+, which is the primary audience for most plastic surgery procedures, so your ads should lean heavily toward this group.
- Put together a compelling offer. In order for your Facebook ad to stand out and grab people’s attention you need to ensure that it is as compelling as possible. This is particularly true on Facebook, where users are regularly inundated with a glut of ads.
- Make every word/picture count. Traffic on Facebook can be quite congested and statistics show that most users will spare only a couple of seconds for any individual ad so you have very little time to grab their attention. In light of this fact, it is crucial that you make sure every single element of your ad is as effective as possible so that you can grab that fleeting attention and draw your target audience in.
- Keep your eye on the conversions. Drawing the attention of an audience is only half the battle. The ultimate goal is ensuring that those clicks convert to sales. When gauging the success of your Facebook ads, don’t make the mistake of equating “likes” to conversions. Likes may be nice, but they don’t always equate to sales.
It can be difficult to make your plastic surgery practice stand out from the rest but if you want to make a great first impression you need to maximize your digital presence. Brandlift can help with our free thirty minute digital marketing consultation as well as a free SEO Audit. Contact us if you have any questions and we’ll help your practice put its best face forward.
