Google “veterinary digital advertising” and you’ll find any number of companies offering tips, tricks, and services to help veterinary practices attract pet owners to their websites through PPC ads (or paid ads). And digital ads can indeed help. Yet in side-by-side comparison, here’s why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) offers better returns for practices than PPC ads and saves practices money:
Free Website Traffic
When you run a PPC campaign to drive traffic to your website, you become an advertiser and pay a fee every time someone clicks through to your website from your ad. Moreover, click costs can rise as new competitors start to advertise, meaning you may wind up paying more money over time to drive website traffic. Organic clicks to your website from a search engine results page do not cost you a cent. Get SEO right and you get free traffic.
SEO also involves less up-front cost. To get a PPC ad campaign started, you’ll first need to pay an agency or freelancer to create your ad. Plus, someone on your team will have to manage your campaign, which costs time (and time has dollar value). SEO is more cost effective in that the cost of using an agency or team to optimize and manage your SEO remains relatively unchanged over time, even though website traffic and conversions grow.
Keywords Savings
With PPC ads, you pay for the use of keywords—words and phrases used to match what people are searching for online. The more popular a keyword is in searches, the more you generally pay to use that word to increase the chances of someone seeing your ad and clicking on it. So, keywords can drive up your cost-per-clock costs. In comparison, SEO enables you to use targeted keywords to increase online discoverability and traffic for your website without having to pay for every click.
For example: If you were to pay for an ad for your site to appear any time the keyword “veterinarian” was entered into Google in the U.S., at a 3.17% clickthrough rate, you would be looking at a monthly bill of around $86,094 and about 26,089 visitors to your website. In comparison, SEO has an average clickthrough rate of 34.2% in the top position of Google, which would result in 281,466 site visitors—and $0.00 cost per visitor.
Better Performance
On average, organic clicks from Google are 10 times higher than clicks from paid ads, according to a 2019 study by SparkToro. This means, you get a higher volume of traffic to your website without worrying about ongoing ad spend.
More Stable Results
When your ad stops appearing after a specified time, shifts to a more cost-effective time of day, or when your ad budget runs out, traffic driven to your website from that ad either changes or stops. PPC ad positions can also fluctuate depending on your competitor’s bidding strategy. When you achieve a strong search engine ranking from an SEO strategy, your ranking should remain relatively consistent over time if you maintain an optimal strategy. That means you can expect to see stable and sustained website traffic results and don’t have to spend money on PPC ads to generate new business.
Overall, according to recent findings by BrightEdge, the average business attracts 53% of its online traffic through organic search, whereas paid ads account for just 15%, and this difference is an important consideration to practices. In a time of physical distancing and ongoing economic challenges, when more pet owners are searching for local businesses online and businesses are closing, optimal website SEO helps practices attract more website traffic and increase revenue.
To help practices reach these goals, WebDVM custom veterinary websites are search engine optimized to attract new pet owners, and custom designed to tell your practice story and convert site visitors into paying clients through strategic, goal-driven calls to action. With Google Certified account managers and optional ongoing search engine optimization, WebDVM helps your practice stand out from the competition and makes it easy for pet owners to find you online.
Additionally, WebDVM positions your practice website as the go-to source of trusted information for pet owners with a suite of industry leading pet health content and online resources, which strengthens client engagement, improves compliance, and drives repeat business.
Get Started Today with 80% Off!
Attracting new pet owners to your practice shouldn’t be expensive, difficult, or time-consuming. That’s why the Plus and Pro editions of WebDVM are 80% off setup fees from Oct. 1st, 2020, to Dec. 31st, 2020, and getting started only requires a fraction of your time.
Our proven no-fuss setup means that all we need to get started is a quick call to learn more about your practice and website goals, and then a review call to make sure we captured your website vision. And our commitment to ongoing toll-free support means our team is here for your practice every step of the way—even after your website goes live.
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