Understanding the difference between SEO and PPC for healthcare organizations is crucial in today’s day and age. While you’ve likely heard the terms thrown around interchangeably over the years, there are some key differences between medical SEO and PPC.
At Vertz Marketing, we’ve been helping medical organizations scale their marketing efforts through SEO and PPC marketing, and we understand exactly what you need to take your company to the next level.
Let’s dive into the differences between healthcare SEO and PPC and help you decide which is best for your company.
Key Takeaways
- Medical SEO is excellent for companies who want sustainable results and brand awareness.
- SEO provides long-term benefits, while PPC offers immediate traffic.
- A combination of SEO and PPC may be beneficial for optimal results.
- Choosing which is best for your company significantly depends on the keywords you will be targeting.
- When it comes to healthcare digital marketing, SEO and PPC are both fantastic potential sources of revenue and brand awareness.
*It’s important to note that with PPC, cost per click greatly varies depending on the keywords you are targeting.
Key Differences Of Medical SEO VS PPC
The key differences between medical SEO and PPC are timeframe and cost. PPC advertising is an ongoing cost that lasts as long as you run ads. With SEO, you will be paying for services that will increase your organic rankings in the future.
It takes expertise to run a successful PPC campaign, just as it takes expertise with SEO. With SEO in particular, your team will work on an often time-consuming approach. However, the results speak for themselves.
As a rule of thumb, many will jump to medical PPC when starting, provided they have the budget, as they can see faster results. However, with SEO, you will typically see a long-term approach that will result in better results.
Medical SEO
Medical SEO is the practice of optimizing your business or website for medical queries, ultimately so that you are able to reach more clients. It stands for search engine optimization, and it’s the organic approach to ranking keywords on search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yandex.
To grow your organic rankings, you will focus on creating a topical authority map and a keyword strategy, optimize for speed, and address the URL structure of your website.
By doing this, you show search engines that your company should be regarded as the authority for the topics you are creating content for.
At Vertz Marketing, we are confident that we do this better than other agencies as we frequently work with healthcare providers and have been growing businesses using SEO for over twenty years.
PPC For Healthcare
Pay-per-click is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on ad spend for medical queries, which will grow your healthcare practice. It can yield quick and efficient results when done the right way and it works well for all forms of healthcare from telehealth to local chiropractor practices.
Medical PPC typically targets keywords that can get expensive quickly, so establishing a budget with your marketing agency is crucial.
Before working with our medical clients, we always create a budget before we present a proposal so that we know exactly what it will take for your company to see significant results from your PPC campaigns.
Our Approach
As every healthcare practice is different, we look at the big picture and identify whether you are looking to target national or local keywords. Once we have an idea in that department, we analyze it to ensure you are targeting the correct keywords and start to build an idea of what PPC looks like.
A blend works the best, providing ultimate visibility for branding awareness. That said, it’s not one size fits all, as some healthcare-related companies benefit better from an emphasis on SEO.
Ranking for keywords on the local level will be a bit easier than on a national level, which targets ultra-competitive keywords.
Hiring An Agency Versus Doing It In House
Over the years, we have worked with numerous healthcare providers who started out doing their own marketing. What many don’t understand is that doing marketing in-house ends up being far more time-consuming than expected. We typically see that the client needs help fixing their entire marketing strategy and websites.
To be effective with a marketing strategy, you typically need more than one person and often a team to work on the overall strategy. Most healthcare organizations who do this try to do so with as few employees as possible, which can lead to insufficient results.
Budget
Determining your budget is crucial when choosing between SEO and PPC. If you have limited funds, SEO may be your best bet as it offers a more cost-effective, sustainable solution over time.
PPC can become costly if not managed strategically, especially regarding keyword selection and bid amounts per click. However, it can deliver rapid lead generation results for your medical practice with a larger budget.
Working with a marketing agency will help significantly when it comes to deciding where to place your budget, as theywill be able to look at the competition to get an idea of how hard it would be to rank organically. If it’s extremelycompetitive, PPC can be the way to go with your budget.
Choose Vertz Marketing For Your Medical SEO/PPC Services
Understanding when to use PPC and when to take a long-term approach to SEO is crucial for all healthcare practices.
With over 20 years of marketing experience and growing healthcare practices, we can help take your business to the next level.
Contact us today if you’re ready to grow your business to the next level on the SERPs.