Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fantastic strategy for increasing traffic to your dental practice website without paying for ads. Organic listings appear below ads on search engine results pages. While ranking high on Google can deliver a lot of website visitors and organic search results are generally trusted more than ads, SEO takes a long time to implement properly - 6-18 months.
If your dental practice isn’t on the first page of search results for your desired keywords - let alone the top three spaces on the first page - then, you will likely get little to no organic traffic. Google Ads gives you the opportunity to jump the queue and appear at the top of the first page on Google. You will have to pay for the privilege, but if you’re serious about attracting more patients to your practice, then this may be a necessary investment.
We always advise our clients to do both SEO and Google Ads. The earlier you start SEO, the sooner you will see results, but that won’t help you in the short term. Google Ads delivers results immediately, so you can get more patients right away.
Once you start getting results organically, you can either stop spending money on Google Ads or continue to invest in PPC, and dominate Google!