PPC for Occupational Therapists: How to Get Started with PPC

Lena is looking for an occupational therapy office for her mother. She turns to the web to find a local office that suits her needs. She comes across a pay-per-click (PPC) ad and clicks on it.

But it’s not to your practice’s site.

If you don’t have a PPC advertising plan in place, you’re missing a prime opportunity to reach qualified prospects looking for your occupational therapy services.

To get started with PPC for occupational therapists, follow these best practices:

1. Find relevant keywords to help your ads appear in the right result
2. Use ad extensions to enhance your ads
3. Create a custom landing page to deliver a tailored experience
4. Add negative keywords to have more control over your ads
5. Optimize your bid amount to maximize your budget

Keep reading to learn more about launching PPC ads! And if you need help with starting PPC, we have a team of over 500 marketing experts who can lend a hand. Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our PPC services!

1. Find relevant keywords to help your ads appear in the right results

If you want to do occupational therapy PPC right, start by finding relevant keywords for your ads.

When users search for an occupational therapist, they’re using specific keywords to find what they need. To help your ads appear in front of these qualified leads, you need to optimize your ads for relevant keywords.

To find the correct key terms, start by conducting keyword research. You can find relevant critical terms by using a keyword research tool like KeywordsFX.

When you use a keyword research tool, you want to focus on long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords contain three or more words, like “Occupational therapist clinic.”

Long-tail keywords are best for your PPC ads for two reasons:

• Long-tail keywords cost less: Since long-tail keywords are specific, fewer companies bid on them, so the bid amounts are lower. Having low bid amounts enables you to pay less to get qualified leads while also maximizing your budget.
• Long-tail keywords drive more qualified traffic: Long-tail keywords also drive more qualified traffic for your practice. Since the keywords are so specific, you know that the people who search them are looking precisely for what you offer.

Once you identify your keywords, you can integrate them into your ad and bid on them for placement in search results.

2. Optimize your bid amount to maximize your budget

If you want to get the most from PPC for occupational therapists, you need to optimize your bids continually. PPC ads operate on a bidding system — you identify the keywords you want your occupational therapy ads to rank for and tell Google how much you want to pay for each click.

Google then uses your bid amount and your ad’s Quality Score to determine your ad position.

So, how much should you bid for your ads?

Well, it depends on the keyword and the competition. For more competitive keywords, you may need to bid higher to try and outrank your competition. On the other hand, other keywords may not warrant a high bid amount because there aren’t many practices competing for that keyword.

You can start by looking at the average cost-per-click (CPC) for your keyword and go from there. The average CPC is a good starting point for figuring out an appropriate bid amount.

Once you set your bid amount, it’s not set in stone. As you continue to run your ad, you may find that you could experience the same results but pay less for each click. That’s why it’s critical you continually optimize your bid amount to maximize your budget.

Without optimizing your bid amounts, you could pay more than you need to for each click on your ad.

Keep an eye on how your ads perform and how much you’re bidding for them. You can adjust your bid as you see fit to allow you to get more clicks at a lower cost for your practice’s budget.

3. Use ad extensions to enhance your ads

Another critical component of PPC for occupational therapists is using ad extensions. When you craft your PPC ads, you want to provide your audience with as much helpful information as possible to get them to click.

While Google limits how much you can include in the base of your ad, you can add ad extensions to help provide more information.

Ad extensions come in numerous formats, including:

1. Sitelink extensions
2. Callout extensions
3. Structured snippet extensions
4. Call extensions
5. Location extensions
6. Message extensions
7. Price extensions
8. App extensions
9. Promotion extensions

You can use any combination of ad extensions to help enhance your ads. By adding this information, you can drive more clicks and leads for your occupational therapy practice.

4. Create a custom landing page to deliver a tailored experience

When you start with PPC for occupational therapy, you want to ensure you’re providing a positive user experience when users click on your ads. To deliver that positive experience, you need a custom landing page.

Custom landing pages enable you to tailor the information your audience sees, so they get everything they need to know.

For example, if you ran an ad for hand therapy, and someone clicks on your ad, they would only expect to see information about your hand therapy. If your page contained information on aquatic therapy or neuro-developmental treatments, it’s not relevant to their search.

By creating a custom landing page, you keep your audience focused on the details of what they searched.

Some elements you can include on your landing page include:

• Detailed heading
• Visuals
• Call to action (CTA) button
• Benefits of your services
• Social proof

By crafting a custom landing page, you will help maximize the results of your occupational therapy ads and drive more qualified prospects to your practice.

5. Add negative keywords to have more control over your ads

When you do PPC for occupational therapy, a great best practice to follow is to use negative keywords. Negative keywords are keywords you don’t want your ads to rank for in search results.

For example, let’s say your occupational therapy office is in Los Angeles and offers numerous therapy services, but you don’t serve the pediatric population. You’re trying to optimize for the keyword “occupational therapist, Los Angeles.”

However, you find out that your ads appear in searches for “pediatric occupational therapist Los Angeles” even though you don’t offer that service. Because of that, you’re driving traffic to your site that isn’t relevant to your practice.

To prevent this scenario from happening, you can implement negative keywords. In this case, you would make “pediatric” a negative keyword so that you can still rank for the term “occupational therapist Los Angeles.”

By setting this negative keyword, your occupational therapy ads won’t appear in the irrelevant results and drive less qualified traffic to your site. It helps you save money, too, because you’re not paying for clicks from people who won’t end up using your services.

Need help getting started with PPC for occupational therapists?

Launching occupational therapy ads is a great way to reach people looking for your therapy services. If you aren’t sure how to get started, WebFX is here to help. With over 20 years of experience, we know how to launch a strategy that drives results.

In the past five years, we’ve driven over 24 million leads and over 7.14 million phone calls for our clients. You can count on our team of Google Ads Certified experts to help you launch a PPC campaign that skyrockets your practice’s online growth.

Ready to get more patients at your occupational therapy practice? Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our PPC services!

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