How to Get Patients: The Essentials of Web Marketing for Doctors and Dentists

Posted by Peter McEllhenney on 13 July 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Medical Practice Marketing

When it comes to finding new patients for your medical or dental practice – nothing’s changed and everything’s changed.

Referrals were the best way to grow your practice before the internet, and they are still the best way today. That’s what hasn’t changed.

What has changed is what patients do before they make an appointment. They now research you on the internet. And the information they find influences their decision to call you or not.

Case Study of Medical Practice Web Marketing

For example, consider our client, Dr. Cathy Hart, a family physician in The Woodlands, Texas. Many patients look up Dr. Hart on the web before they make an appointment.

When they search for her name in Google, this is what they see:

 

 

They find her website listed at the top of the search results page and click the link. The information potential patients find about her education, experience, and more influences their decision to choose her.

Try this for yourself. Go to Google and search on “Cathy Hart”.

Dr. Hart’s medical website averages 900 visitors a month. Of these, roughly 500 find her from searches on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Beyond Referrals in Web Marketing

Not every patient goes on the web to research a specific doctor or dentist. Many patients begin their search for a health professional on the internet. If you don’t have a website for your medical or dental practice, these patients can’t find you.

In the communities surrounding Dr. Hart’s office, there are 7,000 Google searches a month on terms like “woodlands doctors”.

We capture some of these searches with the same organic or “free” search engine optimization techniques we use to make her website rank highly for her name.

Other searches we capture using Google’s AdWords pay-per-click advertising program. Google displays text ads for Dr. Hart when patients near her office search on phrases relevant to her practice.

Here’s one of Dr. Hart’s Google AdWords text advertisements.

 

 

Cathy Hart averages 225 visitors to her website a month from AdWords. Nearly 80% of these visitors are new and they interact with the website for 2 minutes and 40 seconds on average.

The Results: 25 to 30 New Patients a Week

The result for Dr. Hart is a steady flow of new patients into her practice. From the website analytics, we can tell web marketing supports her referrals. Hundreds of new visitors who searched on Dr. Hart’s name spend 15 to 20 hours on the website each month.

The same analytics tell us that visitors from searches like “woodlands doctors” also spend hours on the site. And we know these visitors become patients. When Dr. Hart asks people on their first visit “How did you find me?” one-third of them reply, “On the internet.”

This is one reason we believe internet marketing for doctors and other health professionals is a good investment.

 

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