Google Search Ads Basics

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

Hi. I'm Tyson Franklin, and welcome to this week's episode on Podiatry Marketing. And with me today is Jim McDannald. Jim, how are doing this morning?

Tyson, things are good. Things are good here in Canada. No. I'm happy to be, you know, chatting with you today.

Every day above ground is a good day. I love life. Life is just fun. I just really get a kick out of life. And especially even with COVID being, yeah, a bit up and down and a little bit crazy, it's still life is great.

It's what you make of it.

Yeah. I've got two small kids and it's interesting to see the world through their eyes. You know, I think sometimes when you're in your twenties and thirties and you're working hard and you're trying to kinda make it for yourself and you wanna like be this big bad podiatrist and take over the world. Yeah. That's right.

It's helpful to kinda, like, be somebody's dad. Remember what it's like to be, like, four and a half, five years old. It's yeah. Like, there's nothing you know, every day that ends in y is a good day. Right?

So now I'm I'm excited to chat with you today and that things are good here in Montreal.

Yeah. And it's it's amazing that we can you can sit there when you complain about certain things, but I don't know. There there's some kids that are gonna grow up who at the moment will not know life other than with COVID. And and the rest of us just look

at,

oh, what life used to be like beforehand. Will it ever go back to normal? Well, I think it's gonna be whatever we make it. So

For sure. I think keeping a positive attitude, you know, give giving love and support to to family, friends

Oh, yeah.

And neighbors, and we'll all get this this together, and there's brighter days ahead for sure.

So, Jim, today, we are talking about Google search ads. How does this differ from other types of Google ads? What what do you mean by Google search ads?

Yeah. So really referring to the time when patients or even you, Tyson, you type into the Google that Google search box and you get the results page. And if you're let's say you're typing, you know, podiatrist Portland, Oregon, you're gonna get a couple of areas that are the sponsored portions. Right? Yeah.

Those little those little ad logos get smaller and smaller every year. They look you can barely notice them anymore. They used to be very distinct.

That's true.

But at the at the very top of the search ads, you're gonna see or on the very top of search, you're gonna see some advertising. And then also within the kind of map section, kind of the local section, you might also see some advertising. And that's that's what we're gonna be talking about today, and that's Google search ads. There's also different types of Google advertising like display ads. Those are sometimes images you see on different websites.

There's also YouTube advertising, but we'll touch on that stuff in a future episode.

Yeah. I was hoping we're gonna talk about YouTube ads at some time, but we might talk about it now. Because when we talked about this particular subject, I went, oh, we're talk about Google ads. Oh, not Google ads, about YouTube advertising. Anyway, no.

I went, oh, okay.

One one quick thing. The reason why I'm not talking about YouTube ads, I wanna make sure there's a future episode. Right? I just don't want you to like, get to that YouTube search app, you know, that YouTube advertising Yeah. Episode be like, hey, it's been fun, but I got my YouTube ads podcast and I'm good.

Yeah. So I'm off now. I'm not gonna listen anymore episodes. Exactly. So with Google search ads, there were there was I was reading something years ago and was talking about the statistics of when people search for something, those ads come up.

And it used to be a low percentage of people used to click on, but now more and more that percentage is going up. More people are clicking on them because Google is better at at actually directing you to the right pages for what you're searching for.

Yeah. I think it's a combination of that, and they've added more ads to the top and kind of pushed down what I call the org what's called the organic results. Those the kind of free pages. It would have thrown your especially when you're on your phone, It obviously requires you to scroll down a lot further either on your laptop or on your phone.

I'm gonna do it while you're talking.

It's much more convenient just to click the ad because it's right there on the top. You know, you kind of save a scroll. So I think that's probably that and, like I said, the kind of, like, the lack of clear identification that there are ads. I mean, I think most people these days know their ads. But just for convenience, it's there at the top.

You don't have to search further down on the page. So that leads to people more people clicking there than in the organic area.

Okay. Yeah. I'm just doing a search now. I won't say which area I was searching for. And yeah.

Yeah. So and a lot of it too, it has the has the map and everything there. So how does the Google search ads fit in with the map? Does that have any influence over it?

Yeah. So basically, when you type in certain words, right, like, you if you type in, let's say, the map's gonna show up when you type in a when when Google recognizes something as a location. Yeah. Like I say port Portland, Oregon, it's gonna throw a map there. If I just say the word podiatrist, it probably won't it it might do in your local area because you can kind of through through your IP address on your computer or your phone or GPS, it can tell where you're at.

So it might show your location if you just type in podiatrist. But if you type in, like, example, like plantar fasciitis, you're gonna get a totally different looking Oh, true. Page than as if you were to type something more locally based. So yeah, you're gonna have that top area of text ads most likely, and then you're gonna see maybe some ads occasionally in that map or that local section.

Well, you know, I'm gonna do the search right now while we're talking. So Go right ahead. And now you were spot on. It will pretty much have picked up from where where I am, and it went I just went podiatrist and went straight to the local podiatrist in the area, but but nothing specific. What was interesting though is when I before put podiatrist location, and then it had a list of things after that, like bulk billing, discount.

They had these other words afterwards which people are obviously searching for.

Well, I think that's a really important point because, like, search intent is kind of what Google is trying to nail. Right? Like Yeah. If they don't provide you a relevant ad or a relevant search result, you'll go to Bing or some other place. But they've gotten so good about surfacing, like reading, you know, two or three lines words of in the search in the search box, and really almost kinda guessing what you wanna see.

So when there's the name of, like, podiatrist Portland, Oregon, I mean, it's pretty obvious what you're looking for, and they're gonna show you ads based off that and based off of what people are are bidding for are bidding for what they call keywords.

Okay. That's sort of that make that does make sense. So as you're typing things in or as your patients are typing things in is more important. It's not what we're searching for, it's what our patient's searching for.

Right. Exactly.

So if they've gone, yeah, why does my heel and then all of a sudden Google's gonna say, why does my heel hurt in the mornings, hurt when I walk on the beach? It's gonna start and then the person will scroll down and just click on that.

No. Exactly. And that's that's that intent is probably more like self treatment or to like understand like what's happening to their foot initially, more of an informational search. So like while it can be okay for a clinic to show up on terms like that, and this is kind of like the big push you'll hear with some different website providers or people that say, hey, let's write 5,000 blogs on heel pain or something. They're hoping that it show up on these informational searches, which was not the worst thing, but it's not the kind of like, what I'd call like the low hanging fruit kind of in the search ads area that probably should be the the the kind of the objective for most podiatrists or most clinics getting started with Google search ads.

So what do podiatrists who are listening to this now, what do they need to do in relation to learning more about Google search ads?

Yeah. So I'd say, like, the first thing is to know, like, kind of how how does it work. Like, so obviously, you type in search terms into the box, and then people like, for example, you as a clinic owner would be bidding on certain types of terms. So, like like, let's say you're a port like a Portland Podiatrist. Right?

So, like, Portland, Oregon Podiatrist, you know when someone's searching for that term, it's a high intent that they probably wanna make an appointment. So you as the clinic owner would work with either someone on your staff that does marketing or an outside specialist to basically bid on terms like that that are valuable to you in your practice. So when that does come up, you bid and you show up hopefully in that top three, maybe even number one. So people click your, you know, your advertisement that has excellent copywriting that says, you know, you know, Portland's best podiatrist or, you know, top port you know, top Portland Podiatrist appointments available. You know, you have you have a good ad written.

They click, they go to your website, and they land on a page that, you know, shows that you're professional and allows them to take action on your website. So it's this kind of this kind of three legged, you know, stool or kind of three steps that all have to be in line. They have to you have to kinda make sure that whatever they type into Google on the search box matches the keywords you're bidding on.

Yeah.

And then there's then they're sent by a relevant ad to a landing page. So the when those things are in alignment, you know, you'll it's it's you can get patient appointments from there. And that like I said, that's kind of the best place for clinics to start is focusing more on that. And there's different types of strategies and budgets and things that go into that as well.

Yeah. Can you go into that a bit more? Like so I know probably in the few in a future episode, we'll talk about landing pages, which I think is a really important topic. But what else do they need to know as they go through that? Are they how do they learn to do this?

Yeah. So definitely, I'll put a link in the in the show notes today. I've written some different articles on this topic. So if people wanna kinda educate themselves or get a list of resources, we'll put some, like I said, mention in the show notes. But it it really all it it really is about number one, I'd say, you don't want to bid on these informational terms.

If you're bidding on plantar fasciitis, like I talked about, number one, that's that person probably doesn't have a high likelihood to make an appointment right at that moment. Yeah. And plus, you're you're gonna run into issues with bidding against doctor Scholl's or other insole providers or how to treat it at home kinda guides. If you're paying for those clicks, because that's how it works. When someone clicks on your ad, it's it's kind of a pay per click model.

If you bid $5, that's a $5 click. And if you have 20 people a day just wanting to learn about plantar fasciitis, that's a hundred, you know, a hundred bucks a day day. High intent. Right. Exactly.

I mean, you're getting a little bit of awareness, but it's not really leading to that kind of low hanging fruit like I'm talking about.

So what's a good budget? What what's a good budget that people should probably allocate for Google search ads?

Yeah. So depending on your location, generally, you're looking at, you know, either you're putting it together yourself or, you know, someone this is not including the kind of like building out the campaigns, building out the copy, building out the landing pages. That's all separate. But I would say, general spend for someone just starting your Google Ads is probably somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand to 2 thousand dollars a month. And why that's important is that, especially if you're if you're in a competitive area, and let's say you have a $500 budget, divide 500 by, you know, by 30.

And like what seems like a lot of money for $500 in ads, you know you know, if you're doing the math, right, 20 if it's if it's $10 per click Yeah. You're maybe only getting like 50 clicks that month. Right? So what Google really thrives on is data. And that gives you a a great chance to refine your ads for Google to learn about when it's best to show you.

Also, it provides you an opportunity to if your if your ads are being clicked on more than competitors are because it's relevant and it's helpful, Google's gonna place you higher. It's not this is not a necessarily pay for, pay for position system. It has to kinda, like I said, meet that kind of it has to be relevant. There has to be intent there. People have to stay on your website and interact with your website for Google.

And do and what you mean by that? So if people come to you, they see the ad, they've typed something in, they see the ad, oh, that looks good. They click on it, goes to your website, and it's on a page that is the completely wrong page. You've just sent them directly to your home page, and then but they look for heel pain, but then they're gonna dig through. They'll just go, oh, wrong place, and they'll just zip straight off again.

So they if they're not there for very long, Google will know that page is crap.

Yeah. Because everyone has Google anal pretty much everyone has Google Analytics applied to their website. Right? Yeah. So that's sending that's sending a consistent stream of data to Google.

So they know when someone clicks on an ad, goes to your website, stays for a second, goes back to Google, clicks on another ad or another page. So that's that this is a kind of twenty four seven, three 60 five learning that Google's doing, to try to make sure that they are delivering, the most relevant result. Because if they don't, like I mentioned, like, that's that's why people come to Google's because they feel like they're gonna get the best result. If they fail at that, like, you know, and if you help them fail at that

Yeah.

Then they won't wanna surface you high anymore because you're not providing that value that's helping feed into their ecosystem and into their or their their overall advertising and revenue system.

Everyone everyone will go back to Yahoo. I

don't know. I think Yahoo's dead, but maybe Bing Bing.

AtloVista. Go. What about AtloVista?

AltaVista. Yeah. That was

a good one. That was the old jeez. That was the old days, wasn't

How about, like, Ask G's, I think, was one. So

Yeah. I don't know that one.

It was like a butler.

So and with when you're putting your ads together, or you're looking at it, you because I've seen somewhere I will search something, and because I'm always searching about other, yeah, like, podiatry terms, and then all of a sudden, you'll see an ad pop up. It'll be for like, I'm in Cairns, far, yeah, Far North Queensland, top of Australia, and all of sudden, there'll be an ad there for a podiatrist from Sydney. And I go, yeah, no. If I was a patient, I'm I'm not gonna I'm not gonna travel, you know, two and a half thousand miles to get you to my heel pain. So have they stuffed something up there?

Yeah. So that's either probably one of two issues.

Yes.

One, it's it's a podiatrist kinda learning as they go and doesn't realize they can put like a geofence around the ad. That's one of the benefit beneficial aspects of like the Google Search Ads platform is you could say, okay, I want to be in this postal code or this zip code only. Yeah. And like it's like we talked about with you, Tyson, with your cell phone. It can kinda get a general sense of where you are or where you spend time based on where your phone's at or where your computer's at, and we'll only show that ad to people that are in that area.

So so that yeah. Someone's either a little you know, doing some amateur, marketing. And it's okay. Like, if you you might learn that, but you may never know that you're doing that if unless you know that system, because it can be a pretty complex system to navigate. And the other thing is that maybe it's a a marketer that's trying to spend as much advertising dollars as possible because they're they they benefit from kind of a percentage of ad spend.

So chunky marketers out there.

There might be a couple. I know I I've run across maybe a couple. Yes. But but that's but that you know, like I said, like, it it can be difficult though, because Google really tries to kind of dumb it down. Not and that and that that's not a negative thing as far as people are learning, but what they wanna at the end of the day, think Google's ideal is to like, basically, you give them money, it's a black box, and then they give you maybe a patient, or they give you a patient.

They don't like, it used to be a very open system where you could really control a lot of different parameters. It's almost like kinda like air traffic controlling. Right? Like, this this we're gonna bid this much for this term and this location with these ads, and we're only gonna show them at this time of day to this age demographic. There's ways of really kind of like getting into the the weeds with it, which most of it I just don't need to do.

But what happens is that if it if it's too dumbed down and and Google's really trying to do these kind of it's ironic because they call them smart ads or these kind of like very simplified ad platforms. They'll start advertising your business, your practice, your name, like, around, like, topics that are not relevant to podiatry. They'll get views and maybe some clicks. But once again, it's not that patient looking to make that appointment today or tomorrow that could really benefit your practice.

So when people are putting the the Google search ads together, should they and once it's running, should they also then be looking at the Google Analytics page for some form of results, or will Google give them separate results from the Google search ads once I've got it set up?

Yeah. So as long as you have the kind of like that kind of like professional view or the master view within Google Ads, you can see all that information there. I think it is important to know that there are campaigns that can be made that will boost boost both kind of the ads and the organic. And I'm happy to kind of give that away. And that's usually what I would call the areas we serve type pages to build.

So let's say I'm I'm based in Chicago, Illinois. I'm a podiatrist. Or actually, I'm in the suburbs of Chicago, but there's six other suburbs near me where I'd like to draw patients from. By kind of creating and we'll get into this in the future with, a landing pages talk. But if I create six pages about, you know, podiatrist treating Naperville or podiatrist treating, Rosemont, Illinois, and, you know, that's that's living on my website, and, the main call to action is to make an appointment.

But if it's living, you know, out in the open on my website, that's gonna start showing up in that Google organic. But also, it's a very relevant page to send people to, because that's something where people want to make that that action. They want to make appointments. If you're advertising, know, making ad copy and creating Google search ads for that kind of what I call like the sweet spot or that low hanging fruit patient who wants to be seen sooner than later. Like I talked about, diagnoses and procedures are a little tougher with Google search ads because there is a lot of competition.

So to make it, like, financially viable is a little bit harder. It can be done. You just have to be patient and really kinda dial in, with whoever you're working with to make sure that those ads are, you know, you're not spending more on ads or you're getting back at procedures or or patients.

Yeah. And so that's where you've like, you've gotta set your budget. You can learn to do it yourself or or work with you. And and one of the things I'm taking away from this is what you're saying is don't try and fight against the big guys. Like we just said, where there's a common term that you know the big companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars to get that term.

You're gonna blow through your budget really fast.

Yeah. What you're gonna see is like, you know, people that like, you know, if you go into that diagnosis procedures thing, you're gonna have a lot of competition right away. And there is potential there, but what what you really wanna start with is like, what are the the things that are gonna work the best and the quickest to get some momentum on Google? Because Google also has what's called, like, a quality score. This is what I say.

Like, if more people are clicking on your ads than a competitor or a clinic down the street's ads, Google sees that as a positive thing and wants to to reward you by ranking you higher. So by kinda gaining momentum on these areas, local you know, the areas we serve pages or, you know, getting these kind of conversions for patient appointments, then you can kind of venture into more competitive areas. I think it is it is also important to know that, you know, what you do best and we we talked about in previous shows, like the type of patients you want to go after

Yeah.

To kinda get your name. Because there is an awareness component to these text ads as well. It's tough to quantify sometimes, but what I see that sometimes happens that people, they try to do these, you know, either they don't do these local pages. They try to go after big terms against big competitors. They don't have adequate budget.

It's kind of a combination of all these things. They have someone that's not necessarily like does either doesn't know podiatry, doesn't know kind of like where the quick wins are at. They spend $500 or maybe even a thousand dollars for a couple months in a row, and they get frustrated. And that's completely normal. But you have to really with these ads and kind of the way the momentum within the Google system works, it's gonna take three to six months of consistent advertising and optimization within the account to really get them to a point where they're creating those consistent patient appointments, and really getting that visibility in the rankings so they can be in that top one or two.

If you're looking for, like, this is gonna work tomorrow, I mean, if you're in a small area with limited competition, that is a possibility. If you're the only person in the area doing it, definitely a possibility. If you're in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, or any place with a lot of podiatrists, it's gonna be, you know, a gradual progressive endeavor, which will pay off in the long term. But if you just see this as a quick, let's just do it for a month and see if it works kind of thing, you're gonna be really disappointed.

I think that was a really good point about the consistency. And even when it came to old school marketing, I know I'd be talking to a podiatrist and previously in the last week's episode, I was talking about how I came up with an ad that whenever I ran it, ran really well, eventually give it a spell. And there were a couple of people I showed that ad to. I said, here, run with it. And they go and I talked to him, mate.

How'd it go? Oh, no. It didn't work. I said, what do you mean didn't work? No.

It didn't work. I said, it could have not worked. No. No. It didn't work.

It's what how many times you run it? Well, I mean, I ran it last week and the week before. It didn't work. I'm like, oh, bloody hell. So it's that just it's a consistency, especially with the online with, like, Google search ads.

It just you have to be consistent over a period of time for it to start gaining momentum to get the results.

And and I don't think this is the podiatrist fault or, you know, this is not this is not kind of they're they're sold on this a lot of times. Right? Like, it is cold calling, cold emails, get instant patients, see 30 more patients next month, see 50 new patients next month if you use our system. Yeah. So like, I I I don't like, you know, there people are getting bombarded with these messages that it is like just a a flip of a switch and you're good to go and like life is gonna be great with with x y z marketing firm.

So like I you know, they like when expectations are set in that way and not in a realistic way, like, I I think it's understandable to be either frustrated, think it's a gimmick, or, you know, this doesn't really work. It you're set up to feel that way a lot of times because people want you know, some of these marketing agencies will lock people into a year contract, so you feel kinda stuck. And they're not necessarily think long term in what's best interest of our peers and colleagues. So, you know, when you have a reasonable time horizon and you're and you're ready to kinda like, you know, kind of go after those things, like I said, I'll I'll leave some resources in the show notes Yeah.

Great.

That will be beneficial to either learn on your own. Because you definitely I think one of things we're trying to do here on the show with Tyson is to really like help educate all of our peers and colleagues about what's all out there. I don't think every form of advertising or marketing is for every practice, but until you know kind of what it is and how it works, it's easy to get jaded, to get, you know, kind of wool pulled over your eyes because Mhmm. Some of these things do sound pretty amazing. And honestly, I do feel like this Google search ads, it is a real thing, and it does work for a lot of people.

Otherwise, people wouldn't continue to use it. But you just depending on what your budget size is, where you practice, you know, what other local people are running ads, you have to have a reasonable set of expectations going in in order to kind of form a plan that's gonna benefit benefit both yourself and your patients.

Things that take away from that, and I mentioned in my marketing workshops, is just about you've gotta be in the game. You've gotta be involved. If you just take all your marketing, hand it off to somebody else, and get and they can they can look after it, then you don't know if you're getting the wall pulled over your eyes. So I think it's great that you're prepared to, like, give some resources so people can actually learn about this stuff. If they wanna do it themselves, they can.

But I think once you understand it and you're doing it, and then you think, okay. I don't have time to do now. And then, like, especially North America is handed over to you to then run with it or come and work with you earlier, but at least they understand what the game is. They're not just talking to you blindly.

Yeah. Just having a plan and some knowledge on the topic goes a long way. He'd be surprised.

Oh, definitely. And I reckon after they've listened to this many episodes, people now should be getting really really good at marketing. Doesn't mean you don't talk to Jim or come along to one of my workshops one day, but so Jim, I think we've covered this topic pretty well. Anything else to finish up with?

No. No. It's been a fun one, Tyson. I definitely think people should use our our our website. You know, there's an area to leave some voicemails there on the website, so people should hit that up.

If they have any specific question for us about any of the topics we've covered on podcast so far, what they'd like to see in the future, it's a great opportunity to hear have your voice heard whether on the podcast or read aloud by one of us. But we're looking forward to interacting with everyone that's been listening to the show so far, and I really can't, you know, I can't wait to see where this goes with you, Tyson.

Yeah. That's great. And if you're really enjoying the show, please tell everybody, tell all your podiatry friends, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, whatever podcast platform you listen to. So, Jim, I will talk again next week.

Sounds great, Tyson.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim Mcdonald. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.