The Official Omedix Blog

It’s interesting to see how society adopts new ideas and services. Let’s take a look at Search Engine Marketing. This is such a no-brainer promotional opportunity for a medical practice that targets the general public it’s almost laughable. A comparison is in order:

	THE YELLOW PAGES What You Get: Assuming your purchase, say, a quarter-page ad, you get, well, a quarter-page Yellow Pages ad, maybe in color, located in the section that makes sense for your practice What It Costs: For the above-described ad, roughtly $7,500 - $10,000/year (as I understand it) Value Proposition: You want people to find you when they need your services, and people find things using the Yellow Pages…well, at least they used to
	SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING What You Get: When people search for keywords that suggest they may be a good candidate for your services, your website shows up in the results What It Costs: Depends on if people actually click on your ad. If no one ever clicked on your ad, you literally pay $0. If 1,000 people clicked on your and and you bid $0.25/click, you pay $250. Assuming those rates hold for 12 months, you’d pay $3,000 for 12,000 visitors to your website you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. Value Proposition: People who need your services reveal themselves via their search engine queries and you pay money to “advertise” to those searchers, except that you only pay when they actually view your site

RUNNING THE NUMBERS

So, you can pay about 1/4 of what you’d pay on the Yellow Pages for maybe 60 times the amount of traffic? Let’s translate that into numbers.

Let’s say I’m a Primary Care Physician and one new patient is worth, on average, $350 to me (that’s a very conservative estimate). Let’s say 50% of the visitors to my website are prospective patients. Let’s say 5% of all prospective patients who visit the site actually sign up with me. Let’s say I receive 12,000 visitors a year.
That means that for my $3,000 investment in Google I get back:

[$350 per Patient]*[12,000 Site Visitors]*[50% are prospective patients]*[5% enlist with me] = $105,000 in additional revenue

And if we figure out the Return-on-Investment on that:

ROI = $105,000 - $3,000 / $3,000 = 3400%

WOW. Can you imagine, a 3400% return?

BUT ONLY A MINORITY OF PRACTICES DO SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

And yet, every single medical practice in existence goes with the Yellow Pages because “that’s the thing to do” while only a handfull of progressive physicians does Search Engine Marketing. That’s craziness!

There are some nuances to this. For example, how do you make sure you really are converting 2.5% of your visitors? How do you measure that? What keywords do you target? So, it’s a no-brainer investment (in my opinion), but not necessarily a no-brainer operation. Anyways, it’s just interesting to me when I see practices lay down thousands of dollars for brochures or sponsorhips, when that same money could be used so effective with Search Engine Marketing.

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