Simon Sikorski, MD

Too many doctors invest in designing a website and then jump right into Google Ads to promote their services. Let me tell you this from experience of consulting nearly 5,000 medical marketing campaigns in the past 10 years - Google Ads alone are a complete waste of money.

Here are two reasons why Google Ads are not cost-effective:

1. Many of the Google Ads for physicians are unethical. From advertisements like “Best doctor in N.J.” to “Live Pain-free” these are the types of ads commonly seen and the companies putting these ads together are not the ones at risk of getting in trouble; the doctors are. Internet companies serving other industries are perfectly safe advertising “best ‘product’” if they have data to back it up but in medicine it’s just cheesy. Patients have begun to filter Google Ads too. If your ads are displaying “Top Knee Surgery Doctor” and your website is talking about all surgeries from feet to back, it’s a red flag. In a market where every other doctors is “Best Doctor” what else is there to differentiate one between the other? So please review ads before they’re published.

2. Google Ads for doctors are put on auto-pilot and they’re not giving any other data. Ads are written, keywords are selected, and then they’re launched. Doctors then pay for monthly access without even reviewing ROI. Google advertising needs to be constantly tweaked, needs to be relevant, and needs to be monitored daily for its cost-effectiveness. The system comes with top-notch tools and the doctors are paying $5,000 to $9,000 for advertisements … shouldn’t they get some real data on how their practice works?

Here are three benefits you should be looking for from Google Ads:

1. Great website content. Recently we had an orthopedic surgeon as a client to whom Google Ads yielded over 90 patient calls, showing us everything about their online behaviors, demographics, socio-economics, and what was the exact reason why they were looking for a doctor. It was data that led to some great content for the website. Some newly developed pages had conversion rates of two patient appointments for every 30 visits. Why? Because Google Ads allowed us to test it. We knew in real time that the content on those web pages was compelling enough for visitors to schedule appointments instead of continuing their search. Now these same pages will keep on yielding similar conversion rates organically (without revenue spent on any advertising but rather how the website appears on search results).

2. The second benefit you should be seeing from Google Ads is patient selection and screening. Perhaps you’ve already started seeing too many patients, but they’re not fully qualified for your practice. Google Ads, together with website content, can help screen patients out. Does your pain management practice have too many people requesting pain killers? Advertise for non-pharmacologic treatments? Do you want to see more patients for face-lifts? Start advertising your expertise in face-lifts, not “plastic surgery.” Do people complain they can’t afford your out-of-network fee? Instead of advertising for the entire state, why don’t you choose demographics by carefully selecting or excluding specific neighborhoods and towns. Again, these are tweaks that can be made in real-time, changing the patient demographics completely and can save thousands of dollars on Google advertising campaigns.

3. Test the way your practice works. We were also presented with a challenge. In the orthopedic practice example above, the person answering the calls was not converting calls into appointments. The most common question was “Do you accept 'X' insurance? And the answer was always “No, the doctor sees only out-of-network patients.” As you can imagine, the calls immediately ended without an appointment being scheduled. Once instructed to say “Doctor accepts out-of-network benefits from X, Y, and Z insurance companies," conversion rates from Google Ads jumped to 10 percent (nine of 90 calls), yielding an ROI of $63,000 (gross) to $4,500 spent!” What was the best part about this? We found this issue only after one week of running the campaign, and this person was answering calls for this practice for three years.

Next week we’ll explore the top two tips how medical bloggers and website owners can benefit from their EHR.

Find out more about Simon Sikorski and our other 

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Based on consulting nearly 5,000 medical marketing campaigns over a decade, I can tell you that Google Ads alone are a complete waste of money.

Google Ads and Physicians: Get the Most for Your Money

In our previous articles on medical marketing we talked about the importance of setting up your websites, blogs, Internet ads, and managing your online reputations. This week, we’ll be talking about how to effectively protect all of your investments and hard work by watching out for these five major hackers.

1. Online health companies that have physician locators, rewards for doctors to “claim their profiles,” and offering “badges” so that you share your websites, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook with them.

 By offering up your online properties, you’re introducing another competitor into the mix - advertisers that these companies are directing their visitors to, using your credentials. So when patients come to check out information about you and your practice, they’re most likely directed to your competitors or resources that compete with your own information. The worst problem is that by using your credentials they’re gaining popularity and credibility. These companies will set up doctor profiles which are indexable by Google and effectively establish another listing on the Internet for your name and your practice. They will scan your Tweets, websites, blogs, and everything else you’re sharing and make copies. Then they proceed to re-publish everything under their own brand. Once published, online health companies put up highly-targeted advertisements from medical companies - on everything you just shared.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies.

 They are more than happy to use your name, practice, and personal information to develop an online presence for you. They will sell you on everything because who are we kidding… stroking physicians' egos is a business all by itself. SEO companies will never educate you and will never share how they do business. Most SEO companies still use black hat tactics (deemed “illegal” by Google and other search engines).

These are companies that prey on doctors who do not have an Internet presence and physicians who do not understand that just having a website is not effective by itself. Everybody knows that a website alone is like having an office in the middle of a forest. Unless you’re talking about it, sharing it, welcoming people on it, providing directions to it, etc., what’s the point of having an online office?

. There is no public service on ratings sites. The reason why so many of these ratings sites have prevailed over doctors who sue them is because the legal system is set up to protect the masses. One doctor speaking up or trying to fight a giant with hundreds of millions of investors’ money is not going to make a dent. The only way to fight these giants is by teaming up together to expose their unethical practices. There will not be any Internet regulations any time soon, so the only way to fight it is to establish your own online presence.

 Again, a website alone is not effective. A majority of physician websites are lacking even the most basic set up of how these sites are indexed by Google. While you’re getting a flashy, gorgeous, website if you’re still getting less than 10 visitors a day you should be very concerned. Ask these website companies to share Google Analytics data with you every 30 days. There’s only one way of finding out if your website works - review the work.

Establish your own online presence or face the alternative: somebody else will do it without your knowledge. Doctors should care about it, because whatever is developed online now will be their reputation for the next decade or more. We are in the age of digital media, and it’s only going to get more advanced. Having a well-developed website is already considered a dinosaur. The comet of social media already came and impacted the entire medical world as we know it. Now the only way to survive is to adapt and evolve, or face extinction to Dr. Google.

Beware of these five major hackers who prey on your online brand as a physician to make money for themselves.

Five Hackers After Your Medical Practice Marketing

Internet companies have launched an all-out assault on the medical practice industry. From SEO companies to health information sites to physician ratings websites, they’re all competing for the same thing - a physician’s name.

Whether it’s lack of physicians’ interest in their online reputations, lack of knowledge of what should be on page one of Google, or the lack of regulations in the space of medical marketing, all three issues have led to some of the most unethical practices in the industry.

Because of lack of regulations, even lawsuits against Internet companies have resulted in nothing. Because of the failed lawsuits, more companies with unethical practices are springing up. Upon review of the last lawsuits in the industry, it was very clear that neither the lawyers, the doctors themselves, nor possibly the judges/jury were even remotely aware of why these Internet companies’ practices were unethical.

Here are the top five most unethical practices to watch out for online:

Use of doctors' names in advertising campaigns without their knowledge or consent

If a website is listing your name or the brand of your practice on their physician locator is it justified? Every time this happens, the Internet company utilizes the fact that patients Google their doctors, and they attract attention to their websites and advertisers by enticing people to view information about you. When they get on the website, there is no information about you, but rather advertisements of other doctors who pay the company for patient lead generation. This is the most common unethical practice used by most Internet companies and it’s rampant. From health information sites that use physician locators with propagated ratings, to physician review sites, to physician directories, to SEO companies, they’re all competing to entice more advertisers at your expense.

Use of physician reputations for monetization schemes

It’s without doubt that patients go online to run a background check on their doctors. But are three random physician reviews from the past five years representative of the thousands of patients you see? Well, imagine if a doctor who has two negative or so-so patient reviews pitched against an advertisement of another doctor. Without doubt, patients do not want to go to a poorly-reviewed doctor. They will click on that advertisement. So while possible patients are going to review information about you they’re fooled into going to see another doctor. Again, this is a standard practice among Internet companies that uses doctors’ names to improve advertisers’ results.

Manipulation of public services for profit



Recently many doctors have been affected by patient review and ratings websites that manipulate physician reviews. Many patient reviews are hidden behind filters to make the doctors look worse. Doctors are displayed with awful ratings for their medical schools, hospitals, and training. Then these same doctors are called by the companies to advertise with them, create custom profiles, and remove negative ratings from public view.

SEO (search engine optimization) services for “page one Google results”



The only way to achieve page one of Google is to advertise using Google Ads. Many SEO companies claim to boost your rankings for your website on Google by tweaking your content and building links. At the end of the month they will put together an ad, will call you to review it, and then claim that they brought your website to “#1 Result on Google” Once you review it and have a smile on your face, they get you with an annual contract. The next day they remove the advertisements. If you want page one on Google to list the most important information about you, you need to be proactive. There’s no magical service that will fix this. What good is SEO for your website if the next listing on Google is a bad patient review?

Google advertisements without reputation control and website tweaks

There are now many Internet companies switching from other industries to focus on doctors to offer Google Ads as stand-alone services for several thousand dollars a month. They mostly prey on physicians in surgical specialties who can afford such ads. What they don’t tell you is that if you were to tweak your website and your reputation online was improved, the cost of Google Ads can decrease by a few thousand dollars. Don’t get sucked into getting one or two patients from Google Ads. Internet advertising has to part of a marketing plan. Alone it’s simply a very costly waste of money.

To summarize, doctors need to be aware of their online reputations. The practice of using doctors’ names and reputations are not a public service if there is no service, but rather an unethical monetization scheme. Be careful of who uses your name for their profit. And remember that Internet marketing is not about SEO or Google Ads. Internet marketing is about everything that appears on page one of Google.

Here is a list of the top five most unethical practices to watch out for online that can hurt your medical practice.

Lack of Internet Regulations Hurting Medical Practices

. This week we'll talk about the best topics that every doctor’s blog should have.

Most of my clients prescribe their blogs to their patients and visitors from internet advertising. Why? To further qualify patients for the doctor’s expertise and practice goals; to improve patients’ experience; to improve adherence to treatment programs; and to screen out patients, i.e. plastic surgery (body dysmorphic people), pain management (junkies seeking drugs), or psychiatry (cases the doctor is uneasy to see).

1. Answers to the most common patient questions in the form of FAQ. What kind of insurance do you accept? What to do during an emergency? What does it mean “I accept only out-of-network benefits.”

2. What do you repeat to your patients every single day? This is perhaps the best topic for a blog to have because of the immense time savings during patient visits. Before the patients’ appointments, your secretary or medical assistant would direct patients to the blog for the resources for them to read, i.e. how to prepare for the specific procedure or to help manage patients’ expectations from the visit. Some of our clients also have a tablet PC in their front office so if patients forget to read the prescribed resources the medical assistant will quickly browse to the blog and hand the patient reading material before the doctor sees them. Again, this should be a time-saving feature for the precious time you have with your patients. This also helps patients prepare themselves mentally for patient history.

3. What should patients do after the procedure or treatment? The blog should direct patients to specific online resources designed to improve their overall treatment: especially online patient communities. Keep things very relevant and well-categorized for easy browsing. Not only is this important for patients, but also for your staff which will be helping patients navigate to the resources specifically for them. This type of resource helps patients adhere to treatment protocols. It also satisfies another very important topic: How much time patients spend managing and living with their conditions versus how much time they spend in the doctor’s office. It’s very important to prepare resources for patients to turn to when they’re between visits. Don’t rely on Google to educate your patients. Google will mostly misinform them. There are very few resources for patients that doctors would approve. This is your chance to do what most doctors never even think of.

4. Latest news or research in your sub-specialty. When patients see these resources they tend to trust their doctors better. Nothing tells patients that their doctor is an expert like keeping up to date with research. Some doctors even ask their patients for assistance in writing these resources for other patients like them. The purpose here is to keep medical jargon out and translate everything to educate your patients. Consider this your ongoing public relations.

5. Celebrate your expertise, your practice, and your staff. Have you recently hired a great manager? Were you on the news? Did you publish research? This is the kind of resource that helps personalize the blog and show patients you care not only about them but your practice.

Keep your blog focused, well categorized, and always blog with SEO in mind. Remember to keep controversial issues out of the picture. Your blog is supposed to be the most trusted source of medical information for your patients. Always keep that in mind. Click to last week’s article for more information about that.

Here are five topics you should incorporate into your physician blogging as soon as possible to boost success for your medical practice.

Five Important Topics for Your Physician Blog

Should the most nationally recognized physician bloggers be proud of their work? Yes and no.

Over the past two weeks, there have been more than 30 medical blogs mentioned in various articles in medical journals. They were celebrated for the physicians’ leadership in blogging and paving the way for adoption of social media among medical professionals. Indeed, the content my firm found on those blogs was a wealth of the most important information those doctors’ patients would ever find on the internet.

However, after a brief analysis of those blogs, there’s nothing to celebrate. These doctors spent countless hours of writing amazing articles but aside from the three to five blog posts on the home page, the rest of the several hundred articles and videos were impossible to find. Some of these doctors have been blogging for months and years, and frankly all 30 of them made serious mistakes, in my opinion. It’s difficult to understand why such reputable doctors with national recognition have such poorly managed blogs with no plans for long-term ROI.

In this article we will explore the 10 most important guidelines for doctors to follow when writing for their blogs.

1. Look at the doctor’s bog as a way to establish your credibility and expertise in the field. This is your way to not only gain recognition but help people identify with you as a person. It’s OK for you to hire someone to help you write it, just be sure to put your personality into it. But I will say the best physician blogs are always written by the doctors themselves.

2. Focus your blog. Focus on the one thing you want your blog to accomplish and stick with it. Don’t change the focus; don’t start blogging about different topics. If you’re writing about knee injuries, stick to knee injuries, prevention, surgeries, articles, news, etc. … about knee injuries. Don’t start going on about your political views. It’s OK to celebrate a new hire, recognition for something, a TV appearance, but keep it focused.

3. Don’t write about anything and everything; plan for your articles to have a return on investment. If you think your post is not going to be relevant a week from now, don’t write it. Keep building a positive image. Don’t write about controversial topics, especially if your blog is focused.

4. Categorize everything. I’ve seen blogs that have hundreds of articles on them, but who cares if patients can’t find any of them that are relevant to their needs? Do you think all those tags Wordpress blogs are famous for helps patients find relevant information? No way. If anything they make the blogs look like an art project rather than something that is supposed to be treated as the most trusted source of information on the Internet for your patients. Without categories, blog posts have a lifetime until your next blog post. Why spend 15 minutes to30 minutes of your life on something that will disappear in a week? For example, categorize your knee injury blog posts into prevention, exercises to strengthen muscles, nutrition, prep for surgery, etc. Before their appointment, send your patient a link to the category!

5. Separate your blog for patients and referring physicians.

6. Incorporate medical SEO; plan for long-term success with your blog. Create titles and descriptions for your blog posts that will have meaning for years to come. Plan on using key phrases that your patients are using in your blogs. Hire a medical marketer to go over the blog articles to re-optimize and categorize them. You may pay $20 to$50 per blog post but you can ensure these posts will have meaning and will be found on Google. Some marketing companies incorporate this into their monthly maintenance plans for blogs and websites and that’s a great deal if you don’t have to pay extra for this.

7. Make sure every blog post has a different title and description.

8. Incorporate your contact information into every page. It’s the greatest sin if patients can’t find a way to contact you.

9. Keep your blog posts for local doctors and patients. The biggest ROI is that your blog will save thousands of dollars on promoting your expertise and practice. Make sure your address is on every page.

10. Pick topics that are dear to your patients. Ask them during the office visit what information they want to see, or would have loved to see before their visit. Start prescribing your blog as an educational tool for patients before they come see you. Take pride in prescribing your blog. You will receive great satisfaction when your patients start thanking you for it.

Next week we’ll talk about some of the best topics to discuss in your blog.

Here are 10 important guidelines for doctors to follow when writing their own blogs.

How Physicians Can Improve Their Medical Blogging

A very small percentage of cash-based practices are highly profitable. Those that are follow one common rule: They find ways to differentiate their practice.

Any cash-paying patient expects their doctor to be a sub-specialized expert. A dermatologist with at least 50 percent of his practice focused on psoriasis is more likely to get more cash-paying psoriasis patients. An orthopedic surgeon focusing on minimally invasive knee surgery will surely get more athletes who are willing to pay out of pocket. However, just because a practice is focused does not mean the practice will have enough of such patients increase its profits, especially in highly competitive areas of the country. Promoting that focus is a recipe for success. You have to talk about your niche but you also have to get your patients to talk about. (Hence the reason why social media is such a hot topic nowadays.)

In areas of the country, like New York and New Jersey, it seems like every cash-based dermatologist sees patients for everything skin-related; every orthopedic doctor will take patients for back, shoulder, knee, and anything related to orthopedics; every psychiatrist will see patients for anything related to psychiatry. And the list goes on. They’re all competing for the same patients.

Why are they doing that? There’s no way they can be experts in everything. Everyone knows that, including your future patients. Focus your practice, find a niche that’s underserved, establish your credibility, and promote it.

Stop telling your marketers you want a website like your local competitor. Stop advertising for every procedure in your specialty. You will lose now or later, because when it comes to Internet marketing, the Internet is already a bidding war. Even in New York City, the same cash-for-service consultation at a specialist’s office can range from $150 to $400. It used to average around $300, but now?

Doctors who advertise see patients for $400 per visit. Doctors that don’t advertise keep decreasing their prices to stay “competitive,” and I use the term very loosely. As more doctors within the same specialties are developing Internet advertising campaigns for the same patients, the fee-for-services even for the physicians that are advertising are becoming less profitable. Some doctors change their prices even by $20 and it makes a whole world of difference for a cash-paying patient. Why? Because as far as their patient knows, all the local specialists are the same.

In Internet advertising, specifically advertisements on Google, Healthcare Marketing Center has seen a dramatic increase in costs for clicks on Google Adwords over the past two years. Doctors are getting severely ripped off by SEO and website companies. Every doctor gets the same: the same website, the same advertisement, the same keyword, and the same advice. That needs to stop.

If you’re going to develop a marketing campaign for your cash practice, make sure your marketer does at least the following:

 Any professional marketer will be afraid of making a recommendation without testing their theories. There’s no practice that’s exactly the same and medical marketing campaigns should reflect that. While every medical marketing company will advise you to get a website, SEO, and advertisements, it’s about differentiating them all that will make a practice very successful. Expect 30 days to-60 days of testing advertisements and website content (including design).

 Watch out for companies that seem to own a specific specialty. That just means they’re copying the same website over and over. Refrain from being advised on “this is the most popular website.”



 The website features you select with the assistance of sales representatives may be eye candy to you, but it doesn’t mean it will be of benefit to your patients and referring doctors. Be open to constructive criticism and advice that you may not necessarily like. After all, advice is meant to be explored and tested to find the most cost-effective means to improve that volume of cash patients.

4. A library of information just for your patients. 

If you have a website with the same patient education library that your competitor has, what service does that do for you? Again, you need to differentiate your practice. The less it appears as another doctor’s website, the better. Avoid sending patients away to pre-designed libraries, .org sites, and any external links. You spent a lot of money on getting that patient to your website. Do not send him away.

 This is your key differentiating factor, the least expensive, and the most powerful form of marketing. Chances are good that 90 percent of your local competitors have never explored a blog. My next article will be about blogging strategies for physicians.

 If you want SEO and advertising and the company you’re hiring does absolutely nothing to educate your patients and referring doctors you are definitely wasting your money. There are more SEO companies entering the healthcare marketplace and they’re all doing the same thing. Every year, medical SEO gets more expensive because it’s getting less effective as a standalone strategy. It needs to be supported with education.

 There’s nothing more effective in medical marketing than promoting a doctor with a stellar reputation. If you have bad reviews online you need to be very concerned about this. Any medical marketing campaign without reputation management is a mistake. (See my previous blog on this topic for more.)

 If you have not yet published an article in local newspapers, think about it, because 99 percent of your competitors have not.

Find your niche and enjoy the benefits of running a profitable medical practice.

Here are some key tips you can take to increase the volume of fee-for-service / cash paying patients at your medical practice.