Two of the most powerful approaches to digital marketing for medical practices are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But which strategy deserves your practice’s time and investment?
SEO includes both local SEO through your Google Business Profile listings, as well as more “traditional” SEO that’s driven by the optimization of your website to rank in search engine result pages. At RUNNER, we know that local SEO for doctors is the cornerstone of every medical practice marketing strategy. However, the traditional “website” side of SEO faces serious new challenges due to Google’s addition of AI Overviews to the search engine results.
That’s why more than ever, PPC for doctors has become a critical marketing strategy to create visibility and grow patient volume.
Why PPC is More Important for Doctors Than Traditional Website SEO
While SEO has been viewed as a primary marketing strategy for many medical practices, several factors have enhanced the importance of PPC for doctors:
#1 Guaranteed Visibility in the Search Engine Results
PPC for Doctors: With Google Ads, your practice is guaranteed placement at the top of search results, above both organic listings and AI-generated content. This prime real estate ensures maximum visibility when potential patients are actively searching for medical services.
Website SEO: There’s no guaranteed placement with traditional SEO. Your practice’s visibility depends entirely on your ability to outrank competitors organically—a challenging proposition in competitive medical specialties and locations.
#2 The Only Way to Beat AI Overviews
SEO: Perhaps the most significant SEO change affecting medical practices in 2025 is the growing prevalence of AI-generated overviews in search results. Recent studies show a reduction of up to 70% in click-through rates for organic results, dramatically diminishing the effectiveness of traditional website SEO.
PPC for Doctors: PPC ads remain positioned above AI overviews, maintaining their visibility and effectiveness even as organic results suffer declining engagement. This advantage alone makes PPC for doctors an essential component of any medical marketing strategy in 2025.
#3 Message Control with PPC for Doctors
PPC: When implementing PPC ads for doctors, practices maintain complete control over their ad copy, headlines, and messaging. This control allows you to highlight how your practice is unique or showcase the authority of your physicians.
SEO: Google often rewrites titles and descriptions in organic search results, potentially misrepresenting your practice or emphasizing aspects that don’t align with your priorities. This loss of control can be particularly problematic for medical practices where precision in messaging is crucial.
#4 Speed of Results
PPC for Doctors: One of the most compelling advantages of PPC advertising is the immediate impact. Your practice can launch a campaign and begin generating clicks, calls, and appointments within hours. This immediacy makes PPC for doctors especially valuable for new practices or those looking to quickly promote new services or locations.
SEO: Traditional website SEO requires patience. Even with expert optimization, it can take more than 6 months to see significant ranking improvements, and considerably longer to reach top positions for competitive medical keywords.
#5 SEO isn’t Free
SEO: While some doctors view website SEO as “free”, the truth is that SEO requires a long-term timeframe, and in many cases, a significant upfront investment, like a website redesign. While there’s no direct per-click cost, the resources required for content creation, technical optimization, and link building can be substantial over the long run.
PPC for Doctors: You do pay for each click in PPC. But the ability to target only those keywords you care about, in addition to the hyper-local targeting makes PPC both the most efficient and effective at driving new patients into your practice. And the tracking in PPC ads allows you to measure the impact of every dollar you spend.
#6 Hyper-Local Targeting
PPC for Doctors: Google Ads offers precise geographic targeting, allowing practices to focus advertising efforts on specific neighborhoods, cities, or radius-based targeting. This precision helps ensure marketing dollars are spent on reaching potential patients within your service area.
SEO: There is no local targeting in traditional website SEO. We see it all the time – agencies that take a traditional website SEO approach may be able to drive traffic, but very few of those site visitors live anywhere close enough to become an office visit.
#7 Adaptability to Market Changes
PPC for Doctors: PPC campaigns can be quickly adjusted to respond to market shifts, competitive pressures, or seasonal trends. This agility allows medical practices to maximize return on investment by reallocating budget to high-performing keywords or geographic areas.
SEO: Adapting SEO strategies requires more time, as changes to content, structure, or backlink profiles take weeks or months to impact rankings. This slower response time can be problematic for medical practices, which always see seasonal changes.
The Ideal Approach: An Integrated Strategy
While traditional website SEO faces challenges from AI-generated content and diminished click-through rates, PPC advertising continues to provide medical practices with guaranteed visibility, message control, and immediate results. That’s why it’s important for medical practices to invest in PPC advertising.
It’s important to note that at RUNNER we know that the most successful marketing strategy is integrated, involving multiple channels including paid advertising, local SEO and a highly-optimized website. This ensures your practice gains visibility and generates new patient leads, the essential elements to staying competitive.
If you’d like to get started running PPC ads, or if you’ve been running them and are looking to level-up your performance, request a free consultation and speak to one of our medical marketing experts.
