Essential LASIK Marketing Strategies for Effective Patient Acquisition

LASIK Marketing Strategies

Growing your LASIK practice in Canada can be challenging. This procedure is not covered by insurance, so you do not need to compete with public healthcare options. However, the competition is still severe and includes other private clinics and cheaper alternatives (like eyewear).

With the prolonged economic recession, LASIK practice growth might seem unlikely. However, the Canadian market has great potential for businesses like yours. With the right LASIK marketing plan and proper implementation, you can attract and convert enough potential patients for growth.

This Guide on LASIK Marketing Strategies will help you achieve your desired goals. We’ll be talking about the following proven strategies:

1. LASIK surgery Website
2. SEO strategies for LASIK practice
3. Content marketing
4. Email Campaigns for LASIK patients
5. PPC advertising

Why learn these strategies from us? dNOVO Group has many years of experience helping grow medical practices in Canada using proven marketing channels and techniques. Before we dive deep into the best LASIK marketing strategies, let’s quickly overview the market and share some other marketing materials.

An Overview of the LASIK Industry

Every year, 100,000 Canadians get LASIK surgery, spending $3000-5000 per surgery. 97% of them would recommend the procedure to their family or friends, though the younger the person the more likely they are to do it.

The overall global trend of recent years is the increase in the percentage of people with poor eyesight. Researchers predict that by 2050, 49.8% of the population will have it. Currently, approximately 75% of young Canadians aged 12 to 19 have healthy eyesight. However, this percentage is only 25% for grown-ups of 55+ years of age.

Medical Marketing Materials

dNOVO Group marketing experts have prepared a series of guides on marketing strategies for Canadian medical practices. Check out other materials in the series:

• Medical Marketing Guide
• Dental Marketing Guide
• Plastic Surgery Marketing Guide
• Chiropractor Marketing Guide
• IVF Fertility Marketing Guide

Now, let’s begin our learning journey and check out the strategies that will help take your LASIK surgery practice to a new level.

Developing a Comprehensive Medical Website

The basis for any successful digital marketing strategy is building a high-quality website. Keep in mind that a website’s value is not defined by its appearance. There are plenty of tools and people with the necessary design skills to build a cute landing page.

Modern websites must meet several criteria:

1. Drive traffic with SEO-optimized content
2. Provide necessary information about the business
3. Have high performance (high speed & no bugs)
4. Convert website visitors to clients

Summing up, your website must bring you potential LASIK patients on a regular basis. To achieve this goal you need to create and implement an SEO strategy, optimize the website performance, and publish content on a regular basis. We’ll be discussing these digital marketing strategies in the next section. In this section, we’ll focus on the essential elements of a converting website. These elements include:

LASIK Surgery Information

Remember that your procedure is invasive and dangerous. Potential LASIK patients have many questions and concerns regarding it. “What are the success rates of LASIK surgery?” “What are the possible negative consequences of the procedures?” “How long will I be recovering?” and many many more.

You need to provide as much information about LASIK procedures as possible. We suggest creating one hub page dedicated to the surgery and supporting it with blogs, FAQs, and downloadable content. Don’t forget to mention the benefits of LASIK procedures to the patients’ lives.

No more broken or forgotten glasses. No more contact lenses drained in the sink. No more eye discomfort and headaches. No more long-term costs of purchasing eyewear. No more hard choices between the glasses you like and the glasses that match your face. No more eyesight deterioration. No more stressed morning search of your eyewear when you are late. And the clarity of vision, finally.

LASIK Surgeon Pages

Adding pages dedicated to your team and surgeons in particular is a good practice. LASIK surgeon has the ability to visually impair the patient to the point of blinding them. You need to have a lot of trust in a person to actually let them carry out such a procedure on your eyes.

Check out this surgeon who strategically placed his family photo on the page dedicated to him:

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Creating a page dedicated to a LASIK surgeon is the first step in building this trust. Show the doctor’s photo (choosing a neutral palette). Mention education, years of experience, completed courses, and awards. Showcase the photos of diplomas. Create an image of a reliable and knowledgeable medical professional.

Patient Success Stories

This page serves a similar purpose to surgeon pages and LASIK surgery information pages. The goal is to show how people’s life changed after the surgery. These stories will help potential patients lessen their stress and will add trustworthiness to your LASIK practice.

Video testimonials will make the biggest impact on prospective patients.

LASIK Practice Locations

These pages will help you with your local SEO. It will help your patient understand whether your LASIK practice is located within a comfortable distance from their home.

In the screenshot below, you can see a page dedicated to a laser centre in Calgary, what people with bad eyesight struggle to see is the menu – a somewhat common mistake for LASIK clinics (we’ll talk about accessibility later in the text):

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Contact Page & Contact Widgets

Few websites today go by without a contact page. What many fail to add is a book appointment widget. Yet this element is crucial if you want your LASIK practice website to actually convert.

Making medical decisions is hard, having to click through many pages of the website and then try contacting the medical professionals is even harder. Contact widget can make it much easier.

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Accessibility

This feature is overlooked by so many clinics to much disdain of their potential patients. Make sure that your website is friendly to people with visual impairment. You are not creating a website for a fashion show or modern art gallery where text plays a secondary role. Don’t make reading difficult for people whose eyes already feel tense.

Try avoiding very thin fonts or fonts with too many elements. Make sure the font isn’t too small and avoid putting images as a text background. Check out the screenshot below. A person with bad eyesight will have a hard time reading the left side of the test due to dark blobs behind it.

Check out this example of what you shouldn’t do with text background:

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Tip: ask a person who has poor eyesight to look at your website design before coding it. Ask them to share their eye sensations. If their eyes feel tense after a 5-minute reading, it’s a sign you need to change something. You can also watch them. If they squint while reading, change the design.

Before and After

We especially love this widget enabling patients to see the difference in their vision before and after the LASIK procedures. If you have bad eye vision, it really hits home on a level a healthy person will never understand:

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization can help your LASIK practice not only drive more leads but also improve conversions. A high-quality SEO strategy aims to get your pages to the top of search results pages and includes several elements:

1. Keyword Research
2. Technical SEO
3. On-page SEO
4. Off-page SEO
5. Local SEO

Let’s take a closer look at each of these SEO techniques.

Keyword Research

The keyword research enables potential patients to find your website on Google. The correct choice of those keywords will impact your LASIK marketing success.

Usually we suggest finding a perfect balance between a keyword’s volume and difficulty and look. However, LASIK market is highly competitive and getting to the top of search results will be hard.

Volume

Volume helps you understand how many people are searching for the keyword. For example, around 6,600 people in Canada are looking for LASIK monthly.

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Difficulty

Difficulty indicates how hard it will be to reach the top of the Google search results page. For example, the above-mentioned keyword LASIK has 93% difficulty. It means that you’ll need to write a high-quality copy, optimize it, and obtain a lot of referrals.

However, if you look at the “laser vision correction cost” keyword, you’ll see that its difficulty is only 5%. It means that you can write and publish the page, you will get to the top and will still enjoy a large audience.

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Intent

The problem with the “laser vision correction cost” keyword is its intent. It’s informational, not commercial as LASIK. This keyword is good, but not for your service pages or your main page. It’s hard to find keywords with commercial intent and low difficulty for this market.

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That’s why we suggest starting your strategy by creating good pages with informational keywords and referring them to service pages.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO helps you improve your website performance since Google estimates its UX. The search engine punishes slow websites with “orphan” pages and 404 pages, poor navigation and chaotic architecture.

To get high search engine rankings, make sure you get rid of duplicate content, set redirects, and interlink all your pages into clear hierarchy.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO techniques guide you on how you should place your focus keyword in the page. Add your focus keyword to the following spots:

1. Once per every 100 words
2. The first paragraph
3. The header of the first level
4. At least one header of the second level
5. Meta title
6. Meta description.
7. URL

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On-page SEO is essential to get high search engine rankings for a specific keyword as they enable cralers to understand what your page is about.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to building your domain authority through the meticulous control of your backlinks. You need to work to acquire backlinks from websites with high authority, especially those dedicated to LASIK. At the same time, you need to work on disavowing links from shady websites (e.g., casinos).

Local SEO

Local Search Engine Optimization will boost LASIK marketing and help you get more clients from local community. There are two main methods to achieve good results. First you can add service area pages around “local keywords.” For example, LASIK Ontario has smaller volume, but commercial intent and low keyword difficulty.

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Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is the second technique for local search engine optimization. It helps you appear on Google maps, where potential patients can easily find your business and potentially convert.

Engaging LASIK Content Marketing

Content is a great strategy for digital marketing. As a rule of thumb, content encompasses website pages and your blog. Some teams include SMM in their content plan, however, most treat it as a completely different channel. Your LASIK marketing can heavily benefit from a good content plan.

Content Clusters

To excel in content digital marketing, you need to understand how Google views content. Right now, it tries to analyze a single content piece in relation to all the content on the page. Are those similar topics or not?

The more content you have dedicated to a certain topic the higher Google positions your website. Why? Google wants its users to quickly find the maximum amount of information within one search. Also, if you write a lot about a certain topic, it implies that you know a lot, and you are an expert.

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That’s why one of the best content marketing strategies is to create a content cluster. What is it? A content cluster is a series of content pieces linked by one single topic. For example, LASIK providers are expected to write about eyesight, eye surgery, and the LASIK industry, etc. Each of these topics can be a separate content cluster.

Usually, a cluster has a central piece that other pages within the cluster refer to with links. This technique signals to Google that this page is the most important. Clusters also play a significant role in building the buyer journey for prospective patients.

Blog

The central page within a cluster is usually a service page or a home page. More rarely, it is a blog post. We advise against the latter since it elongates the buyer’s journey for your prospective patients. It’s better to create a content piece and then point it directly to your page dedicated to the LASIK

Paid Advertising for LASIK Surgery

Paid advertising is a great way to get backlinks and drive traffic to your website. They impact positively on your brand recognition, SEO, and lead generation. Most modern paid ads are PPC, which means you only pay for clicks from your potential patients.

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There are several types of paid ads.

Paid search ads

This type of ad is a great way to attract more patients when you’re only starting your LASIK SEO and are struggling to reach the SERP top due to the high difficulty of the LASIK keywords. Paid search ads are ads that appear at the top of Google SERP above organic results.

Social media ads

Ads on social media platforms are a great way to drive more patients. You can set up an audience for your campaigns based on many demographic indicators.

Banner ads

These ads appear on various websites and mobile apps. Their key benefit is providing high-quality backlinks. They also impact your brand recognition.

LASIK Marketing Ideas to Engage Potential Patients

In this section, we briefly discuss some actionable tips to engage patients.

Leveraging Social Media for LASIK Practices

Social media platforms are a great way for LASIK providers to engage with their target audience. You can ask past patients to share their stories with their audiences and tag you. You can promote special offers. You can educate your potential patients about LASIK services.

Traditional Marketing

Traditional LASIK marketing campaigns are a good way to bring more patients to your clinics. Check out the next ongoing event in your local community and find ways to participate.

Business Listings

Business listings provide stable traffic and backlinks from reputable domains to your websites. We strongly suggest adding your business to at least one such directory.

Hire LASIK Marketing Agency

Planning and implementing marketing campaigns on your own can be difficult, especially if you do not have a large marketing team. Hiring an agency and ordering LASIK marketing services can help you get the marketing team with the necessary expertise and experience and save costs.

dNOVO Group is an established LASIK marketing agency. We have helped many medical organizations win more patients and grow their practices. We offer:

1. Website development
2. SEO
3. Paid search ads
4. SMM

Are you ready to win more LASIK patients? Book a free one-hour consultation