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Submitted by: Austin Coulson
Heres What You Need To Know To Get Your Moneys Worth.
Just imagine this: Your dental practice has become so popular that youre asked to make the rounds on all the daytime talk shows where you get to show b-list celebrities how to whiten their teeth using baking soda, strawberries, and a charcoal briquette. Pretty awesome, right?
Ok well you might not want to be a celebrity dentist but Im sure getting more leads and more patients is probably pretty high on you list to grow your dental business.
Dentistry is a hugely competitive field no matter what state youre in. Cities like Los Angeles have well over 10,000 listings of dentists just on Yelp. Theres a dental office on every block and in every strip mall in every major city. Thats a lot of competition to go up against and if youre not equipped with the right marketing tools youre going to end up with their scraps.
I know youve probably already tried to hire a marketing firm or SEO company to help grow your dental practice and they promised you big returns but couldnt deliver. They made everything sound so confusing that you end up basically cutting them a check and had no clue what they were actually doing for you.
The madness is going to stop right here.
You need to make yourself knowledgeable on what dental internet marketing strategies ACTUALLY work to help grow your practice. Once you understand these dental marketing tactics you can ask your SEO company specifically how they are doing these tasks and make them show you reports on how they accomplished these goals. If they cant, its probably time to kick them to the curb and look for someone new.
Heres What your SEO Company SHOULD be doing for you:
In order for your dental website to rank well on Google you will need to build a good reputation on the internet. How do you do this? You need to gain trust with Google by building strong backlinks from other dental related websites. When Google sees that a reputable dental related website or blog links to your website it basically says to itself, Hey, this trustworthy site thinks that this dental website is worth mentioning. Lets bump it up a few ranks. With enough strong backlinks, over time your dental website will move up to the front page for the keywords you want to rank for.
Managing Your Yelp and Review Sites
You might really hate Yelp but the fact is it is the first thing most people will see about your dental practice. You cant hide from Yelp because its the users who drive your listing even if you didnt create one for yourself. A good dental internet marketing company will be constantly pushing you to get good reviews and helping you develop new strategies on how to get happy patients to leave reviews. There are also other review sites like Google My Business, Yellowpages, Superpages, Manta, and many others that they should also be managing for you.
When you do get a bad review (its inevitable, theres always a person that leaves one) your dental marketing team should notify you of it and coach you on how to draft a helpful response. Many times a customer will increase their rating of you or if they dont, other patrons will see that
Optimizing Your Website for SEO
Your dental website needs to be optimized for SEO in order to rank well on Google. There are many things Google looks for such as mobile responsiveness, meta tags and descriptions, webpage load times, proper HTML and CSS, etc. All of these issues need to be addressed in order to build a good foundation for your dental internet marketing. Your website needs to work well and convert well in order to maximize your investment.
Claiming and Managing Your Local Listings
If you want to draw patients from outside your city or just from your local competitors you have to start somewhere. Your dental internet marketing company should make sure you first dominate the city your office is in and then expand from there. A big part of this is making sure all of your Local Listings and Review sites are claimed and well reviewed. The more presence you have in your local areas the better you will show up on maps and Google searches. Eventually your website will start ranking for other surrounding cities and if your SEO team is doing their job youll be pulling in patients from all over the state.
Creating New and Engaging Dental Content
Google loves new, fresh, and engaging content. The more interesting and genuine your dental content is, the more Google values your website. Many dental marketing companies claim to write unique content for your website but actually just cut and paste articles from other places. Make sure your SEO company is actually researching and providing share worthy content that engages your visitors. Take some time to read the content your dental SEO company has been writing for you. If its junk to you then Google probably also thinks its junk and wont care about it.
Promoting Your Unique Dental Articles
Just creating articles doesnt work anymore. An old outdated SEO strategy was to create tons of meaningless content and stuff as many dental related keywords as possible (e.g. Dental Implants, Cheap Dental Implants, Low Cost Dental Implants, etc.) into an article in hopes Googles robots pick it up and rank it well. This is bad blackhat practice. Google wants to see people talking about your article, linking it, referencing it, and discussing it. A good dental SEO company will focus less on creating mass amount of content and instead allocate resources into promoting the good engaging articles they have written for you.
Managing Your Dental Adwords
Many of you have probably already tried Adwords for your dental practice and havent seen a good return. Sometimes it feels like youre just throwing money away every month. Adwords is very tough space because youre constantly competing with hundreds of other dentists and companies with budgets that might just blow yours away. Some dental companies spend between $10,000 $60,000+ a month just on Adwords. If youre managing your own Adwords yourself it is very unlikely that you have the man hours to properly use its features to the fullest to get the most out of your budget. With keywords costing between $2.50 $8.00 a click you need to be very careful and adapt new strategies quickly. The same concerns go along with having your website designer or IT profession who arent experts at Adwords managing it for you.
Heres are some basic questions to ask your Adwords manager:
What is an Auction Insights report?
Answer:A report that shows how your campaign is performing vs. your competitors.
What Ad Extensions are you using?
Sitelink Additional links in your ad
Callout Additional descriptive text below your ad
Structured Snippits Extensions that highlight specific aspects of your services
Call Shows your phone number in your ad
Location Shows a map with your ad
Review Highlights third-party reviews on your ad
What top sites are our ads showing up for our Remarketing campaign?
What negative keywords are you using?
Answer:Your manager should be looking through your search terms and exluding keywords you do not want to show up for (e.g. Gold Teeth, Free Dental Implants, Dental Schools)
There are also some potential problems when a large SEO firm manages your dental Adwords. Since a large SEO company has so many clients, your account gets passed down to a junior Adwords manager who has very little experience which can possibly lead to you losing money on your campaign. They usually work on volume and offer cheap prices but rarely produce good results.
Auditing Your Office Manager and Tracking Their Performance
Its fairly easy to come up with tailored strategies to help your dental business generate leads and convert them to patients but its another thing to implement them into offices daily routine. A good dental marketing company will work closely with your office manager to make sure they are managing your staff correctly so everyone is executing the tasks needed to make your dental marketing successful.
There are certain things your office manager needs to on top of like making sure your staff is actively asking happy patients for reviews, calling back leads in a timely manner, or making sure to record important data like the location and conversion rates of your leads so your marketing campaigns can be adjusted to get the most return on them. Your dental marketing company should be auditing your office manager on a weekly basis and making sure that all tasks are being completed.
Building a Good Sales Funnel
You can spend thousands on SEO and Adwords and get hundreds of leads but if you dont have a good sales funnel, you will end up losing them. A good dental internet marketing company will create a process to help convert those leads into patients. This is done by using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that manages and analyze customer interactions through the sales funnel.
In plain English it means if someone fills out a form on your landing page asking you about a dental implant, you have a process that increases the likelihood that they convert from a lead into a patient even if they cancel appointments, dont answer the phone, or ask to be called a few days later because they will be out of town. A good sales funnel will remind you team and force them to be persistent with these leads so they close and turn into paying patients. Every interaction is tracked so you will know where the leak in your funnel is.
Creating Easy to Understand Reports and Statistics
Many SEO companies give their dental clients complicated automatically generated reports to show how good their statistics are but many of the metrics simply dont matter.
Statistics Important to Your Dental Marketing Campaign
Website Unique Visitors The amount of New Visitors to your website
Adwords Clicks The amount of clicks your Adwords campaign is getting
CTR (Click Through Rate) How likely a lead will click your Adwords advertisement after seeing it.
Total Phone Calls How many phone calls are being generated through your website and landing pages
Total Leads How many leads your Dental Internet Marketing company is generating through SEO and Adwords
Lead to Appointments The percentage of leads that turn into appointments
Appointments to Shows The percentage of appointments that actually show up
No Shows The percentage of leads that make appointments but never show up
Patients The number of leads that turn into paying patients
Cost Per Patient The amount of marketing dollars that need to be spent to get a lead and convert them into a paying patient.
With accurate and useful reporting and statistics you and your dental internet marketing team can make educated adjustments to your advertising campaigns to help you spend less money to get more patients.
Conclusion
Whether your goals are to become a world famous dentist to the stars or if you just want to increase your income enough to become profitable, you need to invest in dental internet marketing. Once youve found the right company to work with youll need to make yourself knowledgeable in what SEO and Adwords practices are most effective so you can audit them and make sure youre getting your moneys worth. When you and your dental marketing team are working in complete harmony you can then begin to fine tune your campaigns and eventually expand the reach of your business and hopefully open up more practices to start the whole wonderful process all over again.
About the Author: Web Design and Internet Marketing have been passions of Austins for many years. While starting out by creating websites for himself, Austin ascertained many of the fundamentals and theory that constitute professional website development. Through networking and word-of-mouth, Austin soon began building and marketing websites for many different businesses and industries.For more information, please visit us at our website at
acuwebservices.com
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