Supercharge Your Dental Practice’s Online Marketing for More New Patient Leads
Dental Practices can’t just depend on referrals anymore. Potential patients are turning to search engines, online reviews and social media to search for their next dentist. If your practice is serious about growing and attracting new patients, supercharging your digital presence is the best way to put yourself in the fast lane. Let’s take a look at some of the key components needed to start seeing results.
Your Website is the Center of Your Digital Universe
Tell me something I don’t know, right? While it’s no secret that having a great website is crucial to your online marketing success, plenty of dentists with beautiful websites are still making some pretty big mistakes.
It’s easy to get caught up in design when a website is being built. It’s a classic case of putting fashion over function. There’s no doubt that having a great looking website is important, but there are a few often neglected factors to keep in mind.
Conversion Optimization: Make it easy for visitors to your website to perform the action that will “convert” that person from a visitor to a lead. The best conversion optimizations happen above the fold and include three crucial elements.
- Clear and powerful call to action
- Prominent form fill
- Easy to spot phone number
Your call to action should leave no confusion about what action you want a potential patient to take. Whether it’s scheduling an appointment, coming in for an office tour or requesting more information about your practice – be clear, straightforward and concise.
The upper right hand corner is a great place to add a form fill. Don’t make visitors navigate to your contact page to reach out through your website. Put a form fill on your homepage and every service page. Keep the fields limited. Typically, name, email and a comment section are a great start. Research shows that the more fore fields you require, the fewer leads you’ll get. If you don’t like the look of a form fill, throw up a nice button with a call to action that directs visitors to a contact form.
It’s also a good idea to make sure your phone number is also easy to see. Throw it up in the header or on your main navigation bar.
Load Time: Nobody likes waiting for a slow website to load. In the age of high-speed internet, users expect instant gratification when they type in a url and hit enter. If your site is taking too long to load, it doesn’t matter how nice it looks. People are going to bail at the first sign of a spinning icon.
Responsiveness: Having a responsive website means that it looks and functions as intended on desktop and mobile devices. If you’ve ever visited a website on your phone that isn’t responsive, you probably found it annoyingly hard to read or navigate.
Structure and Navigation: The industry nerds refer to this as user experience. Navigating through your website should be intuitive and easy. Visitors should easily be able to find pages that highlight particular services. Keep your menu simple and well organized. Use internal linking to help people find relevant information and pages.
Multimedia: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then video should be worth at least 10,000. Videos are a great way to give visitors an inside look at your practice and introduce them to you and your staff. Bring them into your world with a high-quality video.
Analytics: Get a better idea of how visitors are interacting with your website. Google Analytics can show you an astounding amount of data, or big picture stats. It all depends on how far you want to drill down. The most valuable stats you’ll want to monitor are the number of people visiting your website, how they got there, and what percentage of visitors leave as soon as they hit a page (bounce rate).
Local Search Engine Marketing for Dentists: Your Key to New Patients
The face of search engine marketing is changing dramatically. Focusing exclusively on SEO or PPC advertising is no longer an effective strategy. Those dental practices experiencing exponential growth and new patient acquisition through their digital marketing efforts understand one key point.
Search engine marketing requires an all-encompassing approach.
That means putting effort into your organic search engine rankings as well as investing in paid search advertising. We’re going to dive deeper into some of the fundamentals of both types of rankings, but first, an overview of the two main types of search engine results.
Organic: The term organic is used to describe the search results that search engines show based on your web pages’ relevance to the keywords people are searching for online. You can’t pay search engines to improve your organic rankings. If you want to show up higher in these results, you’ll have to invest in optimizing your website and implementing off-site SEO strategies.
Organic rankings are important because of the high-level of trust that users associate with search engine results. Higher organic ranking will not only bring you more traffic, it will bring you more relevant traffic, meaning visitors are much more likely to become leads.
Paid Search Results: Paid search results take up some prime real estate in both major search engines (Google and Bing). In fact, for highly competitive dentistry-related keywords, everything your see above the fold is a paid search result. That means users will have to scroll before they even see the organic results.
Paid results are useful because you can decide how much you are willing to pay for each click and get instant search engine results and a good stream of qualified leads. It’s a great way to get in front of potential patients searching for services you offer, but don’t rank for organically.
Understanding Organic Search Engine Logic
The primary goal of search engines is providing users with the information or services they are looking for and the high-quality user experience they expect. There are at least 200 ranking factors Google uses to determine which sites will earn the coveted top spot, and those are only the factors we know about!
Needless to say, we don’t have time to go over all 200 factors, but we’ll cover some of the key aspects of search engine optimization that can help your dental practice start getting noticed online.
Search Engines Don’t Rank Websites, They Rank Pages
If you’ve paid any attention to your search engine rankings, you’ve probably noticed certain pages turning up for certain terms, while other pages might not show up at all. You should expect your home page to rank for people searching for the name of your practice, but even that isn’t a given.
A good rule of thumb is to theme individual pages around the services you offer and the primary keyword related to that service. Your homepage will provide an overview. Services that you want to highlight or promote should have dedicated service pages.
When it comes to the more advanced aspects of on-page SEO, consider contacting a digital marketing agency that specializes in this type of work. At Dental Marketing Company, we optimize content, urls, sitemap structure, coding, meta information and much more to set our clients up for success.
High Quality Informative Content
When it comes to content. Think quality over keywords. Trying to cram as many keywords as possible into content is an outdated tactic that is far more likely to hurt your rankings, rather than improve your position.
Today, search engines are much more advanced. One example is Google’s Hummingbird update, which doesn’t simply crawl web pages for certain keyword, but is actually able to contextualize the content. That means it is more important than ever to produce content that is engaging, relevant and valuable for visitors.
Off Page Local SEO Signals
Optimizing your website for better search rankings is only part of the equation. There are off-site signals that will tell search engines that your website is valuable and relevant to visitors and should be ranked higher.
Your first order of business off site should be claiming your Google and Bing business listings. Once these are set up, encourage your patients to leave reviews. You want search engines and potential patients to see that your practice is trusted and valued by your patients.
Content marketing and outreach is also a great way to get more visitors and improve your search engine rankings. If you’ve recently posted an interesting post or infographic on your blog, be sure to share it on social media. This will help you get more exposure and links back to your website.
It’s not a bad idea to reach out to an internet marketing agency that specializes in marketing for dentists. Working with Dental Marketing Company will provide you with access to our content marketing network.
We work with webmasters to publish content on your behalf on relevant, high value blogs and webpages to get valuable backlinks to your website.
Get Your Digital Marketing Campaign Started Right
Get in touch with Dental Marketing Company today to learn more about how we help practice’s just like your attract new patients and experience long-term growth. We’ll provide you with a free full audit and come up with a game plan custom built for your dental practice.
