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Best days and hours to advertise on Google for a Dentist?

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I just ran some analysis on last years call data in our system and came up with some interesting insights. The data-set is for around 20 dental office locations that generated just under 10,000 calls from 1st January to 31st December 2019.

Calls by day

Monday is the clear winner. Most offices do not run campaign on Saturday and Sunday.

Appointments by day

Again Monday takes the lead but notice how Thursday is the worst excluding weekends. Many dentists are closed Fridays and open on Thursdays but our data shows it should be opposite!

 Calls by time

The phone is consistently busy from 11 am to 3 pm.

Appointments by time

Morning (9-10 am), noon (12 to 1pm) and late afternoon (3-4 pm) are peak hours for appointments. Do NOT leave the phone unattended during these hours!

Missed Calls by day

Lowering missed calls remains the easiest opportunity to grow revenue for many offices with 1 in 8 calls being missed on average in 2019.

5 Online Advertising Ratios Every Dentist Should Know

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Most dentists outsource their online advertising campaigns to a dental marketing firm which then reports to them the results of the campaign. This is where your knowledge of marketing will be tested because these reports are full of technical terms and abbreviations. You must understand the meaning of each of those metrics to evaluate the performance of any marketing campaign. In this post we explain 5 ppc advertising KPI’s that every dentist must understand.

dentist advertising KPIs

Click-through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the ratio of clicks on your advert to the number of impressions it has received. This metric is very important for pay per click advertising specially Google Adwords. Google Adwords uses quality score in its ad ranking methodology and CTR is the main factor in quality score. A higher CTR means that your ad will get a better placement and cost less per click. Thus you will get more traffic in your budget.

Cost per Lead

The cost per conversion or cost per lead is simply the total cost of the campaign divided by the number of leads. This metric is very important to understand the efficiency of your campaign in terms of driving calls, form submits and other actions. A cost per lead that is too high would result in an unprofitable campaign. Therefore you must keep an eye on this number and make sure it meets your agreed targets.

Click to Lead Conversion Rate

As the name suggests this ratio gives the number of leads per click and is often expresses as a percentage. This metric helps gauge the effectiveness of the website or landing page used in the campaign in converting traffic to leads. In order to produce a low cost per lead, a high click to lead conversion rate is crucial specially for competitive dental procedures like cosmetic dentistry.

Lead to Appointment Conversion Rate

Similar to the click to lead ratio, this one gives the number of appointments resulting from each lead. Since this ratio is less than 1, it is usually expressed as a percentage. Your marketing campaign will be unprofitable if you cannot close enough leads and convert them into dental appointments. This KPI will help you gauge the quality of the leads as well as the phone skills of your receptionist.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

This KPI represents the gross profit resulting from a campaign to all the cost associated with running and managing the campaign. It is similar to the ratio return on investment (ROI) used to compare different investments. ROAS helps you evaluate the overall efficiency of your marketing campaign. A negative ROAS means you lost money whereas an ROAS of 100% means you made a gross profit equal to your marketing campaign cost. For any marketing campaign you should aim to hit at least 100% ROAS.

If you are struggling to make sense of your advertising results, or you need to improve your dental marketing campaigns, please request a free consultation.

How a Slow Loading Website Affects Your Dental Practice

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Website speed is a big deal. Fast-loading sites perform better on all fronts: better user experience, higher conversions, more engagement, even higher search rankings. Since most dental websites receive a lot of mobile traffic, site speed becomes even more important. A slow website gets a higher bounce rate and lower conversion rate both of which affect your bottom line. Just imagine somebody facing a dental emergency having to wait 10 seconds for your website to load so they can locate your contact information. Does your dental office deserve to get that patient?

How fast should my website be?

If you manage to get a load time under 3 seconds, you’re doing fine. If it’s under 7 seconds, it’s okay too (but you have to try to improve it). Over 10 seconds and you’re losing a significant number of appointments. While Jakob Nielsen says people can handle up to 10 second load time, consider this:

  • 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
  • 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes 3 seconds or more to load.
  • At peak traffic times, more than 75% of online consumers left for a competitor’s site rather than suffer delays.
  • According to this scientific study tolerable waiting time for information retrieval is approximately 2 seconds. Adding feedback, like a progress bar, can push tolerable waiting time to 38 seconds (so if your site is slow, add progress bars or equivalent).
  • A site that loads in 3 seconds experiences 22% fewer page views, a 50% higher bounce rate, and a 22% fewer conversions than a site that loads in 1 second. While a site that loads in 5 seconds experiences 35% fewer page views, a 105% higher bounce rate, and 38% fewer conversions.
  • 8% of people cite slow loading pages as a key reason for abandoning their purchase.
  • 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.
  • 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Here is a nice infographic that illustrates this importance of website speed for dental practices.

Website Loading Time and Your Bottom Line

Impact on appointments made from the website

It is well known fact that slow websites get fewer conversions and the following case studies prove that point.

  • Conversion rate increases 74% when page load time decreases from 8 to 2 seconds (real user monitoring data from 33 major retailers)
  • Aberdeen Group study showed that a one second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions.
  • One guy got an 8.47% conversion rate improvement by moving his landing page onto a faster host.
  • Shopzilla sped up their site by 5 seconds and increased the conversion rate 7-12%.
  • Shaving 2.2 seconds off Mozilla’s landing pages increased download conversions by 15.4%, which they estimate will result in 60 million more Firefox downloads per year.
  • Amazon reported already in 2006 that they got 1% revenue increase for every 100ms of improvement.

Top 7 SEO Scams Every Dentist Should Avoid

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With the growing use of search engines to research local businesses, search engine optimization (SEO) has become necessary for any modern dental practice. Unlike dentistry, marketing and specifically SEO doesn’t require a license or even a degree to prove your qualification. This distinction coupled with the rising demand for SEO has resulted many self-titled ‘SEO Experts’ popping up. Dentists are usually their first target and dental practices across the country receive at least a dozen or so emails, cold calls and direct mail pieces selling SEO. In this post we cover some of the most bizarre claims made by SEOs looking to make quick buck.

SEO Scam Alert

Guaranteed Ranking

This is one of the most common SEO scams and one which Google has specifically warned about in their webmaster guidelines. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google and anyone claiming to do so is obviously lying. Do you really want to do business with liars?

Free SEO Trial

This is one of the more bizarre SEO scams that reeks of desperation. SEO involves a lot of custom work performed separately for each client. Make no mistake SEO is hard work and hard work costs money. It is not a software or asset that you can free access so clients can try it out. No legitimate SEO company would give free trials of their SEO service. However, you can expect to get a free SEO audit or a free consultation.

Secret SEO Strategies

Obviously every SEO company has their own processes and methods which they would not reveal. However, any legitimate SEO firm should be able to outline the work they will perform including activities like keyword research, website changes and link building. If an SEO claims to have some magic trick or secret method that they cannot share, they are most likely using black hat SEO (SEO methods that are against Google Webmaster Guidelines) and can get your website penalized.

Submit Your Website to Thousands of Search Engines

Ok let’s cut the crap here because this claim is the definition of the word scam. If you are dentist in USA, only 3 search engines matter: Google, Yahoo and Bing – so you can ignore the rest. In fact for all practical purposes you can ignore everyone except Google since it is the by far the most popular search engine used by almost 70% of online users in the USA. In short, get your website to rank well in Google and you are good.

1st Page of Google in 48 Hours!

The only way to get your website on first page of Google within hours is using Google Adwords i.e. Google’s PPC advertising program. The funny thing is that anybody can do that by signing up to Google Adwords and following the on screen instructions. This scam works by charging a monthly fee per keyword (usually obscure low quality keywords) and then running PPC ads for those keywords. Some dentists who do not know the difference between Google organic results and ads fall for this fraud.

We know the Google Algorithm

While an understanding of Google’s algorithm is necessary for any SEO consultant, nobody knows the Google Algorithm. It is Google’s business secret and one they will protect from the public at all costs. However, through years of experience and testing one can determine some important factors that affect a website’s ranking in a positive/negative manner. This is what SEO education is entails so while this claim is not entirely a scam it is highly misleading.

Now that you know how to avoid SEO scams, how about talking to a legitimate dental SEO company?

How Long Does Dental SEO Take to Produce Results

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Many dentists have unrealistic expectations from SEO which often leaves them disappointed when they do not see immediate improvement in their website traffic. This is partly down to lack of SEO knowledge and partly due to false advertising by some SEO companies that guarantee to rank your website in X days. In this post we attempt to answer one of the most common SEO questions posed by dentists – How long will it take to see results from SEO?
Realistic SEO Results

Unrealistic SEO Results

SEO produces a nonlinear improvement in search traffic over time as illustrated in the diagram above. It is unrealistic to expect continuous improvement in website traffic starting from day 1 of your SEO campaign. SEO is a long term investment into your website and therefore you must set your expectations accordingly. If you need new patients quickly, SEO is the wrong choice and you should look into PPC advertising.

Why are SEO Results Nonlinear

It is important for dentists to understand how a typical SEO campaign progresses and why it produces nonlinear results.

SEO Work Takes Effect Only After Google Updates its Index

Any onsite changes, new pages published, inbound links built do not improve your website’s ranking till Google has crawled those pages and updated their index. Nobody can control the crawl rate, depth and frequency of their website and back-links pointing to it as Google explains on their search console help

“Our crawl process is algorithmic; computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.”

This means that after making SEO improvements you have to wait until those changes have been indexed before you see any improvement in ranking and traffic. This is why it takes 1-3 months of SEO work before you can see any improvement traffic.

Click Through Rate of Organic Listings is Nonlinear

Most people who search on google do not go past the first page and click a result or ad on the first page. In fact majority of traffic goes to the top 5 spots. A 2014 study done by Advanced Web Ranking revealed that on average, 71.33% of searches result in a page one organic click. Page two and three get only 5.59% of the clicks. On the first page alone, the first 5 results account for 67.60% of all the clicks and the results from 6 to 10 account for only 3.73%.

Google Organic CTR

This means that improving your website ranking from page 10 to page 2 will not give any traffic increase even though it takes up a lot of SEO work and sweat. At the same time, just moving your website from 3rd spot to 1st spot in organic results will triple your traffic from that keywords. This explains why SEO traffic improves very slowly (as your website moves up to page 1) and then experience a sudden increase (as your website moves up from bottom of page 1 to the top).

Conclusion

I hope this post has helped you understand the dynamics of SEO and why you cannot expect immediate, continuous improvement in organic search traffic. If you have any questions or want to discuss SEO for your dental office, please request a free consultation.

5 Reasons Why Every Dentist Should Use Call Tracking

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Most patients who want to book an appointment or request more information end up calling the dentist even if they have already visited their website or read their brochure. Talking over the phone gives patients more reliable information quickly, making phone calls the primary source of patients for dental offices. In short, calls from prospective and existing patients is what keeps a dental practice running. Therefore, finding out how these callers are learning about your services is vitally important to the success and growth of your dental practice. In this post we present five more reasons to track calls to your dental office.

call tracking for dentists

Track Campaign Performance

Since calls are the primary source of patients and appointment bookings, you can use the volume and quality of calls to assess campaign performance. By tracking the number of calls you can objectively determine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in terms of attracting dental patients. A good advertising campaign would drive a high volume of calls at a low cost per call. Without call tracking there would be no way to know if an advertising campaign is meeting your marketing goals.

Compare Different Marketing Campaigns

dental marketing call trackingBy tracking and recording inbound calls you can compare the performance of different advertising campaigns, discount offers and marketing channels. This information will help you make better use of your marketing budget by cutting spend on low performers and increasing spend of high performing campaigns.

 

e.g. A dentist spent $1000 on a radio ad that brought in 5 calls and $4000 on a direct mail that brought in 40 calls using the same promotional offer. With this information, we can see that direct mail is more effective than the radio ad. Therefore, next month this dentist can save the money on the radio ad continue with the direct mail campaign.

Optimize Campaign

Another benefit of call tracking is the ability to modify your ads, positing, promotional offers and marketing message to optimize the campaign performance. This way you can improve your campaign results over time through trial and error.

e.g. A dentist spent $1000 on a radio ad that brought in 5 calls and $4000 on a direct mail that brought in 40 calls using the same promotional offer. Next month he tries a different message and promotional offer on the radio ad which results in 10 calls for the $1000 radio ad.

Improve Call Handling

Call recording is one of the most overlooked aspects of call tracking. Call recording helps you identify issues in phone answering, which can then be corrected through training. Better call handling, will increase the production of your dental practice drastically.

e.g. A dental office gets 100 calls per month and which results in 30 patients per month. This means the receptions are able to convert 30% of all calls or in other words 70% of callers do not convert! Now imagine if this office improves call handling to convert 40% of all inbound calls. This would give them an extra 10 patients per month without any increase in their marketing budget.

Call Volume is Set to Increase

The volume of calls received by dental offices are set to increase several folds in the coming years. This is because mobile devices are replacing desktops and laptops very quickly. As a result, a growing number of consumers are now researching local businesses on their mobile phones which naturally favors calling over filling out contact forms. Therefore, call tracking will become even more important in the future.