Dental Marketing Direct

Digital Marketing for Dental Offices

Search Engine Optimization

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.

Website Architecture: How to Structure Your Dental Website

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Before hiring a website design company, you should develop a sitemap to get an idea of how many pages you need and what purpose each page will serve. This will help streamline the web development process, reduce the number of revisions and ensure a faster launch. In this article, we discuss how to plan your dental website to improve SEO and deliver a positive user experience.

dental website layout
Website Pages Organized into Main Sections & Subsections.

Default pages

These pages should be present on any website and the website would be incomplete without them. This includes About, FAQ, Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The about page can be further expanded to create an About Us section that covers your dental office in detail. Here is an example of what a typical About Us section may include

About – An overview of the dental office including some history and services offered.

  • Meet the dentist(s) – An about page for the dentist to discuss their education, experience, achievements etc.
  • Our Staff – A page introducing your staff to prospective patients
  • Vision/Mission – A page for your vision/mission statement
  • Awards/Honors – A page to display the awards, achievements and honors won by your dental office
  • Media/Press – A page to publish press and media mentions

Treatment Procedures

Take some time to think and list down the services and procedures offered at your dental office. Then group the related procedures together into categories making sure you do not leave anything out. Each category represents a separate section on your website so make sure you assign the most suitable category to each procedure. Here is what your procedure list may look like

Cosmetic/Restorative Dentistry

  • Porcelain Veneers
  • Snap on Smile
  • Teeth Whitening
  • Clear Braces
  • White Restorations
  • Dental Implants
  • Prepless Veneers
  • Porcelain Crowns
  • Six Month Smiles
  • Cosmetic Recontouring
  • Cosmetic Bonding
  • Bridge Restorations
  • Onlays/Inlays

Endodontics

  • Root Canal Retreatment
  • Cracked Tooth
  • Root Amputation
  • Apicoectomy

Prosthetics

  • Snap on Smile
  • Implant-supported Dentures
  • Traditional Dentures
  • Permanant Dentures

Orthodontics

  • Clear Correct
  • Six Month Smiles

Dental Fillings

  • Air Abrasion Fillings
  • Tooth-Colored Fillings
  • Silver Filling Removal

Preventative and General Dentistry

  • Oral Cancer Screenings
  • Oral DNA Testing
  • Fluoride Treatments
  • Cleanings
  • Digital X-Rays
  • Scaling and Root Planing
  • Laser Periodontal Treatments

Sedation Dentistry

  • Oral Conscious Sedation
  • IV Sedation
  • Nitrous Oxide (Laughing Gas)
  • NuCalm

Sleep Apnea and Snoring

  • Sleep Apnea Therapy
  • Snoring Therapy
  • Home Sleep Testing
  • Acoustic Airway Testing

TMJ

  • TMJ Therapy
  • TENS Unit
  • Mouthguards

Each category and procedure page can be used to educate visitors about the treatment and encourage them to call or set an appointment to discuss their options with a dentist.

Reviews

Patient reviews improve your credibility and reputation. Therefore, having a separate section for patient reviews is recommended. In this section you can also include video testimonials, before and after photo gallery. Here is how you can organize your patient reviews

Reviews – list patient reviews and references

  • Video Testimonials
  • Before and After Gallery

Contact

The purpose of the entire website is to get visitors to contact you and therefore the contract page is very important. However, in a dental website a contact page is more than a form and address. You should include location map, driving directions and operating hours. You must also include new patient forms and payment information. Here is how you can structure your contact us section.

Contact us – contact form, address, phone number, operating hours and map

  • Payment and Financing – Payment methods, Financing options, Insurance Plans, payment plan
  • New Patient Forms – Downloadable pdf for new patient forms and office policies

Special Offers

No dental website is completed without a special offers page. This page includes information about the various promotional offers and discounts you have been running to attract new patients. Many websites run special offers in the sidebar. Having a separate page allows you to share the link with prospective patients so they can easily go through all the discount offers.

Home Page

The homepage is the most important page in your dental website since most prospective patients will see this when they find your website. It is important to make a good first impression. Therefore, try to feature the best content and the most important procedures on the homepage.

If you are having trouble brainstorming your website architecture or need help with dental website development, do not hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.

PPC or SEO: An Effective Dental Marketing Plan Uses Both

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When it comes to marketing your dental practice with search engines, you have two options to choose from – SEO or PPC advertising. Both these search engine marketing strategies have their pros and cons. In an earlier post I have discussed the benefits of PPC advertising with Google Adwords. In this post we will go over the benefits of SEO for dentists and then discuss how both SEO and PPC can complement each other to create a solid dental marketing plan.

SEO vs PPC Advertising

Advantages of SEO

The main benefit of SEO is it’s long term residual value in that the work you perform today will continue to deliver results for several months and years into the future. In that sense, SEO is like investing money into the future search traffic of your website. However, like any investment, SEO has a payout period and in case of most local dental websites it would be around 3-6 months before you start seeing significant search traffic resulting from your SEO campaigns.

When compared to PPC advertising, the main benefit of SEO is that it has no per click/visitor fee unlike PPC where you are charged for every click. A PPC campaign is more like a current expense where the money you spend on clicks is gone forever. The moment you stop spending, all the traffic and patients you were getting form the PPC campaign will also stop. Whereas, with SEO, once you obtain good rankings, you can hold them for some time without any spending anything on SEO during that period. Therefore, in the long run say in 12 months period, SEO will have a better ROI than PPC advertising (and most other forms of advertising).

Dental SEO vs PPC ROI
The cost per patient acquisition from PPC advertising remains constant over time while for SEO it reduces with time.

Another benefit SEO enjoys over PPC is that dental patients trust organic results more than PPC ads. This fact has been confirmed through multiple surveys where consumers rate organic results as more credibile than the search ads. Therefore, if you want your practice to appear more trustworthy than another local dental office who ranks well in organic search results, then you need to invest in SEO to compete with them.

Given the above facts, we can safely conclude that SEO is not an option but almost a necessity if you want to consistently generate dental patients online. But what to do with the first 3-4 months of SEO when there is no search traffic. This is where PPC advertising campaign can help fill the gap.

Combining SEO and PPC

Combining PPC with SEO
Start with a PPC campaign and reduce advertising budget as SEO traffic grows

You plan your search marketing strategy to generate a minimum number of new patients per month – let’s assume this target is 30. In the beginning, SEO will not be generating any traffic. Therefore, you have to run a PPC advertising campaign to generate all 30 patients. As your SEO traffic grows over the subsequent months it will start generating new patients. That is when you can start cutting back on your PPC advertising spend since some of the targeted 30 patients/month is now being born by the SEO work. Eventually off course you want to be in a situation where all 30 patients are being generated by SEO alone and you do not need any PPC advertising to meet your external marketing target for new dental patients.

When you have achieved your initial SEO targets, you have two options

A) You stop the PPC campaign and continue investing in SEO. This is perfectly normal and if you are happy with the number of new patients you generate with SEO then so be it. Just remember that a competitor may take your advertising spot.

B) You revise your new patients per month target upwards and continue with the PPC advertising campaign. If you want to get even more new dental patients and cant wait for your website to gain rankings on additional keywords, then PPC advertising is the way to go.

4 Ways to Get Dental Patients from Google without a Website

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The most common way to get traffic form Google is by optimizing your website and getting it ranked on first page of for your target keywords. The other alternative is PPC advertising which can be costly. However, while ranking a website is the best long term strategy for getting search traffic, there are other ‘free’ options available. In this post we discuss 4 methods of getting dental patients from Google Search without ranking your website.

Google My Business Page of Your Dental Office

Your Google My Business Listing is your opportunity to rank in the local 3-pack section of local search results. Make sure you follow Google guidelines and recommended best practices when setting up the Google My Business page for your dental office. Collect some patient reviews, add some relevant content and build citations on local directories and data aggregators. Your Google My Business Page should be ranking on first page of Google soon! An example is shown below.

Google My Business Page Ranking

Dentist Youtube Video

The future of web is Video. But even today video marketing and video content is gaining traction. Youtube (also owned by Google) is the most popular video sharing website in google and popular youtube videos often make there way on the first page of google. Make sure you use your target keywords in the video title, tags and description. Also share the video as much as you can to increase the number of likes and number of embeds. An example of a very competitive dentist keyword with a youtube video ranked on the first page is captured below.

Dentist Video Ranking

You can watch the video here

Local Directory Listing of Your Dental Practice

Local Directory websites like Yelp, Yellowpages and Superpages are great for promoting your dental office online. Similarly dentist review sites like Rate a Dentist, Health Grades and Zoc Doc are also useful for getting new patients. However, with some optimization you can rank your dentist listing on these sites in Google. Specially Yelp and Yellowpages are two websites that are consistently coming up for local dentist related searches. Here is an example of a very competitive keyword.

Dentist Yelp Listing SEO

Here are the links to the 2 yelp profiles seen in the image above

http://www.yelp.com/biz/meyerland-family-dentistry-houston

http://www.yelp.com/biz/bristles-family-dentistry-houston

Dental Office Page on Social Media Sites

Social media marketing is a great way of getting new patients but you can use your facebook business/fan page to rank in google search. Optimize the facebook page as you would optimize your website. That is make sure the page title and description has your target keywords. Publish engaging content on your page and increase the number of likes and followers. Also share your facebook page as much as you can to increase number of followers and back-links from other sites. Here is an example of a dentist ranking their facebook page for a very competitive keyword

Dental Facebook Page SEO

You can visit this facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/MichaelJWeiDDS

Note that there is a yelp listing of another dentist ranking just above this facebook page.

Google My Business Page Best Practices for Dental Offices

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Google is the central hub of all online marketing activities you conduct for your dental practice. In this short guide, we list the best practices you need to follow to optimize your Google My Business profile for better visibility in local search results.

Google My Business

Keep your personal profile separate from local business page

Many dentists still have no idea how to bring their traditional style of business to the online space.

Personal Page is the profile used by the person who owns or manages the Google My Business account, and is generated automatically after a person creates pages on Google My Business. Anyone can create a personal profile on Google+ to interact with their friends on the platform so how will you differentiate between your friends or social network and your patients or followers.

As a dentist, it’s easy to think, “I’m the person my practice is named after, so using this account should be fine.”

No. Never use personal pages to represent your dental office on Google My Business. For that, you need a local business page.

The local business page is what appears on local search results, providing information on reviews, address and contact information. To validate the data on this page, Google My Business requires verification, usually through a letter sent to the official business address or a phone call.

Claiming Ownership

Only business owners or authorized representatives may verify and manage their business information on Google My Business. If you wish to share management access to your local page with others, you can add a manager. Examples of authorized representatives include: a third-party SEO/SEM company; a friend of the business owner; an online ordering, scheduling, or booking provider; and an affiliate network provider.

Before you can start promoting your page, you need to verify that you are in fact the owner of this business. While this verification process protects you from duplicate and bad listings, it can be a headache for dental practices, which have several front-facing people representing the business. Therefore, make sure that all your receptionist/staff know that you are expecting a call or letter from Google.

Make sure the business information is complete and accurate

Name: Your name should reflect your practice’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to patients. Any additional information, when relevant, can be included in other sections of your business information (e.g., “Address”, “Categories”).

Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., “Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters” instead of “Google”) by including marketing taglines, codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g. “Chase ATM in Duane Reade”) is not permitted.

Address: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your office location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable.

Phone Number: Provide a phone number that connects to your dental office as directly as possible. Use a local phone number instead of central, call center helpline number whenever possible. Do not provide phone numbers that redirect to phone numbers other than those of the actual office.

Website: Provide one website that represents your individual office location. Do not provide URLs that redirect users to landing pages other than those of the actual office, including pages created on social media sites.

Choose the most appropriate, specific categories for your dental practice

Categories help your patients find accurate, specific results for services they’re interested in. In order to keep your business information accurate and live, make sure that you:

  1. Use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business from the provided list.
  2. Choose categories that are as specific as possible, but representative of your main business.
  3. Do not use categories solely as keywords or to describe attributes of your business.
  4. Do not use categories that pertain to other businesses that are nearby or related, such as a business physically contained within your business or an entity that contains your business.

Establish a strong, accurate presence on the web

  1. Google improves search results by aggregating information about your dental practice from all over the web. Make sure information about your office on third-party sites (like Yelp.com) is accurate, and try to contact the respective site directly to correct any inaccurate information.
  2. Encourage customers to review your business by clicking “Write a review” on the local Google+ page.

If you need help with optimizing the Google+ Local page of your dental practice, just submit a free consultation request and we will get back to you asap!