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Top 7 SEO Scams Every Dentist Should Avoid

December 20, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

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.

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 to Create a Great Slogan for Your Dental Practice

December 17, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

With a plethora of dentists competing for a patients attention through various forms of dental marketing (TV, radio, websites, social media, magazines, coupons, workplace referrals and more), you must up your game to become successful. Most patients think that all dentists are the same since only a few dental practices are able to establish their brand and make themselves stand out. Having a catchy, memorable slogan will help your dental office distinguish itself from others to dominate your local market. But how do you create a great tagline? This is exactly what we attempt to answer in this post.

Keep it Short

Keep your dental office slogan under 10 words. Anything too long will make it impossible to use anywhere with your logo. While you must keep your tagline short, you must also ensure that it is complete and anyone reading it should be able to tell that you provide dentistry service without any additional information.

Brand Consistency is Key

If you have a paediatric dentistry then your slogan must be related to kids and speak to their parents. If you want to attract high end clients, then your tagline should speak to the wealthy. The point being that brand consistency should be maintained when creating a slogan to attract the right patients. For example, Invisalign’s tagline positions it as a transparent alternative to metallic braces.

Focus on Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

At the end of the day, a tag-line is simply another opportunity to tell people what makes your dental practice different from the rest. For example, Crossoak Family Dentistry uses the slogan “We cater to cowards” with a big chicken on its website. Try to incorporate your primary unique selling point in your slogan.

Get Input from Patients

Short-list 5-6 slogan ideas and create a poll on your Facebook page to see what your fans think. Ask for some suggestions from your patients and announce a prize for the one who comes up with the best tag-line for your dental office. You could also personally approach a few loyal patients for their suggestions. Those are some ways to get feedback and advice from the target audience itself i.e. dental patients.

Say It Out Loud

Once you have a few ideas, say them out loud to hear how they sound. Try putting emphasis on different words and inserting punctuation to see how it changes the sound and meaning of your slogan.

Before finalizing a tagline, you will need to see if another business is already using it. If you’re in the U.S., you can run a trademark check through the USPTO. If you’re located in another country, check for availability with your government.

How to Get More Online Reviews for Your Dental Practice

December 15, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

According to a 2012 survey by SearchEngineLand, almost three-quarters of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. The year 2016 is almost upon us and if you are still ignoring online reviews then you better wake up. In this article we explain how you can get more of your dental patients to give online reviews.

Get Listed on Local Business Directories

Make sure your practice is listed on as many third-party sites as possible so that patients can find you on their favorite website if they feel like writing a review. This will get you some reviews organically over time i.e. without specially asking patients.

Add Review Links/Buttons on Your Websites

Your website is where patients go to when they need information about your office. By having review buttons on prominent places you can direct some of these patients to third-party sites to write a review on your local listing. You can also create a separate page on your website where links to all your local listings and 3rd party sites are available. Then link to this page from prominent places on your website.

Distribute Handout

Prepare step-by-step instructions for writing a review on various sites e.g. (google+, yelp, angeslist etc.) on a one-sided handout. Then prepare copies of these handouts and distribute them to patients visiting your office. Make sure you only request a review from patients who have been visiting your office for several years as they are more likely to post a positive review.

Personal eMail

In addition to giving instructions in hard copy, you can send them the review link and instructions by email. Although it may be a problem for senior patients who do not use email, it will be easier and preferable for most patients to get the review links and instructions via email.

Phone Call

Almost every dental patient uses a phone. You can hand pick 20 odd patients and call them personally asking for a review. Also give them review instructions handout as well as a personal follow up email. This will increase your chances of getting a review.

Social Media Request

Ask your fans and followers on facebook and twitter to post a review by giving them a review link in your status or post. The good thing is that you can do this at least once a month and just collecting 2 reviews per month would give your dental office 24 reviews by the end of the year.

Ask Reviewers to Write on Another Site

If you know that a certain patient has given your dental practice a positive review, you can request them to review your dental office on a another website. You can ask them again after 5-6 months to post their feedback on another website and then another after a year. This way you can populate several of your local listings with positive reviews coming from a single patient.

7 Tips to Get More Dental Patients with Facebook Ads

December 14, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

Facebook Advertising is a great to way to promote your dental office online and get generate new patients at a reasonable cost. However, the Facebook ad platform can be very confusing for a first time user and you can waste a lot of money testing strategies that do no work. In this post we share some useful tips to help you get a jump-start on your Facebook advertising campaigns.

Create a Special Offer

Facebook is a social network where people log in to keep in touch with their friends, play games, join communities, share pictures and comment on them. Buying stuff is the last thing they have in mind. Therefore, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. This means your ad must be powerful enough to distract a user from their usual activity on Facebook. One of the best ways to make your advertising powerful is to create a discount offer. Ideally, your special offer should be unique and available for a limited time/quantity so that people are compelled to take immediate action else risk losing the discount. Special offers are the secret behind the most successful Facebook ad campaigns.

Use News-feed Ads

Facebook offer several different ad formats but the best ad format by far is definitely news-feed ads. The news-feed format is any sponsored content that appears in a user’s Facebook timeline and is therefore hard not to notice. News-feed ads work equally well on all devices and thus should be your main focus.

Refine Your Audience Targeting

In order to get the best ROI from Facebook, you must show your ad to qualified users only i.e. people who may be interested in your dental offer. Facebook allows you to target user using any of their many targeting options.

Custom Audience: Use email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs to create and save audiences you’d like to show your ads to. Learn more about Custom Audiences.

Location, Age, Gender and Language: Choose the basic demographics of the audience you want to reach.

Interests: Choose specific interests that are important to your audience. These are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

Behaviors: Select people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more. These behaviors are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

More Categories: Select people based on any Facebook or partner categories you’ve requested access to. Keep in mind that some data is only available to advertisers in the U.S.

Connections: Select your audience based on whether or not they’re connected to any of your Pages, apps or events. Anyone who has a friend connected to what you’re advertising will see their friend included in your ad. This can increase the likelihood that they’ll find your ad relevant enough to click on or engage with it.

Using these targeting criteria you have to create 3-4 different audiences that would be most likely to be interested in visiting a dentist. For e.g. a demographic you could target is moms aged 25-45 who like Delta Dental Facebook page and reside in the same zip code as your dental office. Another target audience could be males/females aged 25-55 who have recently moved into your town or zip code.

Use Before and After Images

As mentioned earlier, Facebook ads is a form of disruptive advertising. Therefore you must use images that grab the user’s attention as they are their news-feed content. Before and after images are perfect for attracting attention from prospective dental patients who may be suffering from a similar dental problem. For instance a teeth whitening ad could use a before and after treatment photo of your patient’s mile demonstrating the effectiveness of the treatment. The image would captivate the attention of users who also have yellow teeth and want to whiten them. They would definitely take your offer more seriously than if there was no before after photo in the ad.

Use Facebook Re-marketing Ads

Facebook Remarketing allows you to re-target visitors who left your website without completing a conversion action (such as appointment for submission or call or brochure download). These users will be tagged with a special cookie and will be shown your ad when they log in to their Facebook account. You can use remarketing to pitch a different offer or different price point to convert visitors who did not convert with the initial offer.

Use CPC Bidding and Conversion Tracking

Facebook offers its users the option to either pay for clicks using CPC bids or pay for impressions using CPM bids. For the most part you should avoid CPM bidding until you have found an incredible offer and matching audience. You must also use Facebook conversion tracking in all your campaigns to compare results of different offers and audiences. You can then pause campaigns that results in a high cost per patient acquisition and reallocate that budget to campaigns that produce a high conversion rate.

Use Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are the missing piece in many under-performing Facebook campaigns. Each offer should have a different landing page that is optimized for conversions (calls or form submits). You should use different landing pages for computers and mobile devices because user behavior on the two devices is quite different. e.g. forms with several fields do not work very well on mobile devices and should be avoided on mobile landing pages.

Try to look at some competitor landing pages to get an idea of what is working and then add some of your own ideas to come up with different designs that can then be A/B tested with the offer to optimize the conversion rate of your Facebook ad campaigns.

My Dental Office Received a Negative Review! Now What?

December 11, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

So you logged into Yelp, Google+ or another review site and found that somebody has left bad review on your listing. This is a common occurrence which every dentist would experience at least once in their professional career. But what do you do next? There is no need to panic because this post addresses that exact question.

Ignore Completely

The most obvious thing you can do is not do anything. If you already have dozens of positive review on your profile, a couple of negative reviews will not affect your overall rating. In fact they may even make your rating more legitimate. Let’s be honest, it is rare for a dental office to get perfect 5 star rating from all its patients. Thus if you already have a high number of positive reviews, you can ignore a few bad reviews. They will make your ratings appear more natural and legitimate to a prospective dental patient.

Contact the Website

If you believe the review is unwarranted, malicious or mistaken, you can request the website authorities to take manual action. Most local business directories allow businesses to flag suspicious reviews posted on their profile. They may request the review poster for proof of payment like a billing receipt and if the review was found to be fake, you will be able to have it removed from your listing. This is not easy as it sounds because the process can take a long and is often unsuccessful. However, if you have the time and patience to go back and forth with the website authorities, you can get fake negative reviews removed.

Respond Politely

Replying to negative reviews correctly can neutralize the damage done by them. At the same time, a bad reply can make you look defensive and immature. Some patients are genuinely angry or hurt and responding to their review no matter how politely could provoke them even further. They may take your response personal and become vengeful – posting bad reviews on your other local listings. Ignoring such reviews is recommended.

The first thing you must do in your reply is to acknowledge the problem. Whether it was the waiting time, cancelled appointment, billing issue, quality of dental work or anything else, make sure you identify the problem and explain how your dental office minimizes such incidents. Next try to reconcile the with the patient by suggesting a full/partial refund or free/discounted corrective treatment or a free consultation. Try to keep your reply brief and too the point using a polite, diplomatic tone. The aim should be to take the issue offline so that you can resolve the issue without heading into a back and forth argument on your local listing.

Website Architecture: How to Structure Your Dental Website

December 9, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

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.