Modern Dental Practice Marketing

A recent study by MerchantCircle/Reply.com surveyed 2500 small business and found that if owners could invest in just one type of marketing, it would be SEO. To dentists in private practice, this study sheds light on where to spend marketing dollars in 2012.

The Statistics

In the survey, nearly one-third of responding small business owners chose SEO as the number-one place to invest marketing dollars. Almost 20% selected traditional media, including newspaper, direct mail, radio, phone book, etc. Another 17% said “none of the above,” social media came in 16%, paid search got almost 10%, and mobile marketing and advertising claimed 3.7%.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, a strategy intended to make websites rank high on search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc. Google now holds over 90% of the search engine market, and over 95% of the mobile search market, so small business owners should aim their SEO strategy to please Google. Read the rest of this entry →

Black Hat Tactics
As with anything in life, there are ways to cheat when it comes to SEO. For instance, you could hide keywords in your website by making the text the same color as the background. You could pay for links to your website from content that’s really irrelevant – just so you get more incoming links. You could stuff your content with keywords that aren’t really relevant to the information you provide or are complete overkill, diluting the quality of your content. All of these black hat tactics have killed website rankings for businesses large and small.

Blacklisting
If you think you’re exempt from Google’s rules, think again. Google blacklisted retail giant JCPenney early this year because of black hat tactics with linking. Blacklisting means that Google literally stops indexing your site, so your site no longer shows up anywhere on Google. You’re basically dead to Google. Read the rest of this entry →

Are you puzzled by blogging and branding? Wondering how marketing evolved from Yellow Pages ads to search engine optimization? You aren’t the only one. The marketing world has changed dramatically in the past decade! But there’s hope. You can get on the modern marketing bandwagon and bring in new patients.

Just this evening, CBSNews.com released an article about blogging. In it, Robert Pagliarini provides “7 rules of successful bloggers.” I want to take Paliarini’s tips and evaluate how they relate to dentists and dental blogging.

We’re told to create valuable content. What is valuable, when it comes to content? That depends on who you are. To a potential patient searching for a dentist or an answer to a question, interesting information not found elsewhere online would be valuable. To a dentist, a blog that ranks high on Google would be valuable. To Google, a blog that’s original and informative would be valuable. So, ideally, a valuable dental blog has unique, informative content that’s keyword rich and well optimized. When this formula is used, everyone wins.

Focus on a niche and identify popular markets are tips two and three. Obviously, the niche for a dental blog is dentistry. However, you can be more specific. Perhaps your blog should be about sleep apnea, Invisalign, cosmetic dentistry, or sedation. Many of our clients have two or more blogs. This allows them to focus on general dentistry to attract bread-and-butter patients, as well as a specific treatment that they find profitable and enjoyable. Before you blog, consider which procedures or ideas (holistic, biomimetic, systemic health, for example) are most important to you. Read the rest of this entry →

Part 1: HIGH QUALITY DENTAL CONTENT

Over the past few weeks, I’ve harped a bit on what Google wants from dentists when it comes to Internet marketing. If you give Google what it wants, you’ll get what you want from your Internet marketing strategy: higher rankings, which translates into more new patients. The bottom line is: Google wants high-quality content.

What is high-quality content? It’s original text, which means that the words that are not found on any other website that’s indexed by Google.

Website Content
Your website should have about 20 pages or more (the more the better), all with original content. That content should be keyword rich and include headings (H1s and H2s) with keywords. Every service needs its own unique page; don’t list all services on one page, but instead, flesh out a three to five paragraph description for each service on its own page. Page text should include keyword-rich subheadings (H2s).

Links
Your website text needs hyperlinks to related pages on your site. The hyperlinks should be embedded on keywords. For instance, you might link “contact our Detroit dentist office” on a service page to your website’s contact page. For usability, open external links in a new tab. You don’t want to send a visitor to an outside website and close your site; instead, you want your site to remain open, and the outside site should open in a new tab. As for images, you can link images to related content, as well. A good idea is to link images to related posts on your blogsite.

ALT Image Tags
All of the photos on your website should have an ALT image tag so that search engine spiders can tell what the photo is. Spiders can’t read images, just text and tags. Read the rest of this entry →

1. Your site has duplicate content: If your site has the same text that’s on other websites, Google will frown. To see if your website content is duplicated elsewhere on the web, cut and paste a paragraph from one of your services pages into Google search. You’ll see that the results show similar or duplicate content in bold font. If your blog has duplicate content, it’s the same deal. The whole premise of Modern Dental Practice Marketing is to provide original content for dental websites and blogs. Our dental copywriters understand writing, dentistry, and search engine optimization.
2. Your domain is in its infancy: Domains (website names) that have been stocked with good, original content for years have an advantage over new domains. When you re-do your website, put it on the same domain it formerly held. Also, purchase your website domain for 10 years, not just one year. Google smiles upon your intention to sustain your business website for a decade.
3. Your metatags are poor or don’t exist: If your site does not have good, quality metatags (title tags, descriptions, keywords), it’s not optimized. Google doesn’t read meta keywords any longer, but Bing and Yahoo do, so I recommend you have all three. It certainly can’t hurt! If you aren’t sure whether your metatags are sufficient, call Jill at Modern Dental Practice Marketing. She’ll look at your tags and let you know what’s going on in your code. Metatags are like a site synopsis for Google bots (spiders). Read the rest of this entry →