The most effective marketing strategy for dental practices is search engine organization (SEO) and search engine marketing. Read our article to learn more about why you should hire a dental SEO expert to increase new patient acquisition, or visit www.kairos-dental.com for the original article.
As a dentist with your own practice, you're no stranger to hard work. You've spent years learning everything you can to practice dental medicine. You invested in a great website. So why aren't the patients steadily flowing into your clinic?
Unfortunately, this is a common problem among both seasoned dental practices and those just starting out. However, the question is easily answered with another question: how visible is your practice on Google?
There's a long-winded explanation for why local search (and SEO) is one of the best options for your practice to scale sustainably. It involves a lot of digital marketing concepts, like organic traffic, link building, website visitors, and bounce rates.
But first, consider these facts:
– 80% of patients find their healthcare provider from an online search.
– 63% of patients will choose one healthcare provider over another because of a stronger online presence.
– 90% of patients over age 60 will choose a different provider if they don't like the reviews or the website.
The simple truth is that most patients will find your practice in the search results of an online query on Google's search engine. Traditional marketing, paid advertisements, and social media hardly compare to the kind of results that a solid dental SEO marketing strategy can bring to your practice.
If you've already invested in an SEO company but you didn't feel like you see results, there may be a few reasons why. Maybe you signed with a large, national agency that boasted great reviews on their website, but you never saw any noticeable increase in your site's visibility. This could be because the content quality wasn't where it needed to be for you to see those great results. Google can tell when your content is written just for SEO, and not for readers -- and it will not promote your dental website in the search engine rankings if the algorithm doesn't show any value for humans within the content.
For truly great results, you need to have great content: blogs and information that is easily readable, attentive to your patients' questions, provides value -- and yes, optimized for SEO.
You may also need a new website. A good rule of thumb is that your site should be refreshed and updated every 7 to 10 years. This will help your online presence keep up with most up-to-date, modern design trends and requirements, and optimize user experience. You also need a mobile friendly website. People make health-related searches more than any other type of search, and 62% of Americans are using their phones to find the answers to their questions. If your website is out of date, or if it's not mobile responsive (meaning that it's usable on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets), you may be missing out on a lot of patients.
A full-service dental marketing agency should be able to build a high quality website, while keeping on-page SEO in mind throughout the website design process. Ideally, each of your dental services offered should have its own corresponding webpage. This will increase your visibility in the search engine, as well as help you measure clicks -- meaning that you'll be able to see which services your potential clients are most interested in.
Search engine optimization is no small task.
First, the dental marketing company will do a full analysis of your website, including:
– Your keywords
– Your current website ranking and online visibility
– Your website analytics, including Google Analytics, call analytics, bounce rates, site visitors, and more.
– Your backlinks, internal links and hyperlinks, anchor text, and more.
And then, armed with a comprehensive report and a lot of data, the SEO company will start planning your marketing strategy. It may take some time for the SEO experts to conduct keyword research, but once they do, you're off to the races! Finding the right keywords is everything. You need a high volume keyword, with a low difficulty rating for the best results. Then, content marketing becomes the key.
The goal of content marketing is to produce high-quality website content in the form of blogs, service descriptions, or infographics. You want the copywriting to target keywords so that the AI (artificial intelligence) in search engines like Google promote your website's authority, and distributes your site in the organic results.
But your website content shouldn't only focus on search engines! You MUST be publishing high quality content. Potential clients that find your dental blog should truly find it informational. As the dental patients spend more time on the blog, and even browse other website content, Google will recognize your website's authority, and continue to increase the website ranking in the search engine results pages.
This next part is very important: after the initial search engine marketing strategy begins, your SEO must be continuously maintained.
Because search engine marketing is a long-term game, you may not see results overnight. And because search engines like Google are constantly updating their search algorithm, your dental SEO company needs to continuously monitor the dental website's keywords, analytics, rankings, and site authority. If you pause your SEO marketing campaign for too long, there's a chance you could lose all of your progress and have to start over from scratch.
Although, technically, you could run your dental practice's blog on your own, you'll be able to scale much more quickly if you hire an SEO service provider. Hiring a dental SEO expert in-house, or even outsourcing to a dental SEO company means that you can spend less time monitoring all of these important ranking factors, and spend more time scaling your dental practice to accommodate your new patients.
When your dental practice is visible in the search engine results, you're reaching more potential patients and increasing your new patient acquisition. Dental offices that prioritize their online reputation earn brand recognition, and receive passive leads in the form of online inquiries. According to some studies, search engine optimization is so important that "without expert dental SEO services, you're most likely missing around 94% of your target market."
Although it's likely that you'll need to hire a dental SEO expert to achieve noticeable results, the return on investment (or ROI) for search engine marketing efforts is invaluable. The passive lead generation allows you to scale your dental practice's growth as much as you like!
Because the benefits of dental SEO services are so great once your marketing efforts have paid off, it's important to make sure your dental practice is ready for growth. It doesn't matter how much your new dental patients increase if you're not prepared to hire more staff or provide high quality service for your patients.
It's also important to keep in mind that you require high quality content to really see results. Continuously auditing your dental website, conducting new keyword research every month, staying up-to-date on search engine algorithms, optimizing existing content and creating keyword-focused, thoughtful blogs is a lengthy and time consuming process. You'll get much better results from an SEO expert than from someone that promises to do all of these things for half of what a reputable dental SEO company would charge.
When you're considering signing a contract with a dental SEO expert or a dental marketing agency, it's important to be very clear about what your exact goals are. SEO can be difficult to measure, so you need to partner with an agency that gives you a clear outline on what to expect, and when.
The best way to do this is to have a direct conversation with your SEO agency. Talk about your goals for your dental service. Are you looking for a higher ranking in the search results, and an increase in organic traffic to your website? How much additional revenue do you want to take on? How many additional patients would you like to see each month? What is your best case scenario for this partnership?
Because search engine marketing campaigns can be one of the most difficult to measure, it's absolutely essential that your relationship with your marketing expert is built on trust. It's also important to keep in mind that SEO is like playing a long game. Results may not appear overnight, but with consistent effort and the use of effective techniques, you can increase your practice's online visibility and see a tangible return on investment.
While every practice should develop their own marketing plan, it's important for you to conduct a cost benefit analysis for your dental business. You may ask yourself questions like:
– Am I prepared for growth? Are my dental team members prepared to take on more work?
– Are my current dental patients satisfied with my services? Do I have good feedback on review sites?
– If my website is outdated and damages my authority, am I open to updating it?
– Is my marketing budget able to accommodate paying for this service monthly?
Unfortunately, SEO efforts won't help every dental practice grow. For instance, if you have an excellent website with top current rankings in organic search results, but an average review of less than 3 stars, your practice may not grow even as your online visibility increases.
Even with an effective internet marketing strategy and an excellent website, quality service must be a priority.
However, for dental practices with a well-designed website, an average of 4+ stars on review sites, and the ability to scale their services and team members, SEO is one of the best investments you can make. It's a relatively low-cost form of online advertising, it's generally an effective marketing tactic.
Again, consider the statistics we first mentioned – where 80% of patients choose their healthcare provider from an online search, and 90% of patients will look for a different healthcare provider if the practice has poor reviews. Most research on consumer search habits point to SEO being a worthwhile investment for your dental practice.
If you're looking for a dental SEO expert of your own practice, I'd really like to suggest Kairos Dental.
Kairos Dental is a marketing agency that specializes SEO for dental practices. They know the market, they have proven that their methods result in huge increases in online visibility for their clients. For a limited time, they're offering $100 credit to new clients. To check out more or to have a free consultation, click the link below to learn more:
