9 Digital Marketing Strategies for Dentists
As a dentist, you know that you want to have a full schedule of patients. You want a steady stream of new patients coming in so that you can have a full schedule and have a profitable bottom line.
Getting new patients for dentists used to be as simple as putting out a sign on the street and getting an advertisement in the Yellow Pages and maybe some newspaper advertising when you first start a practice.
The internet has changed all that. Yellow pages and the newspaper have lost most of their influence. And now there are so many options, it can be hard to know exactly what to do.
Local SEO
Directory Listings and Social Media
Directory Listings
There’s 1000s of directories out there today, but there are probably about 50 general business directories that you need to make sure you are listed on, plus some additional dental specific directories. Your directory listings need to have information aligned, primarily including Name, Address and Phone Number being that essentials that need to be the same.
Having other information, such as hours of operation, business description (don’t forget keywords here), business type and photos can all contribute to how search engines view the value of your dental website. There are services that can help you with this on a monthly basis or a one-time basis.
Social Media
Having social media accounts that have some regular activity can have a positive impact on your SEO rankings
Directory Listings and Social Media
Directory Listings
There’s 1000s of directories out there today, but there are probably about 50 general business directories that you need to make sure you are listed on, plus some additional dental specific directories. Your directory listings need to have information aligned, primarily including Name, Address and Phone Number being that essentials that need to be the same.
Having other information, such as hours of operation, business description (don’t forget keywords here), business type and photos can all contribute to how search engines view the value of your dental website. There are services that can help you with this on a monthly basis or a one-time basis.
Social Media
Having social media accounts that have some regular activity can have a positive impact on your SEO rankings
Review Promotion and Management
Reviews have become very important for dental practices for two main reasons:
Reviews are used to determine a buying decision.
Reviews impact your local SEO rankings.
Reviews Impact Buying Decisions
Reviews are used by people shopping for a new dentist to determine if your practice is a good one.
The reviews on your website are helpful, but independent reviews on independent review sites, like Google My Business, Facebook, and Yelp are considered to be more trustworthy than what’s on your website.
Reviews Impact Local SEO Rankings
Reviews are a significant ranking factor by Search Engines to determine how your website should be ranked in your area.
More Reviews is Better than Fewer
If you have lots of good reviews, that is more helpful than if you only have a few. The more reviews you have, the more Google considers you to be relevant.
What About Bad Reviews
Please note that having a few bad reviews doesn’t destroy your reputation. Most people expect that not everyone is going to be 100% happy with what you offer. The key is that normally, people who are unhappy are likely to put a bad review about you without any prompting. People who are happy with you are way more likely to give a review if you just ask.
That means you should ask people to give you reviews. And while you are at it, you should monitor for all reviews so you can respond to the reviews whether they are good or bad.
There’s ways to promote and manage your reviews. You can read about our Reputation Management and Marketing offering. Also, if you are like many dentists, you are very concerned about negative reviews.
Your Website
Quality, Buyer Oriented Content
The content on your website needs to be what your visitors are use in their buying process. You content can’t be geared for other dentists. In needs to be written for non-technical people and what they are looking for from a dentist.
There’s a buying process people have when considering a dentist. It’s usually something like this:
- They want to confirm you are in their area, so they need to see clearly that you are in the area via phone number, city name and map.
- They want to confirm you have the service they are looking for, so the dental services need to be easy to find.
- They want to get be confident that you are good, so they want to see come testimonials.
- They want to confirm you are qualified, so having icons of your certifications, memberships, etc. is a good idea.
Pictures of Your People and Your Office
You can build a pretty good website with stock photos, however, having photos of you, your team and office gives a great feel of authenticity to a prospective patient. Pictures help them to feel comfortable about who you are and what they are going to get when they visit your practice.
On Page SEO
The content and the technical structure on your website impact how well Google ranks your website.
More content is better
500 words a page is OK. 800 words a page is better. Having 10 pages is good. Having 30 pages is really good.
Having keywords
The words that people put into Google for searching for dentists and dental services is important for helping Google to rank you.
The techy stuff
There are things like rich snippets and meta data that needs to be filled out properly.
For some of this stuff you really need someone with the technical knowledge to do it for you. If you don’t have a website, you want to make sure that whoever develops it, does do significant on page SEO. If you already have a website developed, you may want to have your website audited to see how well the onpage SEO is.
Advertising
Advertising on Google
There are many different ways to advertise online. For this section, we are focusing on two of the best known ways for online ads: Google Search Ads and Google Display Ads.
Google AdWords
When you do a search on Google for something, usually about the first 4 things you see, have a small green box with “AD” in the middle. Those are Google Search Advertisements, otherwise known as Google AdWords. There is no cost to have the advertisement shown in the search results. You do pay when someone clicks on them. The cost of the click could be .50 or $150. It all depends on demand.
Google AdWords can be a great way to drive traffic to your website fast. It is tricky to do it right though. Not selecting the right keywords (search terms) can prove costly. Also, getting people to your site is not the main objective. It’s getting people to schedule an appointment. That means if you don’t have a professionally designed website that gets people to call for an appointment, you could be spending a lot of money on AdWords with very little return.
Google Display Advertising
Display ads are advertisements that are graphical in nature. They are often square graphical ads at the side of a website or a banner ad which is long and goes across a website. The types of website that these appear in are selected by you. The cost for these is pay per impression. That means that every time it is shown, you pay for it. The average cost for impressions is about $28 per 1000 impressions.
Google Display Advertising can be a great way to reach people who aren’t looking for a dentist or dental services right now, but could be soon. The return on investment of this kind of advertising needs to be tracked and managed to ensure that you are getting return for your investment.
If you are choosing to spend a very small amount on advertising in Google (or other alternatives that are similar), it’s OK to experiment with small amounts of money without having experienced management. When the dollars get larger (starting at 300-400), we highly recommend getting some management of your advertising to maximize the number of new patients you can get.
Remarketing
Everyone knows what remarketing is. Most people just don’t know it by name. Remarketing is when you visit a website and then you keep seeing an advertisement for that website on other websites. Some people find this a touch creepy, but it can be very effective.
Here’s where it’s great. It costs a lot of money to get people to your website. People don’t always make a phone call when they look at your website the first time. In fact, they might look at a bunch of different dentist websites and then get distracted on something else.
Having remarketing in place means that your dental practice will be top of mind for your prospective patients. And the good news is that the investment for this is pretty small too. A small start-up fee, plus about 100-200 per month.
Facebook Ads
There’s lots of opportunity to advertise with Facebook. You can place advertisements. You can pay to promote posts. One of the interesting options for promoting on Facebook, is to post a review you’ve recently received and then promote it.
Allows promotion of services people may consider but aren’t looking for now
While Facebook isn’t normally for people who are looking for dental services right now, the demographic market that you choose to go after can be very targeted, allowing you to reach a very specific demographic.
With a very small cost for start up, a monthly budget of $100-400 can produce results.
What Now?
There’s all kinds of different options that a dentist can do to increase new patients flowing into your practice. You now need to select what’s best for you.
Consider how a new patient decides on a new dentist. What is there buying process? What’s the best way to reach them? Is your website done well enough so that visitors will choose you over other practices in your area? Are people able to find your practice on Google?
Getting an experienced digital marketing agency is often the best place to start. Contact Elevate99 and we will show you how you can get more patients for your practice.