My blog #digital marketing

Dental marketing is a process to promote your dental practice; ultimately resulting in your dental practice attracting more new patients as well as keeping hold of your existing ones.

Marketing is key to growing any business and for making that business thrive. Here we look at some of the specifics of dental marketing and offer tips to help you get ahead of the game in dental marketing.

If you want further information on any of these marketing aspects, Dental Design can tell you more and get to work on these on your behalf, just give us a call on 01202 677 277:-

GET INVOLVED IN YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY

Dentists heavily rely on local business, rather than national business, therefore getting involved in your local community and local events is key in promoting your dental services. Maybe you could sponsor a local sports team and provide t-shirts with your logo on the back of them, for example.

Attend local events or festivals and get yourself known in your local community. Other options may be to go into your local school and present a talk about good oral healthcare as we all know that starting young with oral health education is essential.

LEAFLET DROP

Sometimes seen as outdated, but the good old leaflet drop can be effective for dental practices. This is because it is 100% hitting your local target audience. It is advertising a local business for local people. The most effective leaflet would probably include a special offer, such as teeth whitening, or you could include a dental implants offer in an area with a higher ageing population.

HAVE A WELL-DESIGNED WEBSITE

Having a well-designed website with clear ‘calls to action’ is essential. With people being increasingly short of time and wanting ever faster and more efficient technology, the site needs to be easy to navigate and the user must be able to see the telephone number, email and contact form pretty much straight away.

At Dental Design, we design websites that immediately let the user know they are in the right place. They demonstrate clear headlines and well written, straight forward information, which is designed in-line with the specific dental practice and meets their aims and objectives.

MAKE YOUR WEBSITE MOBILE FRIENDLY

According to official Google statements, over 50% of search queries globally are being made on mobiles rather than desktop computers. It is vital in this day and age that your website is mobile friendly.

If your site is not mobile friendly it often loses information on the screen or can’t be seen properly. Plus, if your site is not optimised for mobile use it could take longer to load, which could result in you losing potential patients.

FOCUS ON LOCAL SEO

Search engine optimisation is essential in increasing your website’s visibility in online searches. Without SEO your site will find it hard to stay in the top spot and it will fail to show up for those keywords you want to rank for.

Local keywords such as ‘dentist Cambridge’ or ‘Best Cambridge orthodontist’ are the keywords that will bring you new patients through the door. After all, it isn’t helpful if someone based in London finds your site if your practice is located in Cambridge.

Local SEO helps to attract your target audience and is also great if people use a voice search option like Siri or Alexa asking for a local ‘dentist near me’. We have several ongoing SEO packages to choose from if you want expert help with your SEO.

CONTENT MARKETING

If possible, include content on your website such as blog posts or FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). Blog posts can bring visitors to your site and allows you to build a relationship with the user, which could ultimately result in them turning into a new patient. After all, you would rather visit a dentist that seems to be knowledgeable on the latest treatment techniques and technologies.

Fresh content on your site is also a factor in helping your site to rank higher on Google. However, it is important to have the resources to maintain the blogs as it doesn’t look too good if the blog post was posted over a year ago with no further activity.

PAY PER CLICK (PPC)

PPC is the most targeted online marketing channel and is great for new practices who are just starting up. It has a quick return on investment, so if increasing your patient numbers is one of your major goals, then PPC could be right for you.

PPC allows you to target more than one area, so if you are a practice in a large city or are located between locations this could be very beneficial. It is important to write creative adverts that include obvious ‘call to actions’ promotions and special offers are good to use as these will encourage the user to ‘click’ and visit your website.

Maximum daily budgets can be set to help spread the costs over the month as well as maximum costs per click so that you don’t overspend on a particular keyword.

Dental Design offers reports with all the stats you need to monitor your ad campaigns. We have the expertise and experience in creating and running successful PPC campaigns for dentists and the team here are Qualified in Google AdWords so they can always maintain PPC Best Practice.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media, such as Facebook is great if you want to grow your dental practice. It can help increase new visitors as well as maintaining return visitors. When done correctly, it is a medium, which keeps the conversation alive with its patients.

The key is to post interesting and engaging information and articles on your social channels. You are increasing the trust of your brand, which in turn encourages return custom. We offer either social media training for your team or a fully managed social media service here to help you keep on top in the social world.

REMARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Remarketing is the process of reaching out to existing patients that you already have a connection with and trying to get them to do something specific. This could be to book their 6 month check-up or could even be used to promote new treatments now available in the practice.

APPOINTMENT REMINDERS

Marketing isn’t just about attracting new patients or customers, it is also about maintaining your customer base. Sending appointment reminders or reminders for them to book a 6 month check-up is a good re-engagement method. Emails and text messages are probably the best methods.

NEWSLETTERS

Another form of remarketing could be to use newsletters to be sent to existing patients. These could be blogs delivered straight to an in-box but the key is not to send them too often as they will more than likely get deleted.

It is also important not to make them too wordy. Snippets, useful facts and top tips are always a good start. Make them topics of interest to the patient about the latest dental treatments or new dental technologies, for example.

REFER A FRIEND BONUSES

Bonuses for friend referrals are a great way to attract new patients. You could create a recommend a friend bonus of £10 off their first dental appointment if they sign up to the practice.

A further £10 discount could be given to the friend that recommended them, which could help maintain your existing patient list. You could also consider referral bonuses for specific treatments if you were hoping to promote a specific treatment such as teeth whitening or Invisalign.

GET INTO THE MINDSET OF YOUR PATIENTS

If you can think like the patients you would like to attract to your practice, then you will have a better chance of attracting them. Think about which local events they are likely to attend. Think about the keywords and search terms they might use to search the internet and make sure that these appear in the text on your website or in your PPC campaign.

In short, use the knowledge you have of your existing patients to maintain your patient base and think like those patients you would like to attract in the future.

FURTHER INFORMATION

We hope you have found this information useful and if you would like to find out any more about dental marketing and what we can offer at Dental Design, please get in touch on 01202 677 277 or enquiries@dental-design.co.uk

Optimising websites to rank for number one is everyone’s goal, many factors go into this process and lots of time and effort. In the industry there’s many guidelines from Google themselves in what the best practice is, providing an insight into SEO methods for Online Marketers such as ourselves. These guidelines also highlight what NOT to do when optimising sites.

Many of the techniques listed in this blog used to be conducted frequently to optimise sites in the past. Google picked up on these and began to rank sites using these methods negatively. However, similar methods are still used by what’s called “Black Hat SEOs”, an industry term for online marketers who use methods outside the guidelines in an attempt to rank higher. It’s recommended to steer clear of these methods at all costs to avoid the risk of receiving a penalty.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION METHODS TO AVOID

1) CLOAKING

Google ranks pages on trust and relevancy to the searcher. “Cloaking” refers to the act of showing one version of a page or content to the search engine crawlers and another version to visitors. Examples of cloaking as featured in the Google Guidelines;

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
• Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

2) KEYWORD STUFFING

Also known as just “stuffing” this method was extremely popular back before the Google Penguin Update. This algorithm update put an end to sites adding random lists of keywords to a page and ranking successfully, instead, content now needs genuine well-structured keywords distributed within a page. This includes title tags, meta descriptions, alt-tags, etc.

3) SCHEMES

There are many businesses in the world who provide “paid links/clicks” to increase traffic for a website. These deals are appealing to some website owners and businesses due to traffic/click through rate being a ranking factor. However, Google’s algorithms are extremely sophisticated and can pick up on signals that indicate a genuine user.

4) PHANTOM TEXT

Similar to cloaking, this method involves tricking the search engine into crawling targeted keywords that may not fit naturally into the main content, or used to bulk up the keyword volume. Instead they’re set to a minuscule font or their font colour changed to the same as the page’s background.

However, once again Google’s algorithm will flag these pages down with a harsh penalty. Other examples include:

• Using white text on a white background
• Locating text behind an image
• Using CSS to position text off-screen
• Setting the font size to 0
• Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph

5) PLAGIARISED CONTENT

Search engines are looking for unique, high quality content that is accurate for the searcher’s intent. Last year Google released a revised 164 page guideline document highlighting best practice for website content. Their aim is to have the platform as accurate and genuine as possible, ranking down stolen content, false information, and upsetting content. I wrote another post on how to see if your content is performing well.

6) INTRUSIVE UX

There’s nothing worse than landing on a page only to be met with a mess of ads, pop-ups, and notifications. A smooth user experience is important to visitors and a poor one can mean a high bounce. All three of these items are acceptable in moderation, many sites stay live with the revenue they make through ads. However, it’s important to keep in mind Google’s Mobile First Indexing and ensuring your site is responsive for mobile devices.

If your site has come into contact with any of these methods or received a penalty that you wish to remove, get in touch with us on 01202 677 277 to discuss your website.

Everyone is aware by now (I hope!) that in order to increase the visibility of your website as much as possible you should be undertaking activities such as posting regular blogs. However, there is often fear if anyone will even look at the blog once you posted it…influencing people to question whether there is any point to post blogs in the first place. The short answer is YES! It will always benefit to update your website often, especially with a blog so let me share with you some best practice tips to ensure you increase your chances of your blog being seen.

WHAT IS YOUR NICHE?

There might be a tonne of things you could post about which is great but remember! Keep it relevant to what your website is about. This is why you get monthly visitors, to begin with so make sure the content you’re posting about is related to your niche.

DOES YOUR BLOG HAVE A CATCHY HEADLINE?

This aspect is very often overlooked. The title of your blog is nearly just as important as the content itself. What good is the material if you can’t hook people in with the title! I have posted a previous blog which jumps into the things you can do to spice up your blog title here.

KEYWORDS!

Being an online marketing company, of course, we are going to mention keywords! They are in the heart of SEO. It’s one of the simplest methods you can be doing to increase the visibility of your blog and it’s also amongst the most effective. Every blog you create, you need to have a one or two keywords in mind that you think users will be using to discover your blog online, make sure you then add the necessary keyword to the name of the blog, the headline and inside the article a couple of times. This is keyword immersion to make sure your focus keyword has a nice consistency throughout your content. It is important to note however that you should NOT be including your keywords in every given opportunity and every sentence, this will become obvious and is seen as keyword stuffing which will have a negative impact on your growth.

INCLUDE MULTIMEDIA

There are endless studies that show that including images in your content will influence better engagement. It’s useful to know that this also has a positive impact behind the scenes. Every image has an ‘ALT’ tag within the code, this is where you can include your focus keyword (if relevant to the picture) and this will be a proactive use of search engine optimisation which can be picked up through Google. I’m sure you are already aware but remember, you can’t just pull any image you fancy from Google as this will breach copyright issues. Instead, use images from royalty-free image sites such as:

• Unsplash
• Pexels

INCLUDE LINKS WHERE POSSIBLE

If you’re referencing something in your blog, this could be an article, a study, a video, a product, the list is endless! Make sure you are linking to the original source. Readers of your blog might want to do some further reading and will love it if you’re providing easy navigation for them. This is also very beneficial as the person you are linking out too could then see your article and provide a link back to you within their content, passing on those valuable link juices!

SOCIAL SHARING

Now you’ve published your content, you’re finished and can get on with your day, right? Wrong! Once you have finished your blog post make sure you are offering social sharing. This could be a couple of buttons at the end which allow the reader to share to Twitter/ Facebook/LinkedIn which will help spread the word and reach a larger audience.

If you have any questions or need help – get in touch and we will be happy to help