There used to be a time when a business could get attention from consumers via radio and tv ads, mail marketing and appearances in the phone book and local newspapers. Those times are no more and reality is that 85% of consumers are using the internet to search for local businesses[source].

Most of your clients aren’t listening to the radio anymore, they’re on Spotify and listening to podcasts. They’re not checking the local newspaper and instead consuming digital media at a fast pace. Old marketing strategies are no longer effective so it’s time to jump into the future and get right onto digital marketing for dental practices.

Digital marketing isn’t just a matter of social media and newsletters, it’s a way to reach a wider audience and deliver your message to the right people, those who are already out on the web looking for a dental practice like yours.

Keep reading as we look at some of the benefits of digital marketing for dental practices and find out how you can dive right into this new pool of prospects, help your business grow and stay on top.

Digital marketing for dentists vs. traditional marketing strategies

Digital marketing for dental practices makes it possible for you to track results and make the most out of the money you’ve spent. While traditional marketing methods can reach a large audience, there’s no way for you to know how many of those prospects are actually looking for a dentist.

Sure, traditional marketing methods can work and still do, but they’re simply not as effective as digital marketing has proven to be. There’s no way to target your marketing strategy towards a specific group of people using traditional methods. But with digital marketing, it is possible for you to select the demographics, location and more of the people you’re interested to reach with your ad, therefore making it possible for you to create specific ads for specific people of specific ages in specific places.

With offline advertising, every member in your audience receives the same message and for many of them, that message won’t be relevant.

Tools like Google Analytic Demographics help you measure variables such as impressions, click through rates, costs per conversion and so much more, letting you know exactly how your money is being spent and allowing you to track results in a way no traditional marketing strategy ever will.

When it comes to costs, digital marketing is by far a more affordable option. Even if you decide to invest big in Pay Per Click ads, Adwords and SEO strategies, when used right these tools are proven to have a fantastic return on investment.

Creating a digital marketing strategy for your dental practice

A properly executed digital marketing campaign for dental practices allows you to target potential, current and even former patients with the appropriate message for them, at the right time and over the best possible channels.

Paid digital advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are a very effective way to get your practice’s name out there, especially to patients who may not have heard of you before. PPC can be split into search, social and display ads, all different manners in which to use advertising platforms to get your content in front of potential patients. When done right, the return on investment of these digital marketing for dentists practices will be highly beneficial for your business.

When building a paid digital advertising campaign, you’re in total control of the message being sent, while also being able to track the results in detail. For example, if you’re looking to advertise your dental whitening services, creating a well-crafted specified message will be key to the success of your campaign.

Said PPC advertisement can be used in search ads, which are online ads that appear on search engine results everytime someone looks up a certain service, phrase or product associated to your dental practice on Google or any major search engine. It can also be used in social media platforms and display ads, which are the ad boxes that appear on the tops or sides of a website.

Depending on your specific goals and target audience, it’s up to you to decide which of these paid advertising strategies will work best for your dental practice.

Sponsored content

Sponsored digital content is paid content that’s shared on blogs or other publication sites aligned to your business, providing the type of information that the site’s audience is already looking for. For example, your next teeth whitening ad could appear in a beauty blog, right next to a post mentioning different tips to attain a white, pearly smile.

Video advertising

In this day and age it’s all about the visuals, with videos being a major success in the digital marketing world.

Video ads can be a great way to advertise your practice because audiences online are looking for content, but they want it in a format they can easily consume and engage with, and a video happens to be the perfect form.

Creating a pool of content people will want to view, such as videos sharing tips and advice regarding oral health, testimonials from your current patients, or “How To” guides is a perfect way to get people interested. When they’re interested, they’ll want to share your content and spread your message.

Email marketing

A common strategy in digital marketing for dental practices comes from email marketing. It works by sending a targeted email to a customer or lead list. This could be a newsletter, special offers or even the chosen way to share medical results with your patients.

Remarketing

Remarketing acts as a constant reminder of your dental practice’s services to potential customers. It works by collecting the data of websites browsed by your prospects in order to later send them ads featuring content coming from those same sites they were previously looking at.

For dental practices, remarketing works as a way to push people into scheduling an appointment with you, while allowing you to track users who have gone through your website without incurring into any significant actions, and sharing your ads on other websites they visit.

Analytics

Of course, the best part about all of these strategies is the time in which you’re able to track down all of your efforts, and that’s when marketing analytics comes in. With the use of analytics tools you can see how well your ads are performing, where traffic is coming from, and what’s working and what isn’t.

Marketing analytics allows you to look at your audience demographics, click through rates, impressions, costs per conversion and much more, all letting you know exactly how your digital marketing strategy is working and giving you a much clearer path when planning your content strategy and advertising.

Make digital marketing work for you

As you now see, digital marketing for dental practices is a certain way to help your business grow without breaking the bank. The money you used to spend in traditional advertising strategies through offline platforms can now be redirected towards a much more controllable, clear and modern strategy.

By setting up a good marketing plan that takes into consideration your dental practice’s goals and needs, the opportunities for success are infinite. It’s all about diving into your creativity and building meaningful relationships, while offering your audience the type of content and information they’re already looking for all over the internet.

Both users and search engines love visual content. It is the fastest and most efficient way to captivate your audience’s attention and get them to share your message across various platforms. Visual content conveys information in a faster, more efficient way than say a 500 word blog post.

Although the quality of your textual content remains important, incorporating visual content is debatably a must for attaining consumer attention. Visuals are highly ranked and are extremely shareable. Here are a few things to consider regarding why visual content is so powerful.

Consumers communicate visually

Users don’t always have the time to read everything you write, and spacing out short paragraphs or condensing lengthy text content doesn’t make much difference. No matter how well-written and engaging text may be, a percentage of users will simply scan through it. However, visual content catches attention and can communicate a great deal almost instantly.

Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text. If you had the choice between getting all of the info you need from one image or a block of text, you’d most likely choose the image that’s comprised of information, just like your readers.  

Infographics, graphs, maps and charts are all powerful ways to illustrate data driven content. Data driven content pleases both users and search engines. For the content marketing process, these sort of visual keys are much more effective in explaining your message and getting people to share it, than an article.

Higher Engagement

Images get people talking about you and sharing your message, just take a look at these statistics:

• 63% of Social Media content is comprised of images.
• Visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on Social Media.
• A photo link to your tweet can increase its retweet rate by 35%

Getting your audience to share your content may lead to better SEO rankings, higher visibility and ultimately, more leads, which is the goal of some business content marketing.

Visual content is valuable to create

Sometimes it may be more efficient to create visual content at volume than it is to produce the same amount of content but written. For example, when sharing a new line of products, it is much faster to produce a few great product photos that are linked to description pages than it is to create lengthy text filled with in-depth descriptions.  

You can source user generated images and content straight from your audience to give you a full base of original, fresh content to spread across the web.

When beginning to include visual content into your content strategy, it is important to always be original and creative in order to get on the public’s radar.

Overall, visual content marketing allows for a better online presence, while visual aids strategically placed inside your content are great for keeping your reader’s interest so they’ll want to spread your message.

An SEO audit is meant to examine your website thoroughly and determine the issues in it that may be affecting your rankings. With over 200 different ranking factors being used by search engines to access your site and determine how far it deserves to go on search result pages, it’s easy to overlook many issues and fall into any of these common website mistakes revealed by SEO audits.

If you’ve noticed your website getting lower and lower on the SEO scale and you still have no idea why, then it may be time to schedule an SEO audit or, at least, take a quick look at some of these common issues and make sure you’re not incurring in them without realizing it.

Common SEO Issues

1. Duplicate Content:

Google defines duplicate content as substantive blocks of content found across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciatively similar, and although there’s no such thing as a direct penalty for duplicate content, the existence of it shouldn’t be ignored, since unique content is appreciated by both search engines and users.

When your website has duplicate content in it you lose your capability to choose which page to rank for, while pages can start competing with one another for rankings.

2. Broken Images and Missing Alt Tags:

Alt tags are important to image searches since they help search engines understand what images are about and categorize them – reason why you should include your SEO keyword phrases in them. They’re even important for visually impaired people using screen readers, since the readers will use the info on alt-tags to describe the images to users.

Given that search engines care so much about user experience, a website that doesn’t include them can be considered a sign that it provides little value to the user.

Broken images though cause the same issues as broken links, being dead ends for users and search engines as well as downgrading user experience.

3. Title Tag Issues:

Title tags are one of SEO’s most important aspects, since they help search engines figure out what your page is about and users identify whether to follow your link or not. Missing or duplicate title tags fail to provide users and search engines any relevant info about a page’s content, while tags that are too long aren’t completely visible in search results.

4. Meta Descriptions:

Meta descriptions give users info about what your page is talking about right on their search results, and although they don’t influence page ranking directly, they do influence page CTR, which is also important. Many sites have duplicate meta descriptions and some have none at all, which isn’t ideal.

5. Broken Links:

While a couple of broken links may not be an issue, if the number of them expands this can become a big SEO problem. First of all, broken links cause traffic dropdowns, with users perceiving your site as low quality, while every time search engine bots crawl through your website and find too many broken links it diverts their attention from your pages, which won’t be crawled and indexed correctly, reducing the number of pages that appear in search engine results in the long run.

6. Too Many On-Page Links: 

Although Google no longer requires to keep the number of links on a page under a certain number, good SEO means having a natural link profile including relevant and high quality links. Too many of them dilute the value of your page and send your traffic away.

7. Low Text To HTML Ratio:

A low text-to-HTML ratio means there’s more code on a page than text for people to read, this can be a sign of a poorly coded website with too much Javascript, Flash and inline styling, hidden text – which is used by spammers, so it becomes a red flag for search engines – or a slow site, since the more code and script pages contain the slower they’ll load, affecting user experience and SEO rankings.

8. Incorrect Language Declaration: 

Since audience comes from all over the world on the web, websites need to include a language declaration that states what the default language the text on it is written in. This in turn informs browsers of the content’s language, helping with translation and page display, ensures people using text-to-speech converters can hear your content read in the correct dialect of their native language and helps with geolocation and international SEO.

When the right people can see the right content, this improves your page’s relevance score, and therefore SEO rankings.

9. Temporary Redirects: 

Redirection helps search engines know when a page has been moved. However, temporary redirects can cause search engines to continue indexing an outdated page while ignoring the one you are trying to redirect traffic to. If the change is supposed to be permanent then you should implement a permanent redirect in order to avoid loss of traffic and poor optimization.

10. H1 Tag Issues:

Header tags are there to signal the most important content on the page, creating a useful hierarchy for both users and search engines. While you can have multiple H1 tags on a page, there’s no reason to overuse them, also, for the purpose of SEO relevance, they should be consistent with your title tags without being identical.

11. Low Word Count:

While there’s no minimum word count for a page, Google likes to rank content with more depth higher, and longer content is a good indication of depth, making it more valuable to readers. So, when creating content, you should include relevant on-text page wherever possible. Your readers will appreciate it.

While none of these factors impact your rankings equally, good SEO keeps everything in check, avoiding problems to accumulate and snowball into a greater issue that can destroy your rankings and affect your traffic and user credibility.

An SEO audit helps identify these and other small (or big) issues, catching them on time and helping you solve them before you find your rankings plummeting without having any idea what’s going on.

 

 

From The Owner (not yet edited)

We have been in business about 10 years now. I have been going on ‘sales calls’ / prospect meetings almost weekly for that period of time. In most of my meetings we discuss the usual things. Your website, your business, profits, margins, costs, budgets, ‘this SEO world’ education (how we work, how it works), but every conversation is about growth.

One of the points I take a moment to clarify is that every day your future customers get younger and younger. By that I mean that every day the ‘younger’ generation gets to age of being your customer. Every day your new customers are more web savvy, tech savvy, digitally more perceptive than your past customers. This is the evangelistic moment of my sales process that urges conversion to a more digitally optimized business. If you want to stay in business and grow.

Upon waking up today I read a fantastic article by Josh Zumbrun over at the WSJ. The article is effectively about the Millennials generation eclipsing Baby Boomers. This article has some great charts with the data. I highly recommend the read.

While the Baby Boomers have many more years ahead, and they most likely NO undoubtably have more wealth to spend & spend on high ticket items they won’t (depending on your type of business i.e. if your focused on serving this generation in their twilight years your good if not great). However all the other businesses customers (and this generations kids/grandkids of the Baby Boomers will sometimes be the decision makers) will be this generation that has been ‘connected’ since 9/10 years old. Generationally speaking they are also the ones to spend, and spend more freely without thought of the future. They (we) have our long lives ahead of us and our most financially productive parts of our lives ahead of us. So scrutiny in spending is less, and far faster. These are your new customers, and possibly the decision makers on the Baby Boomers finances.

I would highly recommend you let us do what we have been doing so well over the past decade. Let us help you serve your next generation of customers and provide you a generation of productive years that will allow you the peace of your later/retirement years.

This is a very Common question I get asked very often! “Which Should I use, AdWords Starter Edition or Standard Edition?”

My answer is very simply: Google AdWords Standard Edition. 

The Starter Edition may seem to be easier, how ever the loss of settings far out weighs the value of Control. Plus when you really do get more familiar with AdWords and it really starts to make you good money, You will have to switch to Standard Edition and re-learn the set up all over again. Usually with the Starter edition, since it’s not as easy to turn off the stuff that wastes your money i.e. content network, mobile devices, etc. and not as easy to turn on the things that save you money like Time Targeting etc. your campaigns will not be nearly as profitable. Starter edition is a big reason people out there say they have “Lost money on AdWords”