Can a Website Serve as a Dental Marketing Solution?
Your dental practice’s main website will not market itself competitively. There is a practical, cost effective solution that puts you in control. Don’t let your website go to waste because it doesn’t show up on Internet searches, or because you’re too busy with your practice to spend your time working with keywords and Internet ranking.
In terms of marketing, to get the most out of a website, it needs to have a prominent, high ranking with search engines. If this isn’t the case, the website will lack traffic and won’t be seen by the people who are searching online for the services offered there. This would be a real shame if a beautifully designed website containing loads of information doesn’t rank high in Internet searches, because the website would be unseen in the market. Ultimately, when a website is designed for a dental practice it needs to have a very high ranking so it shows up online when people are looking for a good dentist.
When a consumer begins searching on the Internet for a dentist, they keep in mind the things that they want in a dental practice. Keywords and key phrases are utilized in this way because a person may search looking for services such as teeth cleaning, gentle dentistry, or children’s dentistry. It is very important that the website is rich in text describing the significant services offered at the dental practice, because these are the keywords matched by Internet searches when they direct consumers to the site. It is also important that a website is regularly recharged with changing and current information; if a website is not charged it will just sit and stagnate, and that is not optimum for successful marketing for a dental practice. Unfortunately, adding new content to keep a website fresh requires a lot of time.
The best way to get all of these things done so your website doesn’t merely stagnate in the face of competing practices is to create a site specifically for the purpose of gathering reviews from your patients. There are several benefits to creating a review site, and the biggest reward is having control over what information is published about your practice. Having your own review site will give you the control to select and then push your reviews into search engines, or to keep the reviews to use internally for the purpose of improving your patients’ experience while they are at your practice.
Typically, about half of the patients asked to write a review on a review site will actually do it and of those who do, about half will contain favorable information that would be good to publish. According to original dental marketing research, the large amount of patients normally seen at a dental practice in a month would easily supply the review site with a huge number of reviews to work with in a short time. One added perk of marketing a dental practice with a review site is that there will be no astronomical fee to be paid to a dental marketing company.
Going with a third-party site to publish your reviews is not as beneficial as having a review site for a dental practice. In order to have good results from online marketing, a practice needs as much good feedback as possible circulating to potential dental patients. A third-party site will publish negative feedback, which could harm the practice’s reputation. Using a review site lets the dentist use the negative feedback to improve the services offered to his patients while at the same time he can select the good feedback to use for marketing on the review site. Having this kind of control over a dentist’s reviews is detrimental to successful online marketing for a dental practice.
An important key to getting a practice’s main website to rank high with search engines is to make sure that the review site contains an inbound link that points to the main website. Since there will be several reviews on the review site, each review will have an inbound link to the main website, not just the one from the review site itself. The reviews should contain the location and name of the practice and the name of the dentist, because this information will act as keywords that will link Internet searches to the practice’s main website. This way, each review acts as a separate link to the main website, and will direct many more Internet searches to the practice.
The cost of having your own dental review website is negligible compared to an online marketing campaign that involves paid-per-clicks, banner ads or some sort of sponsored listing in some other directory service. You will not need to hire an expensive dental marketing company. Furthermore, you will have control of your online dental reputation, which is where many patients are finding their dentists.