There was a time that pretty much all a dentist needed to do to get new patients was to put up a sign advertising their services. Sadly, those days are long gone. In today’s world, the competition is fierce, and to have a successful practice, you need an effective marketing plan.
Your dental practice is driven by obtaining and retaining new patients. According to Dental Economics, a healthy practice will have about 1,500 patients who have been seen in the last 18 months. To obtain this number, they recommend aiming for 20-25 new patients every month.
The first question you need to ask is, should you consider digital marketing of some form with all the options available for dental practice marketing? Or traditional marketing like billboards and radio spots?
If you need any help deciding, according to a study from Think with Google, 84% of patients visit a provider’s website before booking an appointment.
That means that your online presence is critical. And if your practice can’t be found online, then you operate your business at a massive handicap compared to your competitors.
Unfortunately, simply having a website doesn’t really matter if prospective new patients can’t find it. This is why having effective online marketing for dentists is important to driving your business forward.
There are many options for marketing your business online, but SEO for dentists is one of the best options. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of influencing search engines to see your website as both relevant and authoritative for your target search term.
When considering the ROI for dental marketing strategies, it is not unusual for dental practices to see a 250% ROI.
The power of SEO is that it is cumulative, and it continues producing results, even beyond a marketing budget. This is why you can reach such a substantial ROI compared to nearly all other marketing tactics.
We could have just as easily titled this page Local SEO for Dentists, as Dental SEO must focus on search results for the local market. As most patients will only travel 5-10 miles for their dentist.
This is why expertise in local SEO and the Google Maps 3-pack are so critical to potential patients finding your practice.
Because, as the name suggests, local SEO is designed to produce local search results. And unlike traditional search results are highly dependent on the distance the searcher is from your office.
The Google Maps Local 3-Pack takes local search even a step further. The 3-Pack is a very prominent section that appears in over 90% of local searches. It consists of only local businesses. So you don’t have to deal with national competition like Yelp, Opencare, or Bright Now.
And not only is there less competition. To make things even better, the 3-Pack results even appear above the organic search results! You have probably seen the 3-Pack before, but just in case, I’ve included a sample search result panel for you to see.
Almost any SEO company can get your website visible for some keywords, but those may not translate into new clients, which is then a complete waste of marketing funds. To make the most of your dental website SEO, you must have a solid strategy with the right keywords.
These keywords make the difference between getting mediocre new patient leads and actually getting the right new patients for your practice. For example, if your practice does not offer sedated dentistry, you don’t want to attract those seeking it.
By looking at your dental practice’s particular areas of speciality, we can specifically target those patients who need only those you provide. This increases the probability of not only capturing new patient leads but converting the leads into new patients who will remain active.
Why are we showing a dentist the results we achieved for a psychotherapist? Good question – While we are new to the dental niche, we have significant experience helping therapists with their digital marketing. And we wanted to show you what we could do in a medical niche for a difficult keyword. In fact, in many cases, it’s more difficult to rank for psychotherapy than most dental keywords.
We consider SEO as the cornerstone of all digital marketing for dentists. However, it is far from being the only tactic you may wish to employ. NewStar SEO offers full-service digital marketing for dentists.
Nearly everyone who has explored online marketing for dentists has heard of PPC or pay-per-click marketing. You may have even tried your hand at it.
And while the return on dental PPC is less than SEO, it can produce “instant leads.” A tightly targeted and timed PPC campaign can produce a good return as well.
SEO may be the cornerstone, but it takes some time to start realizing those results. In the meantime, dental PPC can bring in those leads you seek by giving you immediate results.
While you work to generate your leads, you also need to be concerned about keeping existing patients. This part of where reputation management and social media for marketing for dentists come together to round out your comprehensive marketing strategy.
Many people think of social media as the place to share pictures of their vacations and kids. However, it has become the nexus for sharing information. People seek recommendations for various practitioners across their social media platforms.
Someone can certainly share a link to your website, but that is both archaic and cumbersome. And having an active social media presence makes it easier for your satisfied patients to recommend you to their network.
Social media also offers you recurring access to your patients, providing education and tips for improving dental health. This helps keep more of your patient base active while also helping them achieve better dental outcomes.
In addition, social media has also become an important component of dental website SEO. With the links coming back to your website, social sharing and bookmarking of your posts, reviews provided on social media, and the volume of people mentioning your practice profile helps boost your SEO performance.
Another important component that’s essential for the success of your practice is effective reputation management for dentists.
Every business will eventually have a client who is dissatisfied with the service. It is avoiding these kinds of reviews and feedback that fuels effective SEO for dentists.
Rather, the key is how you respond to these reviews, and the positive review ratio compared to the negative. The two primary components of effective reputation management include first keeping your ear to the ground and seeing what people say about you.
The positive to negative review ratio can be optimized by developing an effective strategy for encouraging and asking your patients for reviews. Luckily, we have a proven system that does just that.
Our powerful automated system can contact your past and present patients by both email and text message, asking them to rate their experience with your dental office.
Once they provide a rating, they are sent to an online review site of your choice to leave a review. If a patient had a bad experience, you are notified so that you can address the specific concerns.
The system also makes it easy to track your reviews from all over the web. So you can keep track of how you are doing. And identify and respond to small problems before they become big problems.
Since online reviews help increase search rankings and make prospects that find you more likely to become a patient, it’s easy to see why an effective online review management system is important to your practice’s health and growth.
We are a professional digital marketing agency offering dental and orthodontist SEO and digital marketing services. Having ranked our clients for thousands of keywords, we have more than an academic understanding of marketing services.
Rather, we have proven results and will apply all of our knowledge and proven techniques to the benefit of your practice.
Furthermore, almost all of a dental office’s leads come from a local search. So the fact that we specialize in local SEO, including the Google Maps Local 3-Pack, means that we can target our marketing efforts much more efficiently than an agency that doesn’t specialize in local SEO.
Most importantly, we never lose sight of the fact that the goal is to bring in a continuous flow of new dental patients to your practice.
We are SEO experts and can provide the finest in dental marketing services. Developing and executing strategies to meet your practice at every stage.
Our team is the only agency you’ll need to achieve your goals, from developing an effective website and implementing SEO strategies to social media marketing.
So if you are looking for ways to effectively grow your practice, take the first step and contact us today.
As you can probably tell, we are very proud of our SEO achievements. Let us know if you are interested in more details on how NewStar SEO can achieve great results for your company too.