People Start Their Search for a Dentist Online

According to the latest market research, more than 80 percent of people looking for a dentist start their search online – and the vast majority of those start with a search engine like Google. Unless you have a robust online presence, you’ll miss out on many of those patients who find your competitors in your community.

Building a Website Isn’t Enough

“If you build it, they will come” may work for a baseball stadium, but it’s not true for dental web sites. If you want people to find you online, you have to make sure that your website is easy to find through search engines and other avenues.

Most Users Click on the Top Result in Search Engine Results

A marketing research company discovered that more than 80 percent of people who searched for something online clicked on the first search result on the search results page. It’s vital to your business to get your dental practice listed in that first spot – or at the very least, in one of the
top three spots.

Online Marketing Is a Professional Game

When the Web was smaller, it was reasonable to DIY dental web marketing. If all of your competition was local, you might be able to do a reasonable job of marketing your dental practice online yourself. These days, though, you’re facing competition from huge national dental franchises that have deep pockets for online marketing. You need a professional dental web
marketing firm that understands how to get your dental practice noticed and bring you the patients your business needs.

Create a Professional Website

A website is essential for today’s dentists. It’s not enough
to get your practice listed with an online dental directory. Most prospective
patients want to learn about you, your practices and your dental practice
before making an appointment. A professionally designed website created by a
company that specializes in dental web marketing can be one of your most
effective dental marketing tools.

Set Up Social Media Profiles

If you’re not on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, set up
business profiles for your practice. Social media profiles are a cornerstone
for social marketing – it’s the new word-of-mouth marketing and you can’t
afford not to use it.

Use Local SEO for Your Website

Search engine marketing has gone increasingly local as
Google and other search engines increasingly focus on providing local results
to searchers. Most people are not searching for a nationally known dentist or
dental practice – they want to find you, right down the street. Choose a dental
web marketing company that understands and can provide local SEO services for
your dental practice.

Link to Area Businesses and Organizations

Outgoing links from your website to local businesses and
organizations are part of effective local SEO services, but they also make your
practice a good neighbor and community member. Set aside a page on your website
to list local organizations and businesses that may be of interest to your
patients. Sponsor a youth sports team and devote a page to them or list your
availability to do presentations at local schools – and post photos of your
visits.

Post Informative Articles and Advice

Make your website a resource for your patients by including
lots of information and advice. Include descriptions of procedures and
information regarding the types of procedures and services your practice
provides and basic information about dental health and advances in dental
technology.

Good dental web marketing can make a huge difference in your
bottom line. Make it easier on yourself and your staff by hiring a firm that
specializes in dental web marketing to handle all of your online dentist
marketing services.

If it sounds like Internet marketing for dentists could be a
full time job, that’s because it could be, especially if you try to do it all
yourself. Most experts in Internet marketing recommend that you hire a
professional web design company that’s knowledgeable in your industry – in this
case, website marketing for dentists – to design and manage your dental
website. Even if you hire experts, though, it’s important to know something
about the process so that you can evaluate the services of the companies with
whom you’re doing business. When you hire a company to design and promote your
website, look for experts who can explain and recommend effective Internet
marketing strategies like these.

Professional Website Design

The web design company you choose should be experienced in
creating websites for health practices. An experienced dental marketing company
will know which pages you need to have on your website and how to best position
everything to make it easier for your current and prospective patients to find
what they need.

SEO for Dentists

Onsite search engine optimization is vital to making sure
that your website is found by people looking for dental services in your
community. Again, a company that has experienced with Internet marketing for
dentists will know how to present your services on your website to make sure
that the search engines can find you.

Video Marketing

People are more likely to trust a dentist if they see and hear
him or her. Website videos are a great way to establish a level of trust with
prospective patients before they ever reach out to make contact.

Content Marketing

One very effective method of web marketing for dentists is
through the use of content – articles and blog posts about dental procedures,
news in dentistry and the like. They help establish you as an expert, and
provide links back to your website to help build its “authority” – a vital
ingredient in Google’s search engine algorithm.

The right web design and Internet marketing company can help
you with all aspects of Internet marketing for dentists. Don’t settle for
anything less than the best.

The Importance of Dental SEO

Just putting a dental website on the Internet won’t do much
to get your dental practice noticed. You need to make sure that your website
will come up at the top of the search engine results whenever someone searches
for a dentist in your town. That takes some serious SEO mojo – knowing which
words to use and where to put them on your web page to attract the search
engines. But there’s more to dental SEO than just using the right keywords.
Google and other websites take a lot of other factors into account when
deciding if your website is the one that a potential patient wants – and those
factors change regularly as the search engines adjust their algorithms to give
more accurate results.

Those frequent changes to algorithms and rankings can play
havoc with your website’s ranking unless you pay close attention. If you’re
running a busy practice, you don’t have time to spend hours every week on
updating and refreshing your website. You have much more important things to do
with your time than to spend it poring over website statistics to figure out
why your web pages aren’t bringing in the customers you’d hoped.

That’s why you need experts in dental website SEO as well as
excellent web design. You could hire two different companies to handle the
different aspects of your dental website marketing, but the best dental web
companies employ search engine optimization experts in addition to dental
website designers. Why hire two companies when you can have everything you need
under one roof?

Hiring a pro can get pricey, though. If you’re on a budget,
you might have to pick and choose among the types of marketing you use to
promote your dental practice. If that describes your position, make sure you
put these three dental marketing services at the top of your list.

Professional Website Development

A professional dental website is essential to bringing in
new patients and servicing your current ones, so don’t skimp on it. There are
web development companies that specialize in creating websites specifically for
dentists, and they’re definitely worth the investment. Your website is your
public face. It should be professional and offer all the features your
prospective patients will expect to find.

Dental Website SEO

A professionally developed website won’t do you a lot of
good unless people can find it. The web design company you choose should also
be expert at dental website SEO – search engine optimization – to make sure
that your website can be found when people in your town or city look for a
dentist. The two go hand in hand to put most of your outreach and marketing
online on auto pilot.

Content Production

One of the best ways to ensure that your website gets into
the top results on the search engines – and stay there – is to provide a
constant stream of new content to bring them back to your website, either on
your website or through backlinks. That means you need content – articles, blog
posts, stories, tweets and photos – that link back to your website. Many
website development companies provide ongoing content for their clients for
exactly this purpose.

Choosing the right dental marketing services are important
to keeping a steady stream of new patients coming into your office. These three
services – website development, dental website SEO and content production – are
the bare minimum services to keep your dental website at the top of the search
engine listings.