Picture your website and your business directory being linked by a two-way street. The traffic flows back a forth just like you want it to. Now picture the road between your business listing and your website as a freeway. Between your main site and your business listing there are all sorts of on-ramps and other traffic arteries. The more connections the more traffic, right?

Off-page links and citations coming into your business directory are like the inbound arteries on a freeway. Not only do they improve your chances of people organically finding you, they also improve your standing in the eyes of the search engines. The more off-page links you have the more the search engines will like your business directory. Your directory will then be more likely to be shown at the top of the list when people search online for “dentists”. Also, however, business directories are a good link back to your main website.

In short, a bit of super-highway building on your part is crucial to building traffic to both your online business directory and your website. Building links to off-page criteria is a shovel-ready project you need to undertake.

Fitting a dental website into any screen without sacrificing elements like content and images is called Responsive Design. Responsive Design is concerned with making a web page appear the same across all devices (Desktop, Laptop, Tabs & Mobile), platforms and screen sizes without compromising content or images.

Making a dental website an interface that can be accessed from any device while enhancing viewer experience. Due to Responsive Design being almost completely dedicated towards bringing smartphone and tablet users closer to viewing websites, it enhances the viewing experience by modifying proportions and making the webpage look as identical as possible to desktop view.

Benefits of Responsive Design

Future of Responsive Design

Surveys estimate that mobile internet users will increase from 800 million in 2010 to 1.9 billion by 2015; while desktop users will only see an increase of 1.6 billion, which is a meager increase compared to 1.4 billion as of 2010

Conclusion

Responsive design keep you ahead of the trend. The demand for media-rich mobile internet and apps is burgeoning, so several important implications must be addressed – development and maintenance costs, visibility in search engines and better conversion rates.

Tablet and smartphone sales are exploding. Responsive design is key, and content consumption on mobile devices will only continue to increase.

3 Simple Questions for You

In your Google Places page and on other local search directories there is also an opportunity to establish backlinks and yes, they are just as important here for SEO here as they are elsewhere; in fact they may be more so. If you’ve claimed your place in the local directories you know that the information you enter is totally under your control. If you put yourself in Google’s shoes you’ll undoubtedly be weary of this self-promotional material. To give your listing a bit of credence search engines therefore look for links as a way of proving you are who you say you are. Called ‘citations’ by many experts, these are links you can put in under the “Web Pages” tab in your local business listing.

Some of the things you may want to put in your local listing might include other directories so search engines can cross reference and validate your existence. These could include Chamber of Commerce links where you are a member, links from professional groups, or almost anywhere your practice can be found. These citations don’t necessarily have to be mini-testimonials for you or your practice but merely proof that you exist. If Google thinks you exist it will shove your listing up in searches by members of your local community.

There have been abuses of this system, however. “Link farms” or services that “buy” links, look suspicious. If the trail of links looks artificial and has no relative use other than for the links themselves, Google will take a dim view of the offending website.

Articles and blogs are still a great way to increase the ranking of your website but you need to know how to do it well. So instead of using blog posts, article submissions and press releases with a single direct link between all of them and your website build a link wheel with a single gap in the train. The gap or break within the wheel reduces the artificial look of incoming links to your site.

To search engines it will look very natural and your website will look more relevant, i.e. more important, and they will love you for it. So will you when your website keeps showing up at the top of the rankings!

Let’s assume you are looking for a way to promote mini-implants. Although you may have a page on your website about the procedure did you know you can do the same through Facebook? Posting a fan page on Facebook is like building an online promotional flyer but with a lot more interaction.

When you first set up your Facebook fan page pay careful attention to the keywords you select. While it might be egotistically appealing to list your practice name or your own name see if instead you can use the keywords for the procedure you most want to promote, such as mini-implants. Find some way to put this long-tail keyword phrase in the title and you’ll not only find a targeted audience on Facebook but it will boost your ranking for your website and the page you are promoting there as well. Then use all of the interactive tools you think will be helpful will on Facebook. You can even put up a video describing the procedure and build interest around your page, your website and you.

Social media is a tool that does require a new approach to marketing. It is all about building a relationship with your patient audience. It is not about direct selling of your services. Once you are in this mindset, however, it becomes a very effective tool the public will use.

There are a number of ways to do this. First is with proper SEO or search engine optimization. This is the process by where not only does your website show up in organic searches by Mr. or Mrs. Prospective Patient, it shows up at the right time and for the right people. Content is king and through blogs you can create content to match your audience and keywords.

If you fancy yourself as somewhat of an author you can also promote your site through the use of articles. Not only can you post your articles on article sites for others to view your expertise, the article sites will allow you to add links to your website. Putting a list of articles on your website with links to the article site creates a two way communication system. Search engines like that and your website ranking will climb.

You can also drive traffic to your site using social media and Pay per Click advertising. These methods can all be done on a local level. Finally there is email. One simple trick very few dentists use is to place a guest book on the front desk. Ask for email addresses of current patients. Use these addresses to build a list you can email for promotions, news or highlight expertise featured on your website.

The point is that a website by itself won’t do you a lot of good. But a website with traffic driven locally and organically or with emails will make you an internet celebrity.

This would suggest that the more traffic you have coming to your website the more calls you’ll get. In the internet world, however, not all traffic is productive traffic. Which would you rather have; 20,000 visitors to your website and no calls or 10,000 visitors and booked appointments? As you can see the trick is in initially reaching people who are more likely to reach out to you.

The first and foremost place dentists turn to for Pay per Click ads is Google. Google is in first place in terms of size and usage. But as stated above, not all traffic is good traffic if you can zero in on another audience who is more likely to call and who is more likely to buy the big dental case.

Take a look at Bing. This search engine is a claiming a growing market share. It has many of the same features in its advertising interface as does Google, but here is the good news for you as a dentist: Microsoft’s Bing often attracts users who have stuck with Internet Explorer rather than Firefox. These users are demographically older. For you, older means these are the very same people who are more likely to have money and will spend it on big case procedures.

Some traffic is better than others. The smaller Bing just might provide you with the market you want to attract the patients YOU want.

Take your best performing PPC campaign. Put it on Ask.com or another second-tier search engine and let it run. Check your Analytics and see the results. You may have just picked up some traffic you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

You can reverse this and use second-tier search engines in preparation for larger campaigns as well. Because they are second-tier they are often less expensive places to experiment with new Pay per Click ads or new keyword groups you want to explore. Set up your new ads on the second-tier engines first and run, test and tweak them. Again, the numbers overall might not be as impressive as on Google or some of the other giants but you can look at click-thru rates, bounces and other Analytics in a less expensive but just as effective way. Then when you think you have a winning ad move it to the bigger search engines and run it again. If your ad produces the same percentages you should be getting more traffic just because of the size of scale. In the meantime you’ve saved some money.

Your goal in all of this is not necessarily to top the return of the leading search engines, but to make your ads more profitable. In the meantime you will hopefully pick up some traffic on your dental website you would not have otherwise.

Next week: Are your advertising on the right platform?

Ok, reality check. After a few weeks the phone is not ringing off the hook like you thought it would be. In checking Google Analytics you discover that a lot of people have clicked on your website but very few calls have come in. Even more disheartening is the cost of your PPC campaign. Lots of click-thru’s but your bounce rate looks like a super ball. Is that the way it’s always going to be?

Did you remember to use negative keywords? As you know, using the proper keywords in your website can help boost your rankings in local searches. You can even promote your more profitable services and drive high end patients your way. Unfortunately not using negative keywords can wreck your best efforts.

Negative keywords are simply terms that prevent your ads from showing up during certain searches. Let’s assume your practice is located in a large metropolitan area where suburbs or neighborhoods are fairly self-sufficient. People from one neighborhood do not frequent others for dental services. If the internet user searches “dentist, my city” you might show up in the listing. But because you are in the wrong neighborhood that person will never call you. In the meantime you’ve wasted a click-thru.

“Dentist” is a pretty broad term. “Your city” might be another. Narrowly define yourself for the traffic you want both in positive and negative keywords. Your website might get less traffic but it will be more targeted traffic, the kind that is more profitable.

It’s not uncommon for a dentist to have multiple locations. In the city you or your colleagues may have an office downtown and one out in the suburbs. In more rural areas dentists frequently maintain offices in two towns. Pre-internet it was not uncommon for the Yellow Pages ad or newspaper ads to list a single phone number ringing into a live person in one of the offices. But that was then, this is now!

The old Yellow Pages ads were confined to a local town or, if covering a broader area, multiple locations could easily be combined into a single advertisement. Readers knew which location was closest to their home.

But people are smarter than search engines such as Google. The algorithms search engines use are based on addresses and phone numbers to sort out who to show your ad to and which location to display. When there are multiple ads with the same phone number Google’s brain melts.

Some suggest Google has done this on purpose so that spammers can’t create multiple business listings with one phone number in an attempt to beat the competition. Whatever the reason, having multiple locations with one phone number signals a death toll to all of your listings. Use multiple phone numbers in your online business directories. They can still ring into a central location but they won’t confuse Google.

Today there is a new land rush and the valuable real estate is on the internet. There is good news and bad news in this as it applies to your dental practice. The good news is that you can list your dental practice in local searches so that new patients can find you. More good news comes from the fact that Google and other places probably have already done this for you. The bad news is that if you don’t go online to “claim” your dental listing the information will be incomplete, possibly inaccurate and your competition will crush your listing every time.

Claiming your place is nothing more than going into the listing and making sure it is accurate. Here, however, is the secret to beating your competition every time someone searches “dentist” in your area; expand your listing.

There are plenty of tools within your listing you can use to expand on the default content. This allows you to give your practice a more helpful profile and target keywords you wish to promote, such as special services you provide. The benefit to all of this is that once you do it the local search engines will rank your dental practice higher in the search pages. A higher listing means more visibility which means more traffic to your practice.

The rest becomes history!

Exploding Your Mailing List with a 3 Step Opt-in

The Mirror Effect

Your Patients Self-Diagnosing Their Own Mouths

The Patients Falling Through The Cracks In Your Marketing

What does a success dental web marketing campaign look like? Here is one example from “click” to “cash.”

If you want your practice to drop off the face of the earth don’t include an address in your web based business listing or directory. Experts all say that this is one of the most common factors in poor ranking performance during online searches. Not only can the public not find you but Google won’t even try. One webmaster went so far as to say that not using an address in your online directory is like buying an iPod and never turning it on.

Another way many dental listings inadvertently hide can be with the street name itself or how it is entered. Using “Rd” for “Road” or “Hwy” for “Highway” confuses the search engines. Leaving out the North, South, East or West as a leading tag on a street name can also destroy your ads effectiveness. Finally, if the street or road you are located on goes by several names you might have a problem. If “Johnson Road” turns into “Decker Street” and then back again your address may show up in one location during one search and in another to someone else.

To correct this, first make sure you enter your street address as completely as possible spelling out everything. Secondly, test your listing. Look online for yourself. Does your practice show up where it’s supposed to be? If not, go back and change your listing and try again.

The 4 (or 5) Costly Bloopers To Avoid With Your Next Dental Website

*2013* Dominating The Web With Video Book

Our Elite Program

How Marketing Has Changed Since 1907 (…Or Has It?)

We talk to many dental office’s have a #1 Google ranking, a beautiful mobile website, and done everything right, but their phone still isn’t ringing…

My Advice: Don’t look for Magic Bullets.

Instead, concentrate on:

Getting people to visit your website won’t make you money.

Increasing the sheer number of people who “visit” you online can not be expected to increase your bottom line.

The purpose of dental web marketing shouldn’t be “to drive traffic to your website.” It should be to get the prospective patient to DO something that is likely to result in you making money:

How does that become profitable for a dentist?

“Check out the services we offer” is NOT a good enough call to action.

On the other hand, “Download your coupon for a $1 Initial Exam & X-Rays” might well be a compelling incentive.

Successful advertising solves the consumers problems.

Most dental websites fail because they’re all about the dentist and what the dentist wants to sell (crowns, bridges, veneers, etc).

Make your prospective patient aware of how and where their problem can be solved.

Tell them what the first step to take towards improving their lives as a result of solving that problem.

True Solutions, not Tools.

Put yourself in the shoes and actual location of someone searching on the web for “dentist”. When they search locally they will be entering “dentist, city name”. Do you want them to see your listing? That may seem like a stupid question but it’s really not. Obviously if they are in Des Moines and you are in Kalamazoo you don’t care if they see your listing. If you are on the outskirts of Des Moines in a suburb with another name you may very well want a person who enters the keyword “Des Moines” to see your listing.

This is one area in a local business listing where you can target your audience. Where do most of your patients come from? Is it the suburb you are on the border of or is it from the city? Narrow your local listing to where you actually are or, if on the border, where you want to be associated with. In a local search your directory will show under the local name you have entered. Doing something cute, like NYC for New York City, should never be done. Use the full and proper name. If you do the search engines will display your listing when your ideal, prospective patient is looking for you.

In the next issue we’ll talk about one of the worst things for SEO many inadvertently do which destroys their business listing effectiveness.

Here’s a follow-up from the past 7 days of tracking to further illustrate why you want to be going after long-tail keywords.

Phone Calls From Keywords
Total 83 Calls
Reporting period 3/11 thru 3/17
Client in New Albany, Indiana
new albany implants 10
newalbanyimplants.com 6
www.newalbanyimplants.com 6
“teeth in your pocket” site:newalbanyimplants.com 3
dentures 3
ronald receveur dds 3
dental implants in new albany indiana dr rivera 2
dont die with your teeth in a glass 2
dr ronald receveur new albany indiana 2
+can a mini implant get tight again 1
affordable dentures dental implants 1
affordable implant dentures 1
all on four dental implants louisville 1
cost of four miniimplant partials 1
dental implants 1
dental implants louisville ky cost 1
dental implants new albany indiana 1
dentist new albany indiana 1
dentists who do dentures in new albany, indiana 1
denture implants 1
dentures in southern indiana 1
dentures you don t take out 1
denturesnewalbanyms 1
doctor offices near new albany indiana 1
does sleeping without dentures affect sleep apnea 1
dr ron receveur 1
how long is the watrsnty on mini dental 1
how much does all on four cost 1
how much does an all on four dental plate cost 1
how much would implants for upper and bottom teeth cost the surgery and whatever else 1
http:newalbanyimplants.com 1
i have bad teeth where can i get chep dental mplants in indiana 1
i need bone reconstruction in lower mouth for inplants 4 of them what is this procedure and how much 1
implant dentures 1
inexpensive implants 4 n one ny 1
mary gettelfinger 1
mini implant 1
new albany implant center 1
perment dentures ky 1
physicians 47150 1
positive affirmation dentist 1
www newalbany implants.com 1
www.newalbantinmplants.com 1

Why 30% of Dentists Get 70% of the Patients

Marketing Tools vs. Marketing Solutions (Part 1)

Plastic Mailers to Turbocharge Your Directmail Campaign

This happens when a dentist is located in a professional building or office complex with many professionals using the same address. As you know there is a field where you simply enter your address into your listing generator. Easy enough, one would think, except when there are multiple professionals using the same address. In that case search engines don’t know which business to display.

Multiple offices at the same address create a very real problem with your listing directory. Search engines cannot sort you out from your next door neighbor. You all have the same address so search engines assume you are the same business. The result will be that either multiple listings will become merged or internet users will get an error message from the search engine saying “address not supported”. SEO experts have seen everything from information swapped between listings to accounts deactivated.

The fix is simple. Include a suite number in your address. Make your address stand out with something like, “123 This Street, Suite 4”. Also, take the extra time to dig deep into the free tools included in your listing generator and fill them up. Extra content keeps you separated from your neighbor.

Assume the search engine is much like a patient standing in front of your office building. Don’t make either one ask, “Which way do I go?”

Next week: Where does your practice live?

How to Brand Yourself The Celebrity Dentist

Google’s Penalties for Over-Optimizing Your Website

Entering The Conversation Already Going on in Your Patient’s Head

Even the SEO experts are having a harder time getting local businesses, such as dental practices, ranked. Listing your practice’s name, location and phone number is no longer adequate. One of the best things you can do to improve your web presence is to make sure that your practice is listed in the proper category in your directory. Many business listings automatically assign these and they may not be correct. When a potential new patient is searching for you on the internet many business directories use the default category to display listings. If you are not properly assigned your listing won’t be seen.

While you are making sure you are listed in the appropriate category, take the time to add several customized categories. The assigned category is good for a generalized search, but customized categories are good for additional keywords which help you promote specialized services such as “mini-implants”, “sedation” or “dentures”.

Set yourself apart using multiple categories. If there are a lot of listings for “dentists” in your area chances are the business listing will be alphabetical. If you combine the general list category with customized ones you’ll rank higher in sub-categories. The advantage to doing this is that many competitors aren’t aware of this fact.

Next week we take a look at one of the worst mistakes many dentists make when trying to rank their web presence.

Dr. Russell Roderick – Phoenix, AZ Implant Dentist Dental Website Swift Kick! Critique

The Maturity of Your Patients Searching

Wanted to talk today about the maturity of your patient searches. I was actually flipping through dental town earlier and saw that there was a doctor asking about the differences between short tail and long tail keywords and he really didn’t want to worry about the long tail keywords right now he just wanted to know more about what people are searching for in terms of short tail keywords and the problem with that is is that people searching for short tail keywords aren’t the kind of people you want to attract. People searching for short tail keywords are immature searches and you have to look at the progression of how people search and how their search evolves as they educate themselves and as they acquire more information about what it is they actually want. What you see is at first you might see somebody searching for “dentist Indiana,” “cosmetic dentist Indiana,” then they’re going to go back, they’re going to look at that first page of search results and they’re either going to find somebody they like and that’s the end of their search, more than likely they’re not going to find somebody they’re looking for with that simple of a search. They’re going to go back and look at “cosmetic dentists in southern Indiana,” or “cosmetic dentist in New Albany, Indiana.” They’re going to look through those search results and they’re going to revise it a little bit more, “cosmetic porcelain veneers in New Albany, Indiana,” and now you’re getting into the nitty gritty of what somebody is going to be searching for, that they’re actually going to be ready to click on and I talked a little bit about this in Episode 32: “the keywords that actually generate phone calls for you,” and those are actually the long tail keywords, those are the things that you want to identify, you want to optimize your site for, that’s what somebody that is searching that is actually looking at what you have to offer and they’re going to pick up the phone and call you. When you go after the short tail keywords when I say they’re immature searches that’s not a dig at the person it’s that they haven’t gone through that process of maturity to know what they even want and that’s what the searching process does. Statistically, 80/90% of your people searching are not going to click to page two, they’re going to go back to the top and they’re going to revise their search. Think about when you search yourself, I know that when I search I do a couple searches and I go back to the top and I revise it and go back down and keep looking at results and tweaking my search. Find out what the long tails are, find out what people are actually searching for when they’re ready to call your office. You can do that through a number of ways: phone call tracking, you can do something as simple as asking people what they searched for when they call you which you can be very effective. Asking somebody on the other side of the country or your buddy you went to school with might be a good starting point as well for your long tailed searches. I’m sure they’d be glad to give you the information as long as they’re not competing with you. The thing to realize there is you’re going to see different keywords in every geographic area and in every town that you’re in. You know, up in New York they use different words than they do down in Texas, than they do in California so it’s going to vary geographic area to area, dentist to dentist, everybody has a different approach a different type of patient that they want to attract. So keep that in mind when you’re trying to optimize your website, trying to use keywords that it’s not that you don’t want the short tail keywords but the short tail keywords are not going to generate as many phone calls for you as the long tails do. If it was just easy as picking cosmetic dentist out of a hat every dentist would be doing that.

Catch up on our latest Fast Thoughts podcasts, download our prospectus, and watch videos from our latest clients. Download the SWM App today.

         

Facebook vs. Google AdWords PPC Ads

I got a question this morning from a client talking about Facebook pay-per-click advertising vs. Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising and I want to spend a few minutes and talk about the differences in each and the advantages and disadvantages and pros and cons of both. With Facebook pay-per-click advertising, you do have the advantage of selecting all kinds of demographics based on the information that facebook has, you can advertise specifically based on race, age, likes, hobbies, interests, geographical location, all kinds of different information, but keep in mind when you are marketing on facebook you are marketing repeatedly to that same pool of people over and over again. It’s similar to Google AdWords content network vs the search network. Pay-per-click with the Facebook and the Google content network are very similar in design. You are putting up advertisements based on a passive action that somebody has taken, they’re looking at something on the page Facebook or Google are reading that information and putting an advertisement over on the side that is related to that. With Google search advertising, it’s more of an active marketing medium. When somebody searches on Google they’re looking for an answer at that moment to a specific problem or issue that they’re having, they’re looking for a dentist, they’re looking for an answer to a problem that they’re having in their mouth. With the Google AdWord search network you are putting your ads in front of a new group of people constantly that are actively searching. What that means to you is that if you’re doing Facebook paid ads and you’re not rotating your demographic typically what we see after a period of three or four or five months your ROI on that Facebook ad precipitately begins to decline because you have absolutely saturated that demographic selection with your advertisement already. Where as with Google AdWords you’re getting a fresh search volume and constantly new people are searching for problems so based on the keywords that you select you can continue to market on Google AdWords without seeing that eventual decline in your results. Now of course keyword trends do change and you have to stay on top of that with Google doing different split testing and making sure your quality scores and your landing pages are all up to snuff but for the purposes of this short video I just wanted to touch on the differences between Facebook and Google in their paid marketing programs, how you can best monetize both of them. Both of them can produce good results, but keep in mind Facebook is not a set it up and let it run for 12 months type of marketing medium. After three, four, five, six months you’re just going to see results just drop through the floor. We’ve done a lot of paid marketing on facebook and that’s almost always the result we get especially in our own market it’s a little bit different when we’re marketing with dentists, we have some Facebook marketing for dentists that runs almost around the clock but that’s a national market not local market like you’re in with being a locally based dentist so if you’re doing Facebook ads keep a look on it, keep your eyes on it, make sure you’re watching your tracking metrics and you are keeping track of how much you’re spending and how much you’re bringing in, same with AdWords, you need to be watching your calls, making sure those calls are converting, recording the calls and making sure that marketing is actually producing results for you.

The Dental Consumer’s IQ

I want to talk today about dentist industries IQ. Was reading in a trade journal this morning that another marketing consultant had stated that the consumer IQ is at an all time low which I’m not sure I agree with. He went on to say that you need to make sure that you’re relating the benefits of your treatment to your patients in a way that they understand. They’re not on a college level talking about clinical options and too many details are certainly is not an approach that is going to, that they’re going to be able to relate to but as far as the dental consumer index goes I would have to say that within the past 50 years of dentistry if we’re looking at how educated and how informed the general public is about what dentistry can do and modern advances in todays world we’re at the pinnacle of the educated gentle consumer. The reason for that is the internet. Never in history have we had the information and instant availability of the internet, WebMD, Wikipedia, of Youtube where they can literally look and see other people’s mouths and crazy videos that people are posting, see what’s going on and see what options are available to them, never before in history have they the accessibility of information that they can go on to these sites and they can look in their local market area and find and compare providers without ever stepping foot, not only into your practice but without even stepping foot out of their house. Consumers are making decision in today’s world in a way that they’ve never made them before. They don’t have to come in for a consult to find out who you are. They can look at your website, they can look at your videos, they can read your reviews. People don’t have to call your office to see if you have a likable staff, they can go on your website to see who you are, to see who you’ve hired, watch videos with your staff, find out if you’re a likable dentist or not, people do business with people they like. The dental consumer IQ in my opinion is at the highest level it has ever been in human history because of this availability of information. People have developed what I call digital attention deficit disorder which is if they can’t find the information that they need right now they’re going to skip onto another place or another time and keep looking. Your website has to be delivering this information to them on a silver platter that they can not only read and take in but in bite sized portions that they can digest and consume because it you just throw a buffet at them that’s not something a consumer can digest. You have to give it to them in a method, in a way that they can understand, that they can consume, that they can read and then they can make an educated decision on. When you’re putting together your website don’t just talk about the services you offer, consumers don’t care about what services you offer, consumers can about how your services can help them. There’s two real ways you can compete, you can compete on price or you can compete on value. If you compete on price and you go for lowest price, it’s a slippery slope. The race to the bottom is not one you want to win. If you compete on value and the expertise that you provide, you compete on the value of your services to the consumer you’re going to attract more and better patients of the more and upper affluent class the type of patients that you want to attract.

The WRONG Video On Your Website

Wanted to chat a little bit today about procedural vs educational video and what it means for your practice marketing. We get on a lot of sites and see the clinical videos, the KC videos and the smile vision and how the implant screws into the jaw and how you prep for a crown and all these videos that explain clinical procedures and how these procedures work and in my opinion the dentists that are using this type of video are missing a termendous opportunity to connect to their patients on a level that for one you’re speaking the language of the patient and to connect to the patients on a level your competition is not. If a patient is interested on how you prep for a crown or how a dental implant works you’ve got the WebMDS, you’ve got the Wikipedias, the Youtubes, you’ve got all these bemis of information out there that can give you all the clinical information you need. The video specifically that is on your website should be answering three or four extremely important questions that your prospects are asking: Is it going to hurt? How much does it cost? Does this guy really know what he’s doing? Showing a video of how a crown is prepped or a veneer is prepped or how a dental implant works, first of is going to scare off the patients that go “Oh my God, he’s going to drill my toothe down or he’s going to drill into my jaw.” Secondly, it doesn’t tell the patient anything that you’re going to charge them a fair fee or that you even know how to prep a crown correctly, that you’re going to do the work correctly and we even see dentists that take it a step further and they have pictures of these clinical procedures and process with the gum flap back and they show the teeth before the cap goes on and while it’s prepped and they have the spatulas I call them pulling their gums back and it’s horrible for you’re marketing. Your video should be connecting with your prospects and showing them you have a genuine concern, your passion for what you do and answering their burning questions, not the questions that you think they’re asking but the questions that are really going on in their head, how much is it going to cost? Does this guy know what he’s doing? Is it going to hurt? And if you answer those three questions with a video on your website you will dramatically increase the number of new patients that your website brings you, number of phone calls that translate into new patients in you dental practice.

The Pitfalls of Your Website Hosting

To better illustrate the points talked about in the video, I compared a WordPress based dental website on a shared hosting platform to one on a dedicated hosting platform. Over the past 15 minutes I ran the shared hosting website (Dr. Payet) against a dedicated hosting website (Salem Dentist).

The speed differences ranged from at lowest, dedicated hosting site 53% faster, to worst with the dedicated hosting site 20x faster (852 milliseconds vs 16,672 milliseconds). Average over all tests was the dedicated hosting being 300% faster with Salem loading 3.2 seconds faster than Dr. Payet’s.

This perfectly illustrates the pitfall of shared hosting. When your shared host gets busy, you suffer the consequences.

Test your site and compare for yourself @ www.WhichLoadsFaster.com

Had some thoughts today about the platform that you’re building your website on. There’s a lot of different options out there that you can use to build your next website. Some of them proprietary, some of them nonproprietary and I want to spend a few minutes today talking about the different options that exist. Some quick pros and cons of each and what those really mean to you as a dentist when you hear different words thrown out with Joomla or WordPress or proprietary content systems and what that really means to you as a dentist. When you’re building your website there’s some kind of back in that has to store that information, there’s a system that has to manage and control that information, that’s what we’re talking about today is those systems that really are seamless. It’s kind of like your practice management software, you can run eagle soft and soft den and curve and all the different systems, they all have pros and cons and what does it really mean to you, which one do you want to do. Here we actually run all WordPress, we run a modified WordPress platform that we have dubbed Snap and what Snap does for us is it gives us some increase security, it gives us increase reliability, we do daily backups for all of our clients, it’s a complete managed WordPress solution. In addition to offering a dedicated hosting platform, and what dedicated hosting means is we see a lot of WordPress sites that are hosted out on hostmonster of blue host or these shared hosting platforms and all of the sites almost without exception are laggy, they’re slow to load, they’re slow to pull up. If you go to any of our websites you see that they come up instantly, we’ve got 100 meg pipe to the internet that has a dedicated server, we also got redundancy in Atlanta, Georgia as well as here in Louisville. When you look at one of our sites versus a WordPress platform that’s hosted elsewhere you notice it loads a lot quicker, that’s because we’ve got a lot more processing power in here in house, we’ve got more server capacity and we’re also not hosting like bluehost and hostmonster where they might host 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 websites on one server machine, we’re only hosting a fraction of that so our threshold is a lot lower which delivers a lot higher quality of service. We also have a third party monitoring service that we use to insure that our websites stay up 24/7, we have over I think the past year something like 99.99% uptime availability of our website which is, if you look at anything across the internet Google offers 99.9% uptime with their business services and we’re running at .99% which if you do the math I think it comes out to something like 6 hours that the website is down per year, the majority of that is in the middle of the night when we’re running scheduled updates and the site is down for five to ten minutes at a time but we’ve actually installed our monitoring on hostmonster in the past on several occasions on hostmonster and found that they usually run anywhere from 87 to 94% uptime. So you have a lot more availability, a lot more speed, a lot more processing power, overall quicker faster experience. Getting back to the platforms that you can run: proprietary vs WordPress or vs Joomla or what other system you might be looking at out there. The main benefits to running an open source platform, anybody can build a platform you could use but the problem is then you’re locked in with that platform. If you go to prosites or there’s a lot of companies out there that offer the template of IDA comes to mind, you cannot transfer their websites, you can transfer the domain but the website itself is built on a proprietary platform that once you build that site, you’re locked in, that’s the end of the road, it can’t be expanded, it can’t be transferred, you pay for it as long as you’re with that company and if you decide to leave you have to build another website. If you decide you want to redesign your website build another website. When you’re working with a WordPress platform or an open source Joomla platform, for one you’re portable, if you decide that you’re not the best provider for your needs if you decide that whoever you’re with you don’t like them anymore you could pick it up and take it with you. If you decide you’re tired of paying the fees of managing your own website, I’m sorry, having your webmaster make all the updates for you, with WordPress you can instantly go in and make changes to your website yourself, if you can edit a word document, you can edit your own website with WordPress,it’s just that easy. Often times when we’re going through some changes in the website with a client, we’ll have them on the phone, we’ll be making changes in real time while they watch and I say click refresh and you can see the changes we just made. Often times with proprietary platforms you’re often very reliant upon the provider because you don’t have any portability or control to do things such as security checks and backups because they are in full control of the system because it’s grown there’s not any way you can backup your data. Really there’s not a purpose to backup your data because even if you have a backup of your website and it’s from a proprietary platform you still can’t really do anything with that data. It would be like, for instance if you have Eagle soft in your office and you have a backup and your server crashes and then you install Softdent, you can’t just restore your Eagle soft backup and you’re off to the races, you have to convert that Eagle soft to Softdent and then it would be able to read it, well same way with proprietary platforms, if you are able to do a back up you’re still not portable, you’re still locked into that platform. Most proprietary systems don’t allow you to do that kind of backup and security checks just because it’s an inherent flaw of how the overall scheme of things work. With WordPress or any other platform you also have the availability of the third party market, you have the ability to go out to the WordPress marketplace by themes, by plugins, expandability add-on features very easily and in many cases for free without having to pay for an expensive web developer to develop it for you. If you’re on a proprietary platform then you’re going to be stuck paying for somebody to do that for you as for WordPress somebodys already invented the wheel out there somewhere and they’ll allow you to download it for free or a small fee, 10 to 20 bucks vs paying a developer a $100 bucks an hour to create something for you a function your website does. Maybe its a contact form, maybe it’s a little floating widget on the side of the screen, maybe it’s a notification bar at the top or whatever it may be, you have that third party marketplace with all kind of availability.

How Google Fools You

I’m going to talk today about localized search results and what it means for you, what it means for your patients, what we’re seeing dentists running into as far as problems with checking their own search results with the localization and personalization that Google and Bing are doing right now. In the good old days you could go out to Google and you could search for yourself and you could see where you’re ranking and to a degree you could still do that today. I talked a little bit about yesterday with the blending of search results. Search engine ranking reports really don’t matter anymore not that they ever really mattered because search engine ranking shouldn’t matter to a dentist at all. It’s an okay metric to look at for “I’m doing good, or I’m doing bad, or I’m on the right track,” but if you’re not tracking phone calls if you’re basing all your success on your search engine ranking reports I’d be really concerned but with the blending of search results search engine ranking reports have just really gone out the door, they hold no value that they hold no purpose anymore. With localization and personalization of search results what Google is doing is they are you use to be able to go out and search for say Santa Cruz dentist and a dentist in Santa Cruz, California, a dentist in Salem, Washington, a dentist in Chicago, Illinois. a dentist in Florida would all see the same organic search results appearing for those searches. Now of course the adwords results are tailored based on location but that’s not what we’re discussing here, we’re talking about only the organic results and now a days what we’re seeing is not only are the paid results, which have always been tailored by location, we’re also seeing the organic results and with the blending of the search engines the local and adword search results that are also being tailored based on the location of the searcher. The search engines Google and Microsoft Bing are getting increasingly adept at pinpointing somebody’s location whether it’s on your cell phone and they’re using your GPS transceiver or there are even phones that do not have GPS, if you’ve been on Google maps in the last two or three years for phones that don’t have GPS, Google Maps offers a triangulation feature, if you ever watched NCIS or those cop mystery shows on TV where they find the killer before he kills anybody and they have those little antennas on the top of their vehicle as they’re driving around trying to find somebody on their cell phone, same concept, they are triangulating based on signal strength between the cell towers to locate your position within a couple dozen meters if there’s several towers in the area that they can triangulate from if you’re in a rural area and there’s only a couple towers around they may only be able to pinpoint your area within a half mile radius of the tower if you’re only within receiving range of one tower. They know where you’re at on your cell phone, with your computers they have your IP address they know where you’re at to a certain degree and they are tailoring these search results to where you are and what they think is the best content to deliver to you. You really have to put yourself in Google’s shoes, spin the table, Google is just trying to make money and they are testing, they are the king of the split test, they are going to find every possible way to deliver the best possible results to their customer and their customer is you or your patients, the person that is searching. They want to deliver the best possible results to them because that’s how they make money. If they started delivering crap results people would stop searching, they’d go to other search engines so this is why Google controls 80% of the US market share of searching because they’re the best. When you’re searching for yourself and maybe you drive 15, 20, 30 minutes home at night and you’re on the computer late at night, kids are in bed and you’re checking out your search engine ranking for yourself keep in mind that if you have driven away from your office, if you’re not in the area, even if you’re right down the road if it’s a metropolitan area Google is localizing those search results. Now talking about personalization of search results, also make sure when you’re searching that you’re searching you are logged out of your Google profile. In the top right hand corner if it has your account in the corner you’re logged in and Google is actually personalizing search results based on your past history. You can go into your Google account and pull up all your history forever for your past searching and if Google sees you’ve clicked on this website before, you’ve searched for Chicago implant dentists ten times in the last six months and everytime you click on your own website Google knows, hey I have to deliver this result again and they’re going to deliver that to you so make sure you’re logged out, I would go as far as clear your cookies maybe even do a private browsing session in Chrome because without a doubt Google is doing everything they can to monetize their customers right now and cookies, there’s been a lot of research data on tracking browsers without even using cookies. Think of your fingerprint, the ID that your computer has, the browser, the version, the type of plug ins that you have, the fingerprint of your browser without using any cookies, without using any kind of tracking system strictly only looking at the type of browser and computer that you have when you’re accessing their website has been proven to be unique like one out of 300,000 was the study that was done a couple years back. Even if you’re logged out, you clear your cookies Google and the search engines can still practically uniquely identify you just based on the fingerprint of your computer. I would go so far as to tell you to pull out your iPad or device you haven’t used before, go down to Starbuck’s, you really want to get a fair sampling of your search results to the average person because of personalization and localization, you practically have to be crazy about it these days. That gives you kind of an overview of where things are at with that in regards to search engines these days.

Google’s Blender

Had a doc call in earlier today very dissatisfied with the results he’s getting from his web marketing but it had a little bit of a twist. He was getting great ranking, had a dominant presence online organically, but he wasn’t getting any phone calls from his website. He recently installed call tracking and was savvy enough to be testing what he was doing and knew that even with this number one ranking he wasn’t getting any phone calls from it. Went in and did a little research on him and the problem that he was running into was a result of Google’s blended search results that they’ve really been pushing over the past, in many markets 18 months, some markets now only a few months depending on where you’re at. Blended search results is Google’s latest change where you may have a number one organic ranking but you might not actually appear on the first page until ranking 10 or 12 or you may not be on the first page at all. In some markets, I’ve seen recently in Chicago google for a search in dentists may not display an organic ranking on the entire first page so your SEO report you’re getting may show you as having a number one ranking but it may not even be on the first page and the reason is because Google is putting a lot of adwords on the first page which is their cash cow. They have the whole first page filled up with local search results and paid search results and there is no organic results there. In some markets there’s some organic results at the bottom or there may be some in the middle or there may even have some locals and organics and some locals and organics sprinkled about throughout the page so when you’re looking at your organic search ranking make sure that you’re actually going out there and testing the searches for yourself and in tomorrow’s podcast I’m going to talk a little bit about localized search results and why you can’t always 100% determine your ranking even by searching because of localization and personalization of search results but for the purposes of today’s podcast talking about blended search results make sure you’re physically going out there and checking because your number one ranking might not be worth squat in the real world on Google and Bing.

The Keywords that Generate Phone Calls

Phone Calls From Keywords
Total 33 Calls
Reporting period 2/12 thru 2/18
Client in Old Bridge, New Jersey

(not provided) 6
http:www.bestnjdentist.com 6
old bridge dental care 2
bleeding gums 1
can lipstick mess up tooth enamal 1
dental help 1
dental implants oldbridge nj 1
dentist best day 1
dentist laser gum treatment near 07036 1
dentist old bridge weisfogel 1
dentist on route18 1
dentists in somerset 1
different dental implant splinnting o fleepping 1
dr avi weisfogel 1
dr. avi weisfogel 1
dr. weissfogel dentist old brige 1
inplants in old bridge,nj 1
neighborhood health working hour 1
old bridge dental care, pa 1
same day inplants in old bridge nj 1
what age does dental implants make sense? 1
what are the cheapest dental care in nj for a priv employee innj 1

Phone Calls From Keywords
Reporting period 2/12 thru 2/18
Total 69 Calls
Client in New Albany, Indiana

(not provided) 14
new albany implants 8
newalbanyimplants.com 5
dental implants 3
new albany implants prices 2
newalbanyimplants 2
teeth in 1 day or all-on-four louisville ky 2
all on four permanent dentures cost 1
artificial tooth flipper isn loose on one side of my mouth and tight on the other side 1
best place to get all on 4 dental implants louisville ky 1
cheap mini implants 1
dental implants new albany indiana 1
dental inplants 1
dentist performing the most mini implants in 1
denture implants 1
dentures made in new albany. in for $200.00 1
does permanent dentures have warranty? 1
dr receiver dentist new albany 1
dr receiver dentist new albany in 1
dr ronald receveur new albany in 1
dr. ronald receveur 1
georgiadit.com denturesimplants 1
how much does it cost to get dentures in southern in 1
how much does sedative cost for dental implants? 1
how much does tooth implant cost in kentucky 1
http:www.newalbanyimplants.com 1
i don’t want to die from a dental problem 1
mini dental implant dentists in new albanyindiana 1
mini dental implant dentists in new clarksville indiana 1
mini dental implants cost in louisville ky 1
mini implant dentures 1
mini tooth implant in new albany in 1
newabanyinplants,com 1
newalbany implants 1
newalbany implants .com 1
permanent denture care 1
receveurcoat of 1
should i get any kind of warranty for dental job 1
southern indiana bad credit mini dental implants 1
warranty on dental implants 1

Had a crazy night last, we were in Pittsburgh for a video shoot. Airline industry is a real pain these days, the ended up canceling our flight and ended up driving back through the night last night from Pittsburgh back to Louisville to get home. Had a late night and early morning, my son had his first doctors visit this morning, his one month check-up, everything went great he’s in the 60th percentile in height and weight. Right down the middle I suppose.
I had some thoughts today about the keywords that you’re targeting. A lot of dentists go online and they search for cosmetic dentists their city , dentists their city and yeah those are important to show up to some degree but what I want to talk about a little bit and I’m going to be posting the actual keywords that I’m talking about right below this video for reference is two keyword reports of actual search queries that people searched for over the past seven days on two of our clients’ websites and the interesting thing that I’m finding here, just to give a little background information these were keywords that were searched for that directly led to a phone call being generated to this doctor’s office something we can track through our zetetic software, and something I noticed about these keywords is there’s very few searches in here that have less than three, or four, five keywords that this person searched for. I’m going to be posting these keywords here below this video, take a look at them I don’t want to spend five minutes going through every keyword and what exactly it says because the video will be mundane and boring and you’d stop watching me, so I’m going to post the list below, you can skim through it quickly and again these are keywords that generated phone calls to this doctor’s practice in the past seven days. There will be two list of keywords for two practices. Take a look, leave a comment below, I would love to hear what you think.

Dominating Google to Crush Your Competition

Yesterday, I made my podcast about dominating Google to protect your eggs. In other words, how to spread the money you’re spending on your own line marketing around to protect yourself against the whims of Google from changes in algorithms to changes in the search result pages and today I’m going to talk about that same philosophy but from a different perspective. Dominating Google to eliminate your competition to get more patients. Essentially, when you’re dominating Google you’re taking multiple listings on the first page. When you’ve got a peg listing on the top, organic ranking, a local places page, maybe an adwords express listing over on the side, videos, press releases down below, your facebook page, you’ve got 4, 5, 6, 8, we’ve seen 10 listings on the front page of Google, not only are you protecting yourselves against any changes Google might make like I talked about yesterday but you’re also eliminating potential properties that your competition can occupy. If you’re taking five spots on the first page, that’s five spots that your competition is not in which pushes them to the second page. Statistically, 80% of your searches are not going to click to that second page, they’re going to revise their search term in the top and search again or take action on one of the search results that’s already in front of them. So, it’s really an anit-competitive measure, of course, when you have five results on the first page if you want to talk about branding or just simply being seen a lot more often. Having five listings on the first page you’ve got 500% more chances than if you had one listing on the first page for that patient to see you for them to click into your website and the other important thing to realize is that patients all people are looking for different things. We see about 60% of clicks coming in through the organic side, your local places, your videos, organic listings, press release, whatever, we about 40% of all clicks coming out of google on the paid side so if you only have one listing on Google, you’re missing close to have, at least half of all the potential patients that you could be pulling in. Take a look at where you’re ranking at, make sure you understand the different search engines that Google offers. There’s a lot of different opportunities out there. If you got any questions, I’m glad to do a quick little demo on the different search engines Google offers, where you can possibly be found as well as a demographic report on your market area to show you what kind of potential exists.

Dominating Google to Protect Your Eggs

I wanted to talk a little today about insulating yourself against the whims of Google. Protecting yourself from the big gorilla in the room that we know is Google. We see a lot of marketing companies out there that only advocate doing organic search engine optimization and there’s a lot of dental marketing companies that only push SEO and they only say do content and on page SEO and there’s all these companies that advocate all these positions of marketing on the internet and I’m sure some of them do that job really well, the very specific task that they’re advocating. The problem with a single mode of online marketing is that a big change such as what we saw last year in April, May with Google they rolled out their panda and penguin updates such as what we saw in 2010 when they really started ramping up their local marketing stuff such what we saw in late 2010 when dozens and dozens over a period of 6 months we saw the number of dentists marketing on adwords in 60 to 70% of the markets here in the United States double or triple in a very short period of time. When you only have a single presence on Google you are open to the whims of not only Google changing but advertising conditions changing in your market. Let’s go back to the days of yellow pages when yellow pages was the only marketing that most dentist did and when the yellow pages started to go down hill it was kind of the frog in the pot, if you crank up the heat slowly the frog will never jump out well a lot of guys that were doing yellow pages did it very successfully for years, if they had seen overnight the changes that took place over a period of two years they would have jumped out really quick out of the yellow pages but it was a slow downhill decline and by the time they made the change they were literally flushing the money down the toilet. The point I’m making is don’t put all your eggs in one basket, don’t only go after SEO, don’t only go after local search, don’t only put your money in adwords, get your videos up there on the first page, get your local places up and on the first page. Google is now looking at social metrics, your facebook, your google plus, your social media profiles as a sign of authority. In other words, Google’s position is most of the scammers and spammers that try to fake google out to get on the first page don’t have social media profiles. While we don’t advocate social media as a means to find you new patients, you’re simply not going to get new patients off facebook, it is still necessary to get that great Google ranking to have social media and have many other tactics in place. Make sure you’re doing a holistic type marketing campaign where you have presence in all the different search engines you have your eggs spread out into many different baskets.

Automating Your Patient Followup

Today’s fast thoughts are about ways you could automate your dental marketing. A lot of dental practices are dedicating a lot of resources right now to keeping in touch with their patients. Front office staff that are doing follow up phone calls and sending out letters and emails and all of this repetitive contact stuff to follow up with patients that aren’t moving forward with treatment or have inquired or whatever the case may be and I want to do a quick illustration of how powerful technology can be if you embrace it the right way. Let’s assume right now that you’re getting one contact a day, let’s say one patient a day is coming to your website and requesting more information or calling you wanting to know more about services, they’ve come in for a treatment plan and they haven’t gone forward, one person a day. Hopefully, you’re getting a lot more than that. One person a day would mean you’re getting 30 a month, first month, second month, let’s just assume you’re getting one patient a day for each month. By my calculations that’s 30 the first month, 30 the second month would be 60, third month would be 180 and let’s assume you’re making two contacts with each of these patients or contacts each month. Comutively, going out to a 12 month period if you made two contacts a month with each of these warm or cold leads, however you want to classify them, that’s going to put you at about 4600 contacts in the first year. If you go out to two years, you’re at 14,040 contacts. Your front office staff would probably pull their hair out and you’d be hiring full time people to be able to make 14,000 touches if you were doing this manually. Thankfully, there’s companies like Infusionsoft that offers software that can do this for you. You can send out emails, text messages, postcards. Some of you watching might be familiar with Infusionsoft and you might be saying well I don’t how to use postcards with Infusionsoft, I thought Infusionsoft only did email, it can do a lot more than that. So much of Infusionsoft is lost because it’s so complex and it’s so extensive, you can do an incredible amount with it but the average person doesn’t have the time to sit down and learn it. We hear from dentists frequently that they bought Infusionsoft, they laid down 3, 4, or 5 grand to jump in, maybe they even sent some of their staff out to Arizona to do training for 10 grand a person and they could just never get their arms wrapped around it and it is a very complex software but with complexity comes a huge feature set and a huge potential if you know how to embrace it. 14,000 contacts that you could be making right now with all of your cold leads, warm leads that have not moved forward in the past two years all for a couple hundred dollars a month at most and that’s if you’re using your own Infusionsoft app, if you go through a company like us for instance who leases out part of their Infusionsoft app to their clients much less than that.

The Language Your Patients Speak

I want to talk a little bit about the ancient city of Babylon, you’ve probably heard about the city from the Bible, the ancient city that is talked about Babylon and the languages there everybody spoke different languages. If you really go back to the core if you say the Hebrew Bible and you look up the root of what Babylon means, the definition of babyl means confusion, if you look at the verb form of babyl which I’m not sure I’m going to pronounce this correctly but it’s bibyl it means to confuse. Why am I talking about Babylon on a dental marketing video? In many dental practices the language that you’re speaking is not being heard by your prospects, your patients, your prospective patients are speaking a completely different language than what you’re speaking when you’re trying to market to them about how you can help them. Many dentists out there, dentistry is not just a job to them it’s a profession, it’s a hobby, it’s their passion and when you’re very passionate about something it’s hard to remove yourself and think about how the other side feels. It’s been said many times that the smartest people in their given field are horrible educators because they assume that the other side knows things that they don’t and when you’re trying to educate your patients, when you’re trying to market to your patients and speak to them they don’t hear the same things you’re talking about. I did an interview with Dr. Woody Oaks last year and Woody made the comment that a lot of dentists spend more time selecting their new handpiece than they did selecting their spouse that they spend all kinds of time trying to get the right tools, the right equipment and the next greatest thing that’s going to help out their patients but they don’t relay it to their patients in a way that their patients can understand the benefits and that is what your patients are looking for. You have to speak the language of benefits, translate that new handpiece into something in emotional terms and how that’s going to effect that patients life. That new handpiece, it’s not just the latest thing and it does x and x rpms and it can prep a crown with these new diamond drill bits and x this and all this so much faster . Here’s what it means to the patient: 80% less noise, don’t like the buzzing sound and the noises that you’re custom to hearing at the dentist, this new handpiece that we have you won’t have any of that, less time in the chair, you don’t like to have dentists’ fingers in your mouth, that’s ok, with this new equipment this high-tech stuff and equipment we have you’re now going to spend 60% less time in the chair, there’s all kinds of different pain free tools out there these days. There’s topical creams you can put on, there’s different types of syringes and all kinds of stuff out there that is coming out these days that is doing painless injections. Don’t talk buzz words talk in plain simple terms: we can give you an injection we can numb you up and you’re never even going to feel it. Fear of the dentist: did you have a previous bad dental experience? We can fix that. That is the language that your patients are hearing, make sure you’re speaking that language. Things patients are going to look for in a dentist: they want to know the dentist is experienced and skilled and has the latest equipment. What they don’t particularly care about or they don’t necessarily understand is it’s your job to educate them so that they understand is what the alphabet soup of accreditations and continuing education actually means. Don’t just list all of your credentials on your website or on a brochure tell them what that means to them, what does it mean the you went to the Las Vegas institute, what does it mean that you went to Portugal to study under Dr. Mallow and you have all this all on four training, what does that mean to the patient? When you can speak the language of the benefits you’ll attract more of the patients that you want.

The One that Questions Who YOU Are Attracting

I want to ask you a question: are you marketing to your patients or are you marketing to other dentists? The reason I ask is we see a lot of dentists who have websites that look like they’re trying to get other dentists to become their patients. We see procedural videos, clinical videos showing how you prep crowns and how you do dentistry. We see before and after videos with the big meat hooks pulling back on their cheeks showing how great and perfect the cases are and how immaculate they look. We see case studies and papers with dozens and dozens of pages on them talking about different, new advancements in dentistry and new technologies that have come out and how so and so is leading the pack and educating this and that and it really makes me wonder there’s a lot of dentist that are out there that are educators and of course you want to stay with the latest and greatest but does all that belong on your website? Is that putting your best foot forward with your patients giving them all this clinical jargon and knowledge and just giving them absolute information overload with the technical how to portions of what you do as a dentist? I don’t think so. Patients are concerned about very simple things: Is it going to hurt? How much is it going to cost? Is this guy the right guy for my needs? Is he the best at what he does? Posting a 25 page case study or clinical videos on how you should be prepping a crown or should be prepping a tooth for a veneer or should be putting an implant in doesn’t answer any of the driving questions in a patient’s mind. When you’re developing your marketing and your website think to yourself, you’re a dentist, you love dentistry obviously you became a dentist, are you marketing to your patients or is this your passion and you’re truly marketing to other dentists with your services?

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Wanted to talk today about the cost of doing nothing. I had this thought about the cost of doing nothing, what if I did nothing and just kept on doing what I’m doing, I would keep getting what I’ve always got. I wouldn’t have a plan to retire on it some point on in the far, far future. Maybe having my first child a couple of weeks ago has got me thinking more about long term goals and where I want to be in 20 or 30 or 40 years. With your dental practice what is the cost of doing nothing? What is the cost of continuing to do just as you’ve always done? What if you had another ten years like the year you had last year or the year before or have for this year? Would that be good? Do you want to grow from that or do you want to stay right where you’re at or if your trend is going down do you want to continue to decline? We talk to dentists everyday that are trying to ramp up their practice to sell, businesses that are just getting started and wanting to add in associates. We have many booming practices that are wanting to take it to the next level and all those guys, I think, would agree that their cost of doing nothing is being in a place where yeah they were happy with last year but they were happy with last year because it was the improvement over the year before that and the year before that.