Key Local Search Updates In 2022

September 30, 2022
Advertising Media, Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, Internet Marketing, Local Internet Marketing

At ProspectaMarketing, we endeavor to stay on the forefront of marketing research. This way, we can provide the most up-to-date analysis and advertising tools to the practices we represent. We believe that the Internet is still young and always changing. Due to this, it takes an active, dynamic advertising strategy to really take advantage of its web of chameleon-like opportunities.

As a dental practice, your team probably doesn’t have the expertise, time, and training to research marketing efforts and care for your patients. This is where we come in; by relying on cutting-edge materials, we use this blog and our other digital avenues to educate our clients and any practices that might be thinking about joining up. This way, you can focus on simply bringing high quality dental care to your patients, while we handle the rest!

One of our key sources of digital advertising and marketing news is BrightLocal, a hub and platform that has been an industry leader in SEO research for several years now. As recently as two days ago, they proved why so many marketing agencies trust their opinion. During the 2022 edition of Google’s “Search On” event, they compiled and shared several incoming search updates that have the potential to completely change the SEO landscape. Our team has picked the four that are most relevant to our dental practices and broken them down for you below. We’ve also included an explanation of how it affects you and your patients. Check it out!

Four Key Updates

  1. Multi-Search – Near Me: Multi-search itself is an update to Google that has been around for a while now. It allows users to capture images and video as search inputs, as opposed to simply words. But with this next update, your camera has officially become your keyboard. The option will now include ‘near me’ terminology. But, what does this mean for you? It means that your potential patients will be able to use photos and images to search for a product or service, find the option they’re looking for, and search providers nearby that offer the service or product. By confirming the rollout of this new update across the U.S., Google is fully accepting that visual media is king; and so should you! Make sure to always have clear, crisp visual media on all your digital fronts, including an updated Google products page that potential patients can match to services or products they might photograph in the wild.
  2. Google Maps – Neighborhood Vibe: Another exciting update is one to Google Maps. Popular spots on Google Maps will burst with vibrancy and life as users explore the area. This affects your practice directly, as patients that browse Google Maps will be able to see user-uploaded photos and videos of the area, to get a real ‘vibe’ of your practice. In an obvious nod to the rise of social search that is prevalent across social media, Google has given your practice a reason to maintain a curated atmosphere that is pleasant to patients: their uploaded media has become your de facto supplemental marketing strategy! Just know that, as with everything, this can work for or against you. If the uploaded patient media is focused on your practice’s negatives, this will also be the first thing users see when they check the “Neighborhood Vibe” option.
  3. Google Maps – Live View: Another new addition to the expanding Google Maps toolbox, users can now explore nearby places by using a live view. They simply have to lift their phones to search and Maps will show them a digital overlay of businesses and practices around them, along with associated details like business hours and reviews. If your practice needed another incentive to ensure the information on your website and Google listings is accurate, the folks at BrightLocal have just given you one!
  4. Google Reviews – They Don’t Tell You Everything: It seems that Google is trending farther and farther away from written reviews. While reviews are still crucial for a lot of patients, the upcoming rollouts make it clear that other sources of site authority and consumer trust will start playing a larger role in the process. These changes include AI that will discern helpful insights from other sources, such as user-uploaded images, to help a patient evaluate a practice and make a decision. What This Means: your customer feedback is bound to come in through multiple avenues. Just like we have recommended publicizing reviews – with the author’s permission, of course – we would encourage using this new, visual feedback (i.e. user-uploaded images) as another route through which you can broaden your practice’s reach and visibility. What This Doesn’t Mean: Stop responding to reviews. Absolutely do not do this. Written reviews are still a great indicator of a practice’s online health. Just because they are not playing as large a role in search engine rankings as they used to, does not mean they don’t serve the greater purposes of showcasing your practice’s success stories and mitigating any complaints against it.

Keeping up with researchers like BrightLocal is just one of the many ways ProspectaMarketing stays at the vanguard of changing online trends. If you are a dental practice looking for an experienced firm specializing in dentistry and the tools of Internet marketing, look no further! We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

Readability Matters!

August 26, 2022
Blogging, Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, internet dental marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

ProspectaMarketing endeavors to meet our clients marketing needs and extend their reach through every possible medium. Audiovisual elements are absolutely crucial in this endeavor and if you haven’t read our article on the core tenets of visual media, check it out immediately! However, another vital element we have covered on this blog – one that is at least as important as audiovisual media – is written content.

If you have read our article on the importance of engaging website copy, then you already know the core elements of creating this text-based content. However, how are you supposed to check if that content is tracking well with readers and getting the correct message across? In an arena like dental advertising, it can be even more important to transmit your goals and information effectively and objectively, as patients are often looking for health-related facts that leave little room for subjective writing. Readability checkers are, at least partially, the answer.

What Is A Readability Checker?

You can infer what a readability checker entails pretty easily by the name: it’s a tool used by blog specialists, website copy writers, and content creators the web over to ensure that their content is grammatically and structurally correct. However, it’s more than just a glorified spell-checker. A properly designed readability checker will also test your content for proper flow, repetition of words, transition phrases, and a host of other fluency and syntax standards. In short, it will make sure your work sounds as professionally written as possible.

There are three types of spell-checkers our blog team recommends when creating written content.

  1. Yoast Plug-in: This particular spell-checker mainly applies to WordPress users. If you’re generating content for a blog, mailing list, forum, or media gallery, using the Yoast Plug-in is a good way to check your progress. When enabled, it will show a color-coded symbol to the right of your blog posts in your blog viewing window in WordPress. The color ranges from red to green, respectively indicating low to high readability levels. Red means your post needs work, yellow means it’s almost there, and green means you’re good to go. The plug-in also enables a similar column with identical symbols for SEO optimization, which means you can use it to both check the accessibility of your text and test how high it will rank on search engines. Yoast not only lets you know that you Readability or SEO are low; it gives you suggestions to help you fix it. All the steps you can take are arranged in an easy-to-access drop down menu so you can easily get your post in the green.
  2. Microsoft Word Readability Checker: What if your written content is not being generated via WordPress? Our best tip is to either create your text entirely on a blank document on Microsoft Word (or a similar, text-based application), or at least copy paste it into a blank document before posting it to your preferred back-end web service. Why? Microsoft itself has a hidden readability checker that few people know about. Making use of it is easy and free! While you’ve got your Word document open, search the top row of toolbar options for the “Review” tab. Then, find the category titled “Spelling & Grammar.” At this stage, you’ll be able to choose spell-check options, but, depending on your version of Word, there should also be a category or option titled “Readability Statistics.” With this pop-up page, you will be able to access statistics like your text’s Fleisch Reading Ease Score. Metrics like this can be helpful in examining whether your text flows well and is understood easily by your intended target audience.
  3. Grammarly: Though focused primarily on grammar and spelling, Grammarly is also great tool for ascertaining how to improve the clarity, fluency, cohesiveness, and vocabulary of written content. It offers real-time assistance and a host of tools. The only drawback to this robust readability system is that most of the features are locked behind a paywall. The only free features are grammar and spelling!

Why Is Readability Important?

In an ever-evolving online landscape, your practice’s potential patients will have no patience for improperly written walls of text riddled with mistakes. They have the ability to quickly click away to another page and come equipped with the increased online literacy of a generation raised on the internet. These standards make readable content an absolute cornerstone to your advertising campaign.

At ProspectaMarketing, we can assign you a specialized blog writer and even help you iron out clunky marketing copy. We are an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices and the tools of Internet marketing. We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

SEO-Friendly Blog Posts: 5 Easy Steps

August 15, 2022
Blogging, Dental Advertising, internet dental marketing, Search Engine Optimization

So, you are a dental professional who keeps up with our blog posts and you have taken our advice on the importance of blogs in marketing. You have set up a solid website with appealing design, informative text blurbs, attractive images, and you have added a WordPress blog to it in order to generate fresh content. Now, you are staring at a blank page and wondering how to go about writing your first blog post. ProspectaMarketing can help!

If you haven’t followed all these steps yet, make sure to check out our previous articles covering topics like the power of the blog, engaging website copy, appealing visual media, local SEO tips, and Google indexing strategies. If you have, then you have likely already read these articles and are wondering how to go about crafting a blog post that will have a good chance of getting picked up by Google’s bots and wind up high on search engine results.

Our team has put together a list of tips to get you writing and to ensure you adhere to SEO-friendly parameters, in order to further maximize your visibility and the impact your dental practice can have.

5 Easy-To-Follow Guidelines

  1. Use Proper Headers, Footers, and Contact Info: Guiding your reader’s eye to accessible information about the practice is a crucial part of any blog post. Before you write any text content, ensure you have a good title and that contact info is available somewhere in the post. Your best bet is the bottom, so craft a footer with large, easy-to-read text that details your practices official name, address, phone number, website and/or e-mail. Make sure to place it at the bottom of any and all blog posts, to create a sense of uniformity and professionalism in your blog.
  2. Make Use of the Official Practice Name: We recommend using the name of the practice twice in every blog post; once at the beginning and once at the end. Doing it only once – or not at all – might mean it fails to stick in your reader’s mind. However, doing it too much will stink to a reader of generic SEO fodder.
  3. Include Unique Location Names: When it comes to creating content that is attractive to Google index bots and search engines, location-specific vocabulary is key. What better way to make your writing stand out than to mention uniquely-named locations that your practice serves? Do it at least once during the actual text, and consider adding it to the title, if applicable. “Quick Toothache Solutions” is a good title; “Quick Toothache Solutions in Silverton, CO” is better.
  4. Start With A Story Or A Quote: In the end, writing is all about story; even advertising copy. Pick a good quote about teeth or smiling and place it at the top of your post. Or start with an interesting patient anecdote – make sure to omit any names or personal details! This might kickstart some ideas and help you structure the rest of the blog post.
  5. Adhere To A Structure: A blog post is like a good essay; it presents a persuasive argument, offers supporting evidence for it, and wraps up with a conclusion on the general benefit of the position being argued. Anything you can write will follow these steps. Use sub-headers to separate each of these sections. Come up with an attractive title for each one. For example, if you’re stuck on a blog post about a new teeth whitening service your practice is offering, write a header like “Tooth Whitening News for Norfolk Residents,” then write two sub-headers like “Why Choose This New Method?” and “The Name of Practice Difference.” Just like that, you have the basic structure for a blog post, complete with an introduction to the idea, supporting arguments, and a conclusion that brings it all together.

Just Start Writing

The most important tip is to start creating content. In modern philosophy, there is a concept known as the infinite monkey theorem. It presents the idea that, if a monkey hits random keys on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, it will eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare. Many take this to mean that there is no way to be original, as random chance could produce the same result as an artist, given time. At ProspectaMarketing, we believe that, since this feat would take an infinite amount of time, it is also proof of all the unique permutations that exist between the random text and Hamlet.

This means you are very unlikely to write something stale, repetitive, and worded exactly the same as another blog post. You would have to sit in your chair for an infinite amount of time in order to achieve the same exact thoughts, worded the same exact same way, as someone else! So, just start writing! We guarantee that, as long as you come up with the text yourself, both your potential patients and, more importantly, the Google algorithm, will view it as unique copy and respond to it organically.

If you represent a dental practice that needs help writing blog posts, ProspectaMarketing offers a wide selection of blogging services, ranging from basic to fully customized. We are an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices and the tools of Internet marketing. We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

Visual Content vs Text: Establishing the Right Balance

July 20, 2022
Dental Advertising, internet dental marketing

At ProspectaMarketing, we help dental practices succeed by providing them with a customized team of SEO specialists, bloggers, and digital experts. Once we have assigned you a team, they will help manage all aspects of your digital advertising campaign. This includes training you and your team members to use specialized analysis tools and keep track of your website activity. Another core part of our process is optimizing websites through unique copy and visual media. However, too much of either of these can mean that your website is incomplete and fails to engage your audience.

So, how to balance these two core concepts of website design? That’s what this article focuses on! Our team has put together a list of tips and tricks that you can follow to ensure your visual media and website copy text complement each other and work well on their own.

  • Visual Content Is The Hook: As far as catering to a new generation of consumer – one that uses the internet often and expects quick, easy-to-access results – visual media is king. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to strike the right balance between text and media; only that this perfect middle point between the two types of content has shifted over time. Though massive walls of information might have worked for print publications, and in spite of the practice still persisting and thriving in certain eras of the internet (think: e-mail newsletters), the balance has definitely skewed toward visual media in recent decades. We encourage you to view this as an opportunity. Employ the use of large, easy to see images to “hook” your website visitors. Place them above and behind headers to make them the centerpiece of the page. Make sure to keep the images diverse and varied, both in size, style, and content. For more information, check out our article on the core tenets of visual media.
  • Text Is What They Are Looking For: As ironic and contradictory as it sounds, those same consumers and digital travelers who flock to pretty pictures and immediately scatter at the sight of a large wall of information, are actually looking for information, not pretty pictures. However, they want that information to be short, accurate, and precise. So keep your copy short and to the point, making sure to fill the negative space on the page left by the images, but not going overboard. Focus on the accuracy of your content; is your copy relevant to your services? Finally, make sure to use precise language; the last thing you want is your message being muddled by awkward verbiage or inconsistencies in grammar. If you do all this, you have a higher chance of establishing authority in your digital community. Read our previous article to find out more about the importance of engaging website copy.
  • How Much Is Too Much?: It might seem like, based on what we have previously stated, you are better off filling every page on your website with hundreds and hundreds of images, right? Well, no. A barrage of textless images can still be overwhelming to a visitor, and it can be ultimately useless in terms of converting a lead into a patient. So, both with images and with text, the answer to this question varies. A website with 10 or 20 thumbnail images and a little flavor text might make sense for a smile gallery or a blog. However, for a landing page with important subject matter about your services, it might be more effective to limit yourself to 2-3 images and a few informative, easy-to-read paragraphs. The balance is different depending on what you want the focus of the specific page to be. It is also important to consider load speed. If your images are putting too much of a strain on it, it might mean your potential visitors leave before they see text OR images. The same applies to website copy. Make sure that the overall information on your page isn’t massive, and that your load speed stays between 1-2 seconds.
  • SEO and the Google Index: Optimizing your website for SEO is crucial. Make sure to use popular, relevant key words throughout your copy, purge any duplicate content (text or visual), and avoid generic content. These practices will ensure that your page remains unique and that the Google crawler bots find it and index it. If your page is indexed, it has a higher chance of showing up on search engines and being associated with the right keywords, whether those be location or service-based. For more information on concepts like the Google Index, read our article on advanced digital marketing strategies.

Striking the right balance between visual and text-based media has never been more important; and we can help! ProspectaMarketing manages the advertising campaigns of hundreds of dental practices the nation over. We are an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices and the tools of Internet marketing. We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

Content-Specific Dental Marketing

June 17, 2022
Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, internet dental marketing

At ProspectaMarketing, we’ve spoken at-length about our unique, in-depth, all-points approach to digital dental marketing. This makes sense. For most of our practices, a marketing initiative that emphasizes a host of services is the right choice. After all, if your practice offers many general, restorative, and cosmetic dentistry options, you want to keep your patients informed of your status as an end all, be all source dental treatment.

But what if your practice requires a more content-specific approach? At ProspectaMarketing, we are versed in more than just generalized dental marketing. During our initial meeting with practices, we perform an in-depth analysis and interview the dental team in order to facilitate a mutual understanding of your areas of interest.

From there, we focus on creating treatment-specific content that highlights your practice as an authority on said treatments. This way, you can cut across the noise that most businesses make online, visual or otherwise, and set yourself apart in the eyes of your patients. For example, if you are a cosmetic dentistry practice, patients should see you as a practice that specializes in cosmetics, not a dental practice that forgot to add the rest of their dentistry landing pages!

In order to ensure the efficacy of your specialized marketing effort, we create:

  • Content-Specific Landing Pages: When it comes to your website, a singular, specific focus on a service shouldn’t translate to a singular, specific landing page. Many branches of dentistry and health services can be split up into several subject areas. If you’re a dental implant-only practice, we might consider designing a landing page like “Dental Implants.” Then, we would split that generalized page up into several other landing pages, like “Am I Eligible For A Dental Implant?”, or “Types of Dental Implants”, or even “What Are Dental Implants?” This way, we can generate a large enough amount of content from a single service.
  • Customized Copy: Though this is a service we provide for all our clients, it is even more crucial to have original copy when you’re trying to become the authority on a certain subject. At ProspectaMarketing, we can overhaul old, outdated copy and keep your website fresh for your new visitors, and reliable for your regulars.
  • Custom Blog Service: For most of our clients, we employ the use of Listpipe™, a blog service that provides our writers with fresh article ideas. Our writing team then customizes these articles for our clients. However, for a treatment- or service-specific practice, we encourage signing on to our custom blog service. This way, you can have content written from the ground, up. The content will be unique to your website and will go a long way toward keeping Google Index bots on it long enough for your pages to be archived. (You can learn more about Google Indexing by reading our previous blog post on the subject.)

ProspectaMarketing has helped advertise site-specific content for practices that focus on general, restorative, and cosmetic dentistry. But we’ve also advertised on behalf of more unique practices. To this day, we’ve worked on marketing initiatives for practices that focus on:

  • TMJ
  • Sleep Apnea
  • Orthodontics
  • Pediatric Dentistry
  • Denistry for Seniors
  • Emergency Dentistry

Whether you represent a general dentistry office, or a more content-specific practice, we are here to help! ProspectaMarketing are an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices and the tools of Internet marketing. We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

The Core Tenets of Visual Media

May 20, 2022
Advertising Media, Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, internet dental marketing, Video

At ProspectaMarketing, we create and manage all sorts of visual marketing materials for the dental practices we represent. From website design to local listings, all text needs images and visual cues to lead the reader to the right material. Without it, all you’re left with is an empty digital presence and a virtual hub that doesn’t draw visitors in.

Our team has put together a list of the core tenets of visual media; that is, the 5 most important rules to follow when using any images or videos on your website, social media sites, blogs, or any other digital marketing avenues.

The Rules

  1. Strive for Creativity: An engaging picture can be an absolute game changer for a website. The marketing authority Hubspot conducted a study this year that 70% of companies invest in some form of audiovisual media marketing. This includes videos, photos, and even music! In a pool as large as that, you must strive to choose pictures and videos that are unique to your services and that are stylish. Use music and colors that draw the eye.
  2. Don’t Overdo it: Though it might seem to fly in the face of the previous point, you don’t want to overwhelm your digital visitors with a carnival of mismatching colors, loud sounds, and intense images. As with everything, balance is key. Ensure you only ever use three types of font styles in your web presence, be it your website or other digital hubs. Another good tip is to make sure your pictures match your aesthetic. Pick three or four main colors that  your dental practice uses often and try to pick images and visual media that complement them.
  3. Videos, Videos, Videos: The aforementioned study by Hubspot also pointed out that the primary form of media used in content marketing is video. With a new generation of consumers, who are all tech savvy, comes an affinity for quick, engaging, quirky videos. Even as a dental practice, you can take advantage of this! Make sure to keep videos on your website and social media sites updated and share them often!
  4. Image and Video Licenses: After a few months, image and video licenses might begin to expire. This could lead to dead links and redirect loops in your digital hubs. Don’t let this happen! We recommend keeping an updated document with all licenses and license numbers, as well as their expiration dates, and checking it often.
  5. Labels and Descriptions: It is often important to label and describe images. The benefit of an image description is two-fold. Firstly, it helps the reader identify the media, if the actual image doesn’t load. Secondly, it can clarify complex factors (like complicated dental or medical procedures) to consumers, so they immediately know what they’re seeing.

If you need a company to manage your dental marketing strategies and provide you with excellent visual media for your digital advertising effort, we are here to help! ProspectaMarketing are an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices and the tools of Internet marketing. We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

Should I Respond to Negative Reviews?

March 1, 2022
Dental Advertising, internet dental marketing, Online Reviews

Man,Hand,Showing,Thumbs,Down,And,One,Star,Rating,OnAt ProspectaMarketing, we know mistakes happen. Sometimes, a patient coming to your dental practice has to wait an undue amount of time, runs into a scheduling issue, or is simply unhappy with treatment. If you have been closely monitoring your reviews, as we’ve detailed in our previous blog posts, the possibility of a bad one might be making you cringe.

We encourage you to see this as a positive moment. But in order to take full advantage of it, there are some things you need to accept. Yes, the customer is dissatisfied with the service you’ve provided. Most likely, they are going to leave a review. And yes, there’s a high probability that people will see the review.

According to BrightLocal’s 2022 Consumer Review Survey, 98% of people at least “occasionally” read online reviews. 77% of consumers ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ read online reviews. The percentage of people ‘never’ reading reviews, on the other hand, has dropped to an all-time low of 2%. Furthermore, 7% of people leave reviews for bad experiences, and a whopping 33% leave them for good AND bad experiences. So patient feedback counts for a lot!

It’s easy to tell what this means: If you have any sort of digital presence, chances are people are reading your reviews in order to choose between your practice and a competitor, and bad reviews will lead them to ignore your practice, if no action is taken.

What To Do About Bad Reviews

This can be alarming if you have any bad reviews, as the first thought is that a massive amount of people will see them. Indeed, online reviews play a major role in creating and maintaining consumer trust in the healthcare industry. 83% of those polled indicated that reviews played a ‘very important’ or ‘important’ part in their choice of healthcare provider.

But here’s the good bit: you can turn it around! The same survey details that 80% of consumers will leave a positive review if they initially had a negative experience, but it was turned into a positive experience. There’s no better way to curtail bad reviews than by having the same customer leave a good one that states how their issues were fixed during a follow-up appointment.

Our suggestion is to always read negative reviews in order to ascertain what went wrong. Don’t write them off as occasional messages from disgruntled customers that are simply pouting. Learn from them. This way, you can ensure the problems never repeat and the patient leaves positive feedback following future appointments.

But should you respond to negative reviews? BrightLocal says yes! Respond to all reviews, positive and negative. When asked which factors of online reviews would make them feel positively about a practice, 55% of people said that the business owner responding to the review was vital. Similarly, when asked how likely they were to use a business that deals with responses in a variety of ways, 89% of people said that they were ‘highly’ or ‘fairly’ likely to use one that responds to all reviews.

How To Respond

  • Don’t Be Defensive: Respond to every negative review with kindness, direct information, and professionalism. Understand that this is not a personal attack on you or your team, but simply a case of a customer letting a business know how it can improve its services.
  • Keep It Accurate: If a patient’s complaints are inaccurate, or somehow don’t reflect what actually occurred during the appointment, do not respond as you would in an argument. Experiences are filtered through our unique, subjective perspectives, and what one person might see as an egregious offense, another might see as a small nuisance. Give your patients the benefit of the doubt, don’t attack them, but do make sure to clearly state what actually happened, so other patients can understand the situation. Offer apologies for their negative experience and commit to making their next appointment a positive one.
  • Grammar Counts: People often see poor grammar and written mistakes as indicative of a lack of professionalism. And why shouldn’t they? If your practice is to be an authority on healthcare in any capacity, the information patients receive from you must be correctly and accurately transmitted, and so must your responses to patient feedback.
  • Respond Quickly: Don’t let reviews, good or bad, sit in the queue unanswered. When asked which factors would make them feel positively, 49% of those polled by BrightLocal stated that the review being posted within the last month was important. This means about half of your patients are reading recent reviews and deciding to use your services based on them. If a negative review was recently written, it is important to respond to it in a timely fashion, so that anybody sorting by ‘Most Recent’ can see the lengths you’ve gone to in order to fix the issue.

The verdict is in: responding to reviews helps build up consumer trust and improves communication between practice and patient. Don’t let a negative review get you down. It is yet another marketing opportunity you can use to make sure you’re getting the right message out.

At ProspectaMarketing, we can help manage your review responses for you! We are an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices and the tools of Internet marketing. We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

Keep It Current! Your Dental Practice Website

September 15, 2018
Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, internet dental marketing

Virtually every dental practice has a website these days. It’s all but impossible to succeed without one. Yet a lot of dentists don’t take the time to keep their sites current, and as a result, they lose ground to their competition. It is essential to stay on top of online trends to set your self apart from your competition.

Investing in your website may, in fact, be the single most important thing you can do to stay competitive. At the top of the list is making your site mobile-friendly. It’s essential for any website to be compatible with smartphones, but the web is increasingly mobile-centric, so the smart move is to convert to a mobile-first strategy.

Google has always used the desktop version of a website to rank it in searches, but no longer. “Since the majority of users now access Google via a mobile device, the index will primarily use the mobile version of a page’s content going forward,” the search engine giant announced on its website earlier this year. “We aren’t creating a separate mobile-first index. We continue to use only one index.”

That means websites that are designed mobile-first – designed for mobile devices – are going to rank higher in search engine results than sites designed for desktop computers. We are increasingly mobile device-oriented. Research shows that people are five times more likely to leave a website if it isn’t mobile-friendly.

A site that is mobile-first is, for one thing, designed for smaller displays. It is also intended to be a company’s primary website. Some businesses, such as Uber, target mobile devices almost exclusively. Their desktop sites are more of a landing page.

Chances are, your own experience bears this out. Do you really want to do a lot of zooming, pinching, and scrolling, just to get at the content you’re looking for?

If your dental website is designed with desktops in mind, don’t despair: you will not fall off the map. Google says that while it primarily crawls and indexes web pages made for smart phones, searches will still give users the most relevant search results, whether it’s desktop or mobile.

But the shift is on, and you should not ignore it. ProspectaMarketing specializes in marketing dental practices on the Internet, and can help your practice reach its audience. We use the tools of Internet search marketing to reach key prospects looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

Finding Your Practice: Dentistry And Search Engines

March 30, 2018
Blogs, Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, Internet Marketing, Local Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Websites

The numbers are staggering: forty thousand times per second, three and a half billion times each day, 1.2 trillion times a year. That’s how often people navigate to Google and types in search terms.

More and more of these searches ask about local businesses: show me the auto mechanics in my town. Show me a tree pruning service. All the pizza places.

This is as true for health care as it is for everything else. Eighty-five percent of Internet users turn to search engines when they’re looking for dentists and doctors. An online presence is critical for any practice.

Search Engines Are Essential!

Your practice has a website, right? A practice website is one of the most vital marketing tools available, because potential new patients read them. If you don’t have one, they may never find you.

Your practice website must be user-friendly, and engaging to visitors. The goal is to convert them into new patients.

It also needs to be mobile device-friendly. Mobile devices – smart phones in particular – are the device of choice for many Internet users, especially younger ones. As recounted here in February, mobile devices were being used in more than 60% of dental searches by the end of 2017, and that is only likely to grow.

Optimize, Optimize

Moreover, your site must be properly optimized. Internet users tend to scan, whether they’re looking at Facebook or your practice’s website. And they prefer tiny bites. The content on your site should be broken into short paragraphs with headings and bullet points, with plenty of images.

Another thing about that content: with any Internet experience, people like to feel they’re getting something from it. Your site should have informative content that is free of jargon, and makes a connection with visitors.

Where Are You?

So how do Internet users find you online? The short answer is via search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Your practice can have a unique listing on local search engine sites. Listings include basic contact information, and also a map showing your location.

There are step-by-step instructions for getting your practice listed on Google My Business, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

Properly marketing your dental practice is critical to any practice. It is also a discipline in and of itself. Prospecta Marketing specializes in using the Internet to find new patients for dental practices. To find out what Prospecta Marketing can do for you, contact Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

 

 

 

The Consumer Move To Mobile- What Do You Need To Do?

February 9, 2018
, , , Dental Advertising, Internet Marketing

In 2015 Google announced that the number of searches from mobile devices (excluding tablets) had surpassed the number of searches from desktop devices.

While that was true overall, it wasn’t the case for the dental industry, yet. Mobile searches for dental terms still lagged behind desktop searches even through 2016.

2017 – The Dental Year of the Smartphone
That changed in 2017. From March to June the winner of the search traffic bounced back and forth between desktop and mobile.

Once July came, mobile searches never looked back. By December 2017, mobile devices were used in 56% of dental searches and desktops were only 38%. The remaining 6% of dental searches were performed on tablets.

If you haven’t yet paid close attention to your mobile website presence, now is the time!

Changes in the Google Indexes
Recognizing this shift, Google created a new search index specifically for mobile devices. If you searched on a desktop, Google would use its desktop index to find the websites most closely matching your search. If you searched on a phone, Google would use its mobile index to find results.

This mobile index considered additional aspects beyond what the desktop index used, such as the user experience with this website on a small screen, the speed of the website, and the available content.

In November 2016, Google announced that they were moving towards a single, mobile-first index. This mobile-first index means that even if you were searching on a desktop, the results would be based on what Google found on their mobile index. This mobile-first index should be fully implemented sometime in 2018.

So What Do You Do as a Dental Practice?
Do a little sleuthing on your own website. Here are five things you can look at to see if your website is ready for mobile consumers.

1. Your website must provide a great user experience on mobile devices.
Just a few, short years ago it was good to have a separate mobile website with stripped down content and few images. That was when mobile phones and data plans were slow.

Now both the phones and the data plans have improved dramatically. People expect to see graphics on their phones and to easily be able to find what they are looking for.

Pull out your phone and look at your website. Is it engaging? Would it be to someone who isn’t a dentist but is looking for one? Can they easily navigate through the site and even search for content? Can they easily contact you and find where your office is located?

2. Visitors to your website need to easily contact you by their preferred method.
Smartphones add additional features to websites. If the website is coded correctly, a visitor can simply touch the phone number to start the call. Or they can simply touch your address to be taken to a map to provide directions.
With our new Click to Text tool, you can now even allow people to text you from your website! You can receive and respond to texts through a screen on your desktop and continue texting with the potential patient.

As you are on your website on your phone, try touching your phone number or address or even texting from your website. Is it easy? If it isn’t, your potential patients will likely leave your site without contacting you.

3. Your website needs enough content to be found and understood by both real people and the search engines.
There is a constant battle between website designers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialists. Designers want graphics and very little content. SEO Specialists know that if a website doesn’t have content (especially the home page), the search engines won’t know what your website is about and therefore cannot rank it well in the index.

Starting with your home page, look at each page of your website on your phone. Is there enough content that a person could understand what you are about and what you can offer them? Can people easily scan the content to find what they are looking for? Are paragraphs short enough that a reader typically won’t have to scroll to get through them?

4. Your website needs to be fast!
Part of the user experience is having the website load very quickly. In 2016 Google said that “53% of mobile sites are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.”Think With Google

Site speed has been a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010. In January 2018 Google announced that mobile page speed will be a ranking factor in mobile searches. If your site is slow it will have a harder time ranking well for any searches.

How fast is your mobile site? Or even your desktop site? Test it out at https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ and https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.

5. You need to appear at the top of the search results.
With a smaller screen, fewer search results from the search engines are visible on the screen. Typically, the listings at the very top of the page are Pay-per-Click (PPC) ads. Depending on the size of the screen, only 1 or 2 results are visible on the screen and they are ads.Save As Picture

If you are not using PPC ads for your practice, people will have to scroll down the search results to find your practice on their mobile device. After the ads come the map results in Google. Then come the organic, or natural, rankings.

Ranking in the 1st organic position is good, but not as good as it used to be. It now means that 1st position ranking is really the 6th or 7th listing (and a few scrolls) on the page.

Have questions or want help?
Specializing in sourcing new patients for dental practices online using internet search, ProspectaMarketing has developed a unique and thorough approach that provides visibility, financial accountability and ongoing refinement and improvement. To learn more, contact Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

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