Keep It Current! Your Dental Practice Website

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.

Lights, Smartphone, Action!

Your dental website is your most potent tool for promoting your practice: it’s where patients and would-be patients find out about you and the services you provide, and perhaps most importantly, your office hours and location.

As we have described elsewhere, video remains the most popular type of content on the Internet, and is a huge factor in local search success. It is something you should take advantage of, and by using the smartphone you probably have in your pocket right now, you can create professional-quality videos and share them on your website.

What sort of videos, you may wonder? As a trained dentist, you can start by drawing on your own expertise. Your site visitors would love to hear your thoughts on topics in dentistry, from simple subjects like checkups, to popular procedures like teeth whitening. You might create a Q&A with questions drawn from real patients, or create a video centered on your dental team.

What you don’t want to do, however, is share poorly-made video. They don’t have to be perfect, but by learning a few simple techniques, you can make quality, effective videos that work to your advantage.

  • Good lighting. This is essential. You don’t need to invest in expensive equipment, but try to always shoot in brightly lit areas. The resulting video will be crisp and clean.
  • Stay horizontal. Turn your phone sideways, in what the pros call “landscape” orientation. When you play back the video it will fill the screen, and give it a professional look.
  • Get close. Don’t be afraid to move close to your subject. (The subject might be you, so remind your videographer!) Image quality will be improved, focus will be better, and – again – your videos will have a quality, professional look.
  • Be steady. It’s hard to hold any camera steady, and smartphones are no exception. But shaky video detracts from the content, and looks amateur. Use a tripod or some other stabilizing device.
  • Edit. Some people are satisfied to put “raw” video clips on their sites, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you may do multiple takes, and only one will be right. Simple editing software allows you to trim out any rough edges. There are plenty of inexpensive video editing smartphone apps.

Remember, eighty-five percent of Internet users in the United States watch videos online, and it makes up one-third of all Internet activity. By incorporating simple but informative and well-made videos on your dental practice website, you boost your chances of reaching many more potential patients.

ProspectaMarketing uses the tools of Internet search marketing to reach key prospects looking for what your practice has to offer. We bring a unique and thorough approach that 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.

Your Dental Practice and Reputation Management

As a highly trained professional, the dental services you provide should be enough to establish your reputation, and your reputation should speak for itself. In a perfect world that would be the case.

But in practice it doesn’t work that way: in today’s world, your professional reputation is largely based on your Internet image. Furthermore, there are a lot of dentists out there: nearly 200,000 as of 2017, according to the American Dental Association. That averages out to sixty-one dentists for every 100,000 people in the United States.

So there’s a lot of competition.

The vast majority of would-be patients make up their minds about your practice based on what they find about you on the Internet. You can influence your Internet reputation with strategies known collectively as Online Reputation Management, or ORM.

It begins with the information you choose to present on your website: your services in particular, but also your bio, and what you share on its blog. Your website combines with what others have said about you on review sites, message boards, and so on. Taken together, it forms your Internet reputation.

A technique called search engine optimization, or SEO, helps your practice to rank higher in search results. When it comes to search engine results, the first page is the gold standard. It’s the most important, because most users don’t go beyond it.

SEO and your Internet reputation have a direct impact on the profitability of your practice. Together they increase traffic  to your website, and in turn bring new patients to your office.

ProspectaMarketing uses the tools of Internet search marketing to reach key prospects seeking what your dental practice has to offer. We bring a unique and thorough approach that 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.

Mobile First! Your Practice Website

Everyone wants to keep their teeth and gums in good working condition. When they find a dentist they like and trust, patients are likely to not just stick with that practice but to tell their family and friends, all to the benefit of that practice.

But word of mouth is no longer enough. A dental practice’s website remains its most important marketing tool. It’s important to remember that your website should not be a static thing. It’s more than just a digital business card.

A new website design strategy is known as mobile first. That means a website is conceived and built with smart phones and tablets as the primary devices accessing them. Google is leading the way in this idea. The search engine giant says its algorithm will be changing to index mobile websites first. They’ll continue to index desktop sites, but the trend is clear: if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you are likely to rank lower in search results.

Another trend to pay close attention to is online chat. Did you know there by one estimate, a staggering eight and a half billion text messages are sent every day, in the United States alone? If you haven’t already, your practice can take advantage of this by sending appointment reminders and other messages via text. Chances are your patients will be expecting it.

We described in our previous post how video is more important than ever to your practice’s website. Nine out of ten users say that they have been influenced in their decision-making by the videos they’ve watched on practice websites. The lesson from this is clear.

You can keep up with these and other online dental trends with ProspectaMarketeing. , a company specializing in using the Internet to find new patients for dental practices. We bring a unique and thorough approach that 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.

Video Content And Your Website

News flash: no one uses the Yellow Pages anymore.

All right, so that isn’t exactly news. Those heavy old phone company listings have long since gone the way of the dinosaur. To find information about virtually anything, including local dental practices, everyone turns to search engines like Google. And that means the online presence of your dental practice is more important than ever before. In fact, it can make or break you.

The centerpiece of your online presence is your dental practice website. This is where you strut your stuff: you describe yourself and your team, the services your offer, and provide your office hours and location.

It is also where you share useful content that site visitors can access for free. This content is important, and it comes in several forms. One is your blog. If a site visitor finds something free and useful via your blog, you just might get a new patient.

Just as important as your blog, and maybe more so, is video. In fact, it can be integrated into your blog. Video is, across the board, the most popular form of content on the Internet. Studies show that website visitors spent up to 88% more time on a site if it contains video, and increases organic traffic from search engines by more than 150%.

What kind of videos can you incorporate for your own website? Draw on your expertise. You can go on camera to answer questions about dentistry, or about your staff and office. You can ask patients to describe some of the procedures they have undergone in your office, and their successful outcomes. Videos like this, inserted strategically throughout your site, are a compelling way to deliver your message.

They don’t need to be fancy, either. You don’t have to hire a movie crew – you can shoot them with your smartphone. Upload the finished videos to YouTube and embed them on your site. It won’t cost you a dime, and has great potential for bringing in new patients.

And who knows? Your video just might go viral!

You can keep up with these and other trends in dentistry with ProspectaMarketeing.  We specialize in using the Internet to find new patients for dental practices with a unique and thorough approach that provides visibility, financial accountability and ongoing refinement and improvement. To find out 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.

Trending: Reviews and Reputations in Dentistry

Industry prognosticators are constantly looking into their crystal balls to identify social and business trends – and that includes dentistry. The dentistry trends that many of them see include the ever-growing importance of online reviews, and the online reputation of your dental practice.

Every dental practice loves to see new patients coming in the door, and leaving the office happy enough to tell others about their experience. But dentistry is more competitive than ever, so word-of-mouth is no longer enough.

How do you go about getting more positive online reviews for your practice? The best place to start is on your website. It’s essential that your site provides enough interesting and useful information to give visitors a reason to stay.

It also needs to be easy to navigate. One effective review technique is to include links on images that take visitors to a section for posting reviews. Listings on third party sites like Yelp and Angie’s List is also a good way of increasing your visibility.

A downside to encouraging reviews, of course, are the negative ones. They are inevitable. What should you do when you get one? The best response is to write a professional, non-emotional reply that acknowledges the issues raised. If it needs to go beyond that, take it offline.

It is perilous to ignore negative reviews. To do so suggests you don’t care, and impacts your online reputation. Consider this: vast majority of consumers who were asked – ninety-four percent – said a negative online review turned them against a business. That statistic did not address dental practices specifically, but it is safe to assume that it applies.

The bottom line is that reviews matter, and negative reviews have an impact on your online reputation. You can stay ahead by monitoring your online reviews. There are various tools for doing this, including Google Alerts, a free service that lets you search the Internet for any mention of you or your practice. Once you’ve set yourself up, Google Alerts sends you an email whenever you’re mentioned.

You can keep up with trends in dentistry with ProspectaMarketing. We specialize in using the Internet to find new patients for dental practices with a unique and thorough approach that provides visibility, financial accountability and ongoing refinement and improvement. To find out 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.

It’s All About the Patients: Online Marketing for Dentists

A simple truth about dentistry in 2018 is that to succeed, practices must have a strong online presence. Like so much else in modern life, the Internet has revolutionized the way people find information, consumer products, and services – and that includes dentistry.

Eighty percent of American adults are active on social media. And they love their mobile devices: nearly all of those who were asked said they prefer finding information about a practice on a smart phone app, rather than use that smart phone to call to that practice.

It follows that your practice website should be mobile-friendly. Most users will leave a dentist’s site (or any other site, for that matter) if it isn’t easy to understand and use.

Clearly, online marketing is a simple fact of life for modern dental practices. And it’s all about your patients: your current ones, and those you’d like make new ones.

One of the most critical things to do is make it easy to find out practice online. Your website must be user-friendly, in the sense that it is easy to navigate, and provides the information that new patients will be looking for. Examples are your services, a map showing the physical location of your practice, and downloadable patient forms.

To make your website stand out from the crowd, you should have it designed and optimized by professionals. Your expertise, after all, is dentistry, not marketing. You outsource your lab work, so you should not hesitate to outsource the marketing of your practice.

ProspectaMarketing specializes in using the Internet to find new patients for dental practices. Our unique and thorough approach 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.

Find and Keep New Patients: Online Marketing for Dentists

Dentistry is a business, and like any other business, practices need a reliable core of existing patients and an influx of new ones. The trick is finding and attracting those new patients, especially when there are plenty of practices for people to choose from.

The best way to do this is to have an online presence. As with so much else today, most people use the Internet when they’re looking for something, whether it’s a pizza place or a dental practice.

All of us find new things on the Internet by using search engines like Google and Bing. We enter our search terms and scroll through the results. In the case of dentistry, determining factors include the physical location of a practice, the services it provides, and the insurance it accepts.

You can influence search results with Internet marketing, a general term that is designed to put your practice before as many potential patients as possible.

The foundation of any modern business is its website. That’s where people will find out who you are and what you have to offer them. But how do they find the site, if they’ve never heard of you? A technique called search engine optimization, or SEO, means using the words and phrases that people enter on the search engines, so that your practice ranks as high as possible in search results.

Once people find your site, you want to keep them there. You do that by providing the information they’re looking for, like whether your practice provides certain services – orthodontics, for example.

They’re likely to have general questions about dentistry, too. They view you as an expert. You can leverage that in your favor by making your site a go-to resource for dental information, with blog posts about a wide range of dental topics.

It is critical that your site is designed to look professional, be easy to use, and stocked with valuable information. If it isn’t, site visitors won’t hang around; they’ll go back to their search engine results and visit the site of one of your competitors.

ProspectaMarketing specializes in online marketing for dentistry. We use best practices to find our clients new patients. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. To find out 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.

Trends in Dental Practice Marketing

There are more than two million blog posts published every single day, according to industry observers. (Before continuing, we’d like to thank you for taking the time to find and read this one.)

Website content (like this) is a staple of marketing on the Internet, and that certainly includes dentistry. It influences not only how new patients are drawn to your practice, but how practices complete and evolve.

The rules are constantly changing. So we’re going to gaze into our crystal ball and see where dental practice marketing might be, just a year or two down the road.

Content Remains King
Providing useful information and engaging posts on your practice site has been essential for a long time. That isn’t going to change anytime soon. In fact, it is going to be more important, because there is going to be a greater need than ever to have a loyal client base that values the services you provide.

One big reason for this is, quite simply, fewer and fewer people are expected to have comprehensive dental health care. Seeing the dentist every six months may become more optional than essential. Therefore, it is critical to build that loyal client base and demonstrate that what you provide is essential.

Your Online Reputation
This follows from the previous point. Reliance on social media – to find your practice, and find out about it – is increasing, and with the steady growth of mobile devices, is easier and more important, than ever.

That means that you cannot overlook your internet reputation – the way your practice is seen online. Social media, and review sites like Yelp and Healthgrades, are how most potential new patients will form an opinion about your practice. You need to get your current patients to provide positive, and honest, feedback about their experiences with your practice.

Be Mobile
More than ever before, your practice website must be mobile device-friendly.

As we described here in February, more Internet users are choosing their Smartphones and other mobile devices over laptops and desktop computers. Before much longer, an ever-larger segment is expected to be using mobile devices almost exclusively.

Have questions or want help?
ProspectaMarketing specializes in finding new patients for dental practices using the Internet. Our unique and thorough approach 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.

 

Reputation Management in Dentistry

When people search for a new dentist, they first turn to customer review websites. These sites, such as Yelp, provide the real opinions and experiences of real people. Good or bad, past patients will rate a practice based on everything from dental services provided to interactions with the office staff; even to the appearance of the office itself.

The totality of these customer reviews – what they’re saying about your practice online – represents your online reputation. One bad review can have long-lasting implications. All those interconnected customer review and social media sites can magnify a single negative review; how you react to it is critical.

Reputation Management for a dental practice takes information from your practice’s website, from social media, and from patient comments on review sites and other message boards. This data makes up your online reputation profile, which drives the reputation of your practice with a positive narrative.

It’s a complex strategy, with the objective of enhancing your online reputation and bringing new patients to the practice. Fortunately, there are numerous software platforms that provide reputation management. While that means yet another business expense, it has become a necessity in today’s plugged in, 24/7 online world.

Most patients will have an opinion about your dental practice, even before they have their first appointment. Properly marketing your practice is essential. Prospecta Marketing specializes in using the Internet to find new patients for dental practices. To learn about what Prospecta Marketing can do for you, call 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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