Using Your Name To Brand Your Dental Practice?

Why it may not be a good idea….

Here at Dental Media we’ve had the pleasure of working with some dentists for over twenty years and understandably, some are now entering retirement and selling their practices. This may sound like a relatively straightforward thing to do; recruit the right advisors, try to secure the best price and move on.

However, in three or four fairly recent cases, we’ve had to help with a complicating factor that the dentist very likely didn’t envisage when setting up in business all those years ago.

The issue I’m referring to is where the dentist used their own name as a key part of their branding, website domain, logo, signage, stationery and so forth. For example ‘Semple Dental’ (fictional) where www.sempledental.co.uk might be the chosen domain name.

This is all well and good where Mr or Mrs Semple is in charge and progressively growing their business, building their Google presence with hundreds of carefully crafted links and using their brand across all of their various channels of communication. But what happens when the business comes to be sold on? Here that personalisation of the brand becomes quite a complicating factor and one we’ve had to help incoming dentists overcome on several occasions quite recently.

In this circumstance not only do you have to change signage, stationery and all of those other markers, you also have to completely re-work the web assets. e.g. the website, blog and Google links, to represent the new practice and new domain name. It is highly unlikely that ‘Semple Dental’ will be appropriate for the incoming owner and consequently those assets will all need to be switched across to something more appropriate.

Logos, signage and stationery changes are a chore and can be quite costly, but at least it’s relatively quick to do. More complicated is switching a dental website and all of the assets that go with that e.g. the domain name, email addresses etc.

For sure the trickiest part is switching a well-established website with prominent Google rankings on to a completely new domain name. If this is not done diligently, then search ranking positions can crash completely and take the new owner back to square one with their web presence. Even when the switchover is done expertly and using the guidelines recommended by Google, it’s really time-consuming and hence not cheap to do. It can also mean 4 or 5 weeks of ranking disruptions and still with a risk that the rankings of the former website may not be fully re-established. This task should not be under-estimated and really does require expert assistance.

Portable branding with an eye on the future

Whilst you may wish to use your own name to brand your dental practice, it’s recommended to use something more generic if possible – for example trumptondental.co.uk, redbeachdental.co.uk etc etc – you will see the idea. Not only can you make this much more geographically appropriate and appealing, but it’s also way more portable come the time of a future sale.

In particular, your new owner isn’t compelled to switch away to a complete new name and also the costs to facilitate such a switch are no longer there. New buyers are increasingly aware of this and working it into their negotiations. So please think twice before naming your new dental practice and keep in mind the issue of portability down the track. It may be quite a long way off but come the day you’ll probably be glad you did, as will your potential purchaser!

If you have any questions about moving or upgrading your dental practice website whilst keeping your Google rankings intact, please contact the web team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for experienced advice.