by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Dentists can now interact with dental patients directly from Google search results!

There is a little known but very effective feature available in your Google My Business Profile which allows you to interact directly with patients who are searching online for your dental business or services. This is known as ‘Google Business Messaging’ and is very well-worth a try, particularly as it’s not being used by many dentists in the UK. So it’s a great opportunity to differentiate.

Why use Google My Business Messaging?

Here’s what the search giant themselves says about the feature:

“Google My Business messaging allows customers viewing your listing to message you directly. Respond to questions, share information, and quickly connect, for free”

The feature is known to work best for small to medium size businesses such as dentists, opticians and hairdressers who are probably best placed to give near instant answers to their clients. This type of contact is also much more preferable to delayed emails and potentially missed ‘phone calls.

How do you set up and use Google My Business Messaging?

Initially this service was only available to users of Android devices but is now available on IOS (Apple) and desk-top too.

To get started you first need to download the app, login to your Google My Business page and turn on the messaging options in the customer’s menu. You can also manage your messages in this section of the app. If you prefer to manage your messages in a desk-top environment (this may be better for the reception team) then Google also made this possible earlier this year.

What will patients see on Google?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Instagram

Budget and resource considerations for dentists

Over the last couple of years there has been a flurry of activity with dentists joining Instagram. You may remember similar a number of years ago when there was a similar flocking to Facebook?

So what has happened with all of those accounts and how many dentists are actually getting lots of new patients from Instagram? Well the reality is, very few indeed. So what’s gone on and why hasn’t Instagram become the panacea for new patient acquisition promised by some dental marketing agencies and written about in more than one book?

Let’s take a look…..

Understanding organic reach

This is absolutely critical and explains why simply creating an account and posting content to Instagram won’t instantly lead to new patients getting in touch. The harsh reality is that simply because you’ve posted content on the platform, doesn’t mean that anyone will necessarily see it. Just like Facebook, you need to gain a following of people to stand a chance of reaching anyone with your content. Even then, there is no guarantee at all that your content will be seen, even by those who followed you.

It’s also important to remember that Instagram is owned by Facebook. With Facebook, organic reach (the average number of people who liked your content who actually see your posts) has been reduced to less than 4% – so that’s less than 4 in every 100 people! Facebook did this to support their “pay to play” plans; forcing the use of their paid advertising for those who are serious about getting their content in front of potential purchasers.

Whilst organic reach on Instgram hasn’t been curtailed as much as Facebook yet, it’s going that way quickly as Facebook again pushes businesses to pay for the privilege of using their platforms. So even if you’ve managed to get quite a few followers, the large majority of them aren’t seeing what you post.

What do we see in conversion data (new patient enquiries)?

The analytics data we run for many dentists shows us how many new patients enquiries (conversions) come from the various channels used to promote their services i.e. how many visits come from Google searches, paid ads on Google and also from social media, including Instagram.

It’s very clear from the data across numerous accounts that even those dentists who have quite active social media presence, tend to see very limited new patient enquiries coming organically from those channels (i.e. not via paid ads).

What does this mean for your marketing budget?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Analytics for your business website – what you need to know to maintain and improve results

Do you rely on your website marketing agency to advise how your website is performing; do you check it yourself or perhaps you don’t check it at all?

What we tend to see when new dental clients come to us is that most of them don’t really know too much about how their website is working and they either don’t check it all or rely on minimal information from their design and marketing agency. The latter tends to be an automatically generated report which shows a few trends but little else.

So what should you be doing? Given that your website is perhaps the most important asset in your digital marketing tool-bag, it makes very good sense to ensure that it is performing optimally. This doesn’t mean just relying on your web team, there are some important elements you can cross-check yourself. In today’s blog we will look at six key performance metrics which you can check monthly within Google Analytics and Search Console – two free and powerful pieces of software which you can easily install on your website.

Traffic

This is clearly an important “high level” metric to help you understand how your website is growing, however it’s not quite as simple as looking at the overall traffic to your site. You need to look into Google Analytics to segment the traffic by channel so you can see how many visitors are coming from paid ads, from organic Google searches and so on.

It is also important to understand if the traffic is “good” i.e. is it leading to new enquires and treatments. This leads on to perhaps the most important measurement known as conversions (or goals).

Conversions

If your web agency is diligent and genuinely wants you to know how well your website is delivering, they will have set up conversions (or goals) in Analytics for you. These are recordings of specific events, for example where a contact form has been completed to contact the practice. Understanding your traffic stats is all well and good but you also need to know how conversions are running in conjunction with this. For example, it could be the case that your marketing agency launched a poorly targeted social media campaign which has resulted in website traffic, but that traffic isn’t converting into meaningful enquiries – careful analysis of your data will reveal this.

There are all sorts of tools within analytics which allow you to dig deep and see how conversions resulted, for example you can track a user’s route through your site from their entry page to the point at which they contacted you. Similarly you can also analyse where users left you site without contacting you. This can be really useful to help optimise your website content to improve performance.

Here at Dental Media we always insist that website growth is all about traffic (the right sort) AND conversions.

Conversion rate

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Relationship marketing to promote patient engagement and trust from the get go….

Many dental websites follow the same pattern in that they follow a purely transactional approach to selling services. What I mean by this is that they have the usual introductory pages, contact form, a list of treatment pages, a few offers and not much else. This is fine for letting potential new patients know where you are and what you provide but that’s about it – those websites then tend to do little else to convince a new patient to actually pick up the ‘phone or complete the contact form to take the next step towards treatment.

We also see this in the huge proliferation of dental social media ads that litter Facebook and Instagram these days – most of them seem to offer all sorts of incentives to sell Invisalign, implants etc at ‘knock-down’ prices as more and more dentists join the race to sell treatments. But is this the best way to build a sustainable business?

Transactional processing of this nature is quite bland and is akin to the way that retailers sell mobile ‘phones and groceries – they focus solely on the benefits of the product rather than trying to build a relationship with the purchaser.

This is fine for certain types of businesses and relies on their products being safe, reproducible and fit for the intended purpose. This presents a low risk to buyers and once they are familiar with the product, they’ll happily buy it from anyone as long as the price is right. But is this suitable for dentistry and would you actually want your marketing and website to support that approach? I would suggest that it’s not really the best way to go and won’t build a sustainable patient list into the future.

For dentistry, we need to pursue an approach which is known as “relationship” marketing rather than simply trying to sell treatments using a purely transactional approach. The trust you build with the purchaser/patient is somewhat different in dentistry in that the “product” is different each time, is potentially being delivered by a different person on the team and can’t easily be returned if it’s sub-standard!

Hopefully we can see that dentistry isn’t really suited to simple transactional selling and will be much more sustainable when you sell your services rather than just treatments. Here we are trying to build a relationship between the buyer and seller, significantly more so than a simple transaction when goods/products change hands. The patient has to trust you and your team, particularly if they are to keep you as their dentist into the future.

Now that we have an appreciation of transactional selling versus relationship marketing, how should you position your website and other marketing assets to support that approach?

An engaging, personalised website

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Promoting a new dental business to hit the ground running

Perhaps the largest part of setting up a new dental business is to ensure that new patients will come through the doors as soon as they open. To achieve this, a well-considered marketing plan needs to be developed and implemented well in advance.

Over the years the team at Dental Media has helped hundreds of dentists across the UK build their businesses successfully; indeed we are currently developing new websites and marketing campaigns for several dentists who are currently setting up new squats as well as those who are already well-established.

I thought it would be useful to share the main components of a typical marketing programme for a squat practice, albeit each circumstance will have its own specific requirements depending on the business objectives, location, demographic target and so on.

Let’s take a look at the marketing channels you need to consider and how to make them work best for you. I’ll start with the digital techniques and then also touch on more traditional mechanisms which still have value.

Launch an excellent website

Done well, a new practice website will probably be the best marketing investment you make. Properly maintained and updated, it will continue to bring a steady flow of new patients to your practice and also provide a very useful source of information for existing patients.

When setting up a new business, you need to start work on your website at least three to four months in advance to ensure that it’s ready to launch on time. You may also wish to use a holding page on your website domain to notify new patients that the practice is opening and to encourage them to register their interest in advance.

One thing which is very important to understand is that a website alone will not simply work without ongoing optimisation in the search engines. In the UK this is primarily Google and ideally you need your site to be up there amongst the top three positions. So please seek advice on how best to achieve this and also how much you need to budget for your own location.

To give a rough idea for budgeting purposes, a new website will likely cost anything between £3 – £5k and search engine optimisation anything from £300/month upwards. Expert assistance in these areas is not cheap but is well worthwhile.

Claim and optimise your Google My Business Page

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Arty, minimalist websites might look great but….

We’ve recently received several requests from dentists to build websites which are “minimalist”, “artistic” and “don’t look like a dental website”. This seems to be a recurring theme in the last year or so and one which is not really well-informed or very useful in my experience. So why is that?

Historically we’ve built a couple of dental websites which have been “off theme” at the specific request of the dentist and to be frank, they’ve not performed as well as “mainstream” sites either in Google or in terms of user-experience. One of them was briefed to be “like Apple, not like a dentist” and the others were based on high-end art dealers through to fashion-designers and watch makers. I stress that these projects were completed to very prescriptive client briefs.

We employ a range of data collection techniques to evaluate the performance of all of our client’s websites and it became clear that for the examples mentioned above, that the performance wasn’t what we would normally expect. We could see that in numerous cases, visitors would land on the sites and then leave quite quickly.

Further investigation, including a survey of the dentist’s existing patients, showed that numerous users didn’t think that they’d landed on a dentist’s website whereas others understood that the site was dental, but didn’t like how it tried to be too “posh”. What they actually wanted was a high-quality website which was instantly “dental” and gave clear, useful information in an easy-to-use format. Not an esoteric art installation.

This is just one lesson we’ve learned in over 20 years of web design and it’s valuable “real life” experience we can bring to bear when advising new clients; including what works well and what is likely to fail when it comes to meeting the expectations of users (and Google) with your practice website. Incidentally, we’ve since rebuilt those websites mentioned above and they now perform extremely well.

Keep it ‘dental’

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Avoid big monthly fees for simple dental website compliance checks

When marketing companies hook dentists into paying monthly fees for services they don’t really need, it’s somewhat questionable in my opinion. One such example is where dental web companies make a big deal over website compliance issues and then sell monthly checks as part of an expensive compliance package.

The truth is that ensuring this type of compliance is really quite straightforward and you don’t need to pay big fees to have it checked monthly for you. Neither do you need a little symbol on your website to say that you comply.

What’s happening here is that those marketing companies have tried to differentiate themselves as a compliance ‘experts’ by creating the illusion that achieving such compliance is difficult and needs constant attention and maintenance. The reality is that whilst compliance is clearly very important, achieving and maintaining it is not – and you certainly don’t need self-styled experts to do it for you.

Practice website compliance – the reality

The level of compliance you need depends on the type of website you operate and any good web designer should ensure the correct level of compliance in the initial development of the site. For example, ecommerce websites have some fairly onerous compliance requirements around taking payments online; whereas the compliance issues for a simple business site are less strict.

Dental websites fall somewhere between these levels; they need to comply with the same standards as other business websites but also have some additional requirements coming from compliance bodies such as the GDC. However, those standards are straightforward and easy enough to implement and maintain.

Compliance issues to know about

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

Why agency managed Facebook and Instagram likely won’t bring in new patients

A dental practice is typically a busy place and like most businesses, team members are expected to multi-task to ensure things get done to move the business forward. Effective management usually means that resources are quite stretched and when something new crops up, e.g. pushing forward with practice marketing, it can be tempting to outsource it, simply because everyone in the local team is occupied. But is this a valid strategy?

Whilst outsourcing would be perfectly sensible for some marketing initiatives, e.g. SEO for Google ranking which has a strong technical element; when it comes to growing the practice’s presence on social media, it certainly isn’t.

In today’s blog we’ll take a closer look at why the day-to-day business of building your dental brand using social media is by far best handled by your own team and not handled by a third-party agency working on your behalf. This is very important to understand if you want to make the best of social media for promoting your business.

Why use social media anyway?

I know a lot of dentists who openly state their dislike of social media and understandably so. Some “old school” practice owners don’t really “get it” but take it on board reluctantly as a necessary business tool. Others avoid it completely simply because they are so worried about picking up bad reviews and other adverse comments.

However, these days it is very important to realise that most people seeking out new products or services will frequently cross-reference a business’s social media channels as well as their website. They do this to look for comments about the business, reviews and also to gain a real-time sense of who they will be dealing with. This is often known as seeking “social proof” and it’s proven to be a key part of a person’s buying cycle. It makes sense that if there is no social proof available, then that buying cycle could easily be interrupted.

Given then that these days there is a clear need for an active social media presence, why not just outsource it?

The huge problem with agency led social media

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Local SEO – Key Features Dentists Should Know

As you are very likely aware, getting your dental website prominent on to the first page of Google search results is very important. New patient acquisition from the web is second only to word-of-mouth referrals and so any business wishing to avoid or at least minimise paying significant sums of money for paid ads, will have a solid ‘organic’ SEO strategy in place.

The first page of Google is split into different sections and I’ve covered this in depth elsewhere in this blog. One of the key areas where you need to seek prominence for your dental business is in the local or ‘map’ listings – this is the area near the top of the page where typically three results appear along with a map detailing their actual location. In addition to the map, each of the results is displayed with a link to the business website, another link for directions to it and, very importantly, the number of reviews the business has gained.

These ‘local’ results are very prominent and catch the eye of users very quickly. Data suggests that over a third of all traffic from Google now originates from people clicking on one of the results and so it’s very clear why getting your website into this local pack as it’s known, should be a key objective. But how do you go about achieving that?

In today’s SEO blog we will take a look at 10 of the key ranking signals Google uses when determining which websites to include in the local results on page one. Generating these signals comes with differing degrees of difficulty; some you will be able to achieve yourself, other elements will very likely need the assistance of a dental SEO professional.

Let’s make a start with the fundamentals of local SEO ranking for dentists:

Set up your ‘Google My Business’ Page

Google provides a little corner of the web for all business where basic information for that business can be added. Setting up this page is fundamental as it lets customers and Google know what the business is about and key information about location, opening times, types of services offered etc. You can (and should) upload photographs to show people different aspects of your facilities and services. For a dentist, this could range from pictures of the outside of the dental surgery, through to indoor shots showcasing your surgeries and equipment.

You must not skimp on this set-up and the consistency of the data you enter there is very important too. There are plenty of guides on-line and as part of our SEO auditing service, Dental Media can also assist to make sure you get this key information absolutely spot on.

Name, Address, Phone Number Consistency (NAP)

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Understanding the limitations of dental website CMS

We are regularly asked by new dental clients if they will be able to edit their new website; the answer to which is, “it depends”. This is an important question and one which is often misunderstood by dentists when they sign up to a new site development project. So today’s blog will try to clear up any misconceptions about website content management systems (CMS), including the main advantages and disadvantages.

Let’s start by taking a look at what a content management system (CMS) actually is and how it works.

Website CMS explained

A CMS is a system which allows some or all of the layout and content of a website to be changed online via a management portal and theoretically without the need for your web designer to get involved (I’ll come back to that last point in a moment). A CMS works using a scripting language (“code”) typically PHP, used in conjunction with a database, typically MySQL. All of the website content is stored within the database and the html which makes the website appear in a web browser is rendered in real-time when a user looks at the site.

Before the invention of CMS, dynamic code and databases; websites were typically built using “static” html code i.e. not generated on-the-fly by a scripting language and without a database. These “traditional” types of websites appear exactly the same as websites using PHP/MYSQL and a CMS but what goes on behind the scenes, often called the “back-end”, is quite different. I should say at this point that there are still a lot of advantages of static html websites e.g. speed and security, over CMS driven sites, but these come along with the disadvantage of needing a web designer to makes changes to the website periodically, even relatively simple ones.

How easy is a CMS website to use and maintain?

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