by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

What should you expect from your dental SEO campaign?

rising Google positionsOne of the most frequently asked questions of my team at Dental Media is “how quickly can you get my website to number 1 in Google?” Whilst this is a fair and perfectly understandable question, there is no definite answer. In this blog we’ll take a look at the question of “time to rank” and why many different factors can affect it.

Realistic expectations and transparency

Many digital marketing (“SEO”) companies still proclaim that they can get your website to the number one position in double-quick time; but the reality is that they can’t. It’s now fairly apparent to most business owners who know how Google works, that there are no “magic” schemes for gaining top ranking results and pushing too hard can get your website penalised irretrievably. The link schemes pushed so heavily by a couple of dental marketing companies a few years back are now defunct and have left many website owners stuck with Google penalties.

Google’s key objective is to present users with the websites which provide the best answers to their search queries – so you need to work hard to ensure that your site meets the quality criteria to achieve this. Undoubtedly this means hard work to build a great website in the first instance and then ongoing efforts to maintain it with new information and to build up its overall authority and relevance for Google. Genuinely there are no quick wins, but the huge rewards that a prominently ranked website can deliver, do make the efforts worthwhile.

So which factors come into play?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Helping your dental website project run smoothly.

planning-websitePerhaps surprisingly, many dentists have never had a website for their practice and consequently have no idea what they need to do when they finally get round to doing it.

Understandably it can feel like quite a daunting task, but with the assistance of an experienced dental web team at your side, there is nothing to worry about.

However, having said that, there are a few things which the practice needs to take responsibility for to help make sure that the website development runs smoothly and without delays. Let’s take a look at those things here.

Is your branding already available?

The “look and feel” of a website is heavily influenced by the businesses brand identity, i.e. the logo and associated colour scheme. It is well worthwhile considering this at the outset of the new website project – is the branding current and are you happy for it to be used on the new site or is a re-brand required? Perhaps there is no brand identity at all and one needs to be developed? If so this is a precursor to the website design and time needs to be allowed for in the development process. If you need to develop a logo from scratch or you wish to discuss a re-brand, then the Dental Media team will be pleased to guide you.

Website domain name

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by AdminPosted on Posted in email

Which email systems should you consider – pros and cons.

clicking on mouseEmail management is quite a thorny issue for dentists and dental practice managers to get to grips with. Legislative and regulatory bodies are quick to tell you that information must be transferred and stored securely but provide little or no guidance on how to achieve this.

Indeed, when it comes to email security, there is no 100% certainty given that there may be some part of the network that isn’t encrypted or under a secure data management regimen. So an element of pragmatism and practicality is usually necessary.

So what types of email systems are dentists currently using and what are the issues to consider?

Free email services

There are plenty of free email services available; GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL etc and perhaps surprisingly, lots of dentists still use one or more of these. Some even use them for the main practice address. Whilst these services are free and tend to offer a lot of storage space, they have some significant downsides. AOL and Yahoo have been prone to hacking whilst the privacy concerns surrounding GMail and how Google scan your content to serve ads. to your inbox, are equally worrying.

There is also the problem of appearing unprofessional if you emblazon a free email address across your website or use it for business correspondence.

So our guidance would be to think twice before using these services on a professional basis.

Domain hosted email

These are email addresses which come with your website hosting package, local email server or other remotely hosted email service. This the standard way to set up for a small business and different email addresses can be associated with different functions at the dental practice. For example there might be a generic address for the administration team, e.g. reception@trumptondental.co.uk and separate ones for the key personnel as required.

Accessing and sending emails

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Ranking implications for your practice website?

This is quite a technical topic but one which all small business owners need to be aware of, particularly if they have been running SEO campaigns for their websites. ‘Penguin’ is the name given to the part of Google’s anti-spam algorithm which seeks out manipulative practices designed to improve the search ranking of a website but using techniques which are outside of Google’s publishing guidelines. We discuss it on our blog in more detail here.

Given that there have been several Penguin updates over the last few years, what’s new here and why would you need to know about it in relation to your dental practice website?

Penguin the ‘reaper’!

As some dentists will testify, the original Penguin update back in 2012, devastated their websites and also left a severe dent in new patient enquiries.

These business owners unfortunately fell foul of two particular dental marketing companies who had gained a reputation for being able to manipulate Google. However, their techniques were not sustainable, Google caught up with them and their clients’ websites plummeted; sometimes so badly it was impossible to recover.

Since the original updates, Google has become even more stringent in tackling what it considers to be aggressive SEO techniques, sometimes penalising techniques which were historically considered to be safe. There are also examples of websites which have picked up lower quality back-links quite naturally i.e. not created by their SEO partner, and have subsequently been compromised as a result of this. These cases are rare but even where a website has maintained ethical SEO, within Google’s guidelines, there is still a small risk that it could be adversely affected by an arguably over zealous algorithm update. If you’d like to read more about the long history of Google’s search updates, take a look at the link below:

Google Algorithm Update History – MOZ

The move to “real time”

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Setting up your practice website and systems to encourage and manage patient referrals.

This article will not be of use to all dentists but it may serve to assist those who already take referrals or are considering doing so. This would typically be registered specialists, or dentists who have a great deal of experience in certain disciplines, for example placing implants. At Dental Media we provide a lot of services for this particular sector and consequently thought it would be useful to summarise some of the useful ethical marketing tools and techniques which are available.

A referral section for your website

Perhaps the most obvious technique is to implement a specific referral section for the practice website. There are a couple of ways to do this as follows:

The introductory “splash” page:

You may see the technique used whereby a splash page is presented as the website home page with a couple of links – “For Patients” and “For Dentists”, added there. However, data suggests that this isn’t the best way to go about it – bounce rates from splash pages set up like this tend to be quite high. They can be confusing to the general public and they also tend to fare quite badly in Google. So you can consider this method but it would not be our recommendation.

The dedicated referral section in the headline navigation structure:

This is the recommended way to proceed rather than trying to develop the “site within a site” concept. You should lead the referring dentists to a clear section which details your skills, services, testimonials, process etc but still as part of the overall website structure. This way, if a general user accidentally accesses the referral section, it’s a single click to get back to where they should be rather than being stuck in a world of clinical explanations etc. The referral section itself can incorporate all of the necessary information plus an encrypted contact form to submit information.

The dedicated website:

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Avoid these errors when embarking on a new website project.

mistake signHere are the top ten errors to avoid when starting out on your new dental practice website. You can use this list to check what your designer is proposing to deliver to make sure that your website doesn’t just look good, but functions well too.

Form over function

Unsurprisingly, web design is affected by trends and never more-so than the last couple of years where the “WordPress” template tsunami has hit. So many sites these days look very similar and are burdened by widgets, gadgets and effects which serve little purpose other than confusing users. Similarly we see lots of new dentist’s websites where the screen is taken up by a big, “flashy” image which leaves you pondering where the navigation actually is.

Clearly the aesthetics of a website are very important, but form needs to be balanced with function to ensure that your users can find the information they are looking for, quickly and efficiently. So by all means incorporate some great images and a few interesting effects on your website, but don’t forget to balance this with great website usability too.

No text for the search engines

This one often follows on from the point above where site owners go too minimalist in their approach. Home pages which have virtually no text content may look pretty but your users and the search engines won’t make much of them. Once again we have to balance form with function, so you need to include enough text for the users and also sufficient for Google to work with. Irrespective of what you may be told, minimalist page content does not work well for Google unless the website concerned has extremely strong authority and exceptional off-page SEO. This is also important for your treatment pages – several hundred words will typically work better in the search engines than a few short paragraphs.

Over-optimisation for search engines

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

How to measure the number of enquiries from your website.

tracking dental website conversionsThis article is a quick recap on “conversions” – the simple way to measure how many people get in touch with the practice by completing your contact form or by telephone enquiry.

Measuring the success of your dental website is so fundamental but you might be surprised to know that very few actually do it.

It seems that some digital marketing companies specifically avoid setting up conversion analyis and monthly reporting which is odd in that it doesn’t actually take a great deal of time to do. The cynic in me thinks that it may be a deliberate attempt to mask the success, or otherwise, of poor digital marketing campaigns and to generally limit transparency. Other companies will only set up conversion analysis if you subscribe to the their expensive packages which seems a bit cynical too.

But of course you need to know exactly how well those campaigns are performing, large or small, and conversion analysis is key to this. So my recommendation would be to insist on it and also to make sure that you have access to the data. Even if you don’t have time to read you SEO report in detail each month, a quick glance at the trend of conversions/enquiries is sufficient to give you an idea of what’s happening.

How do you set up conversion tracking?

First off you will need Google Analytics set up on your website. Other “enterprise” packages are available but they aren’t really suitable for dentists – the Google package is free and will give you all of the data you need to measure things like contact form completions, downloads of your e-book etc.

Once the Analytics code is installed on the site, it’s then a relatively straightforward process to tag and record various interactions which occur; so for example when a potential new patient completes your enquiry form. Like all of the data in Analytics, the information can be charted, trended and reported on a daily, weekly or monthly basis as required.

Differentiating the conversion sources

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

How Google is evolving and how it affects your dental website.

Google-logoGoogle is evolving constantly and it’s our role as digital marketers to try and make sense of the changes and adapt our clients’ websites and marketing campaigns so that they continue to perform well in the search results. I’ll be the first to admit that this is not as easy as it sounds, particularly as Google keeps the inner workings of its search engine a very closely guarded secret.

However, what we can do is monitor trends, research and test best practice techniques and generally work within the official web publishing guidelines to achieve best results. We also have the advantage of working with hundreds of dentists websites and the usage data which is available to us via tools such as Google Analytics. As such, even though we would never profess to know exactly how any search engine works, we can see empirically what works and what doesn’t.

With those thoughts in mind, I thought it would be useful to summarise my own thoughts on how Google has changed over the last five years and where it looks to be heading in the near future. Let’s start by taking a look at the SEO techniques which worked back in 2011 and the significant changes which have occurred since then.

SEO 2011 style

Back around 2011, it was still relatively easy to manipulate Google rankings with clumsy, mass link-building. Whilst Google was starting to tackle on-page spam such as keyword stuffing quite effectively and also taking down “thin” content sites via its “Panda” updates, mass links would still help websites rise to the top of the rankings.

A couple of dental marketing agencies focused on this and built a reputation as being SEO “ninjas” using these clumsy but effective techniques. For a short while their clients prospered, however Google was watching and clamped down hard on mass link-building with its “Penguin” update in 2012. As we’ve illustrated elsewhere in this blog, prominent dentists websites crashed out of Google literally overnight and their businesses suffered significantly as a result. Getting such penalised websites back into Google is a huge task and some never recovered; needing to start afresh with a new domain name.

The more conservative and considered SEO guys amongst us realised that the only way to make sustainable progress was to invest in quality – so making sure that both the on-page and off-page SEO work was within Google’s publishing guidelines and as natural as possible. This way we were able to keep all of our websites penalty free and also still prominently placed.

After Google’s link purge and close scrutiny of on-page content via their Penguin and Panda updates, it became clear that the only way to make safe progress in Google was via high-quality, time-consuming techniques – and this is even more apparent today.

SEO 2015 style…. and onwards

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

What are you really getting for your monthly fee?

In our last article we looked at the elements which make up a balanced digital marketing strategy and why you need a multi-channel approach to make headway in Google these days.

We reviewed why content generation, blogging and the use of social media are all important elements to complement “traditional” methods like gaining back-links, and why cherry-picking just one or two methods will dilute the overall effect.

We also discussed why it need not cost a king’s ransom to implement such a strategy and how the practice can work alongside the dental marketing specialist to get the job done.

Moving on from this, and with a good understanding of the tool-kit required, in this article we’ll take a look at why some of the monthly ‘SEO’ packages offered by UK dental marketing companies are extremely limited and won’t bring you the success they might suggest.

The typical monthly SEO package – why you need to question the value….

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Why the multi-channel approach works best for dental practice marketing.

Dentists or practice managers often ask “why do I need to do that” when we are discussing various digital marketing techniques for bringing new enquiries to the practice. So for example they may have heard about how links back to the website from elsewhere can boost search rankings, but may not have heard about the benefits of dental blogging or indeed where social media fits into the mix.

There is also the risk that key elements get dismissed because the practice owner has a personal dislike of it or has perhaps heard horror stories about adverse effect on businesses – social media is a classic example of this and many dentists still shy away for one reason or another. The downside of “cherry picking” only certain elements or channels from the basket of digital tools is that synergies get missed and the overall positive effect is diluted. Given this, I thought it would be useful to recap on the main elements of a digital marketing strategy that all businesses, not just dentists, should be using and how and why they work.

The practice website

This is pretty obvious and one element that progressive practices now realise must be up-to-scratch. However, there are still a surprising number of dentists who persists with antiquated versions or haven’t yet upgraded to mobile friendly frameworks. Being blunt, this is rather naive, particularly when you consider that, after word-of-mouth, websites generate the second highest level of new patient enquiries. Your website is your 24/7/365 shop window and if it’s poor, chances are your potential new patients will look elsewhere.

Search engine optimisation – SEO

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