by AdminPosted on Posted in local search

If you aren’t in “Trumpton” don’t expect to rank well for “dentist Trumpton” in Google search

Google search resultsAs a provider of SEO services for lots of dentists throughout the UK, we spend many hours trying to evaluate just how Google ranks websites.

One of the particularly fascinating areas is “local” search i.e. how Google determines where a business is physically located and whether it should feature in the “local” results on page one of Google.

These are the entries which are associated with a map of the businesses location and which often appear in a pack of seven near the top of page one – you will often see this referred to as “the 7 pack” in the SEO world. For obvious reasons, an entry here is very valuable for any business, including dental practices.

One of the key factors which Google appears to use to evaluate whether a business qualifies to appear in the “7 pack” is it’s location relative to the centrum of the nearest town. Other factors also play a large part, e.g. the location of the searcher relative to the business, the number of client reviews etc. However, one of the fundamental aspects is where a business is physically based.

So what does this mean for dentists?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Why too much focus on a single keyword can be detrimental

As an SEO practitioner with many years of experience working with dentists, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I know what the “money” keywords are when it comes to securing dental search rankings.

Gaining good Google positions for the main keywords is obviously important, however, it’s also key to understand that just going after a small set of very focused keywords can be detrimental and cause more difficulties than you might expect later on.

This is an example where a new client came to us for a website re-design which had previously been optimised solely for the term “cosmetic dentist”.

The site actually ranked top for this term in their particular location – however it didn’t rank for much else. Now whilst the “cosmetic” term is well-worth having, it is only one of the important ones. The more generic “dentist” term gets a lot more traffic and more targeted “implant”, “ortho” etc terms are also very well worthwhile.

The problems first came to light when the new client asked us to ensure that the new site would rank not just for the “cosmetic” term but also for the general dentist term along with a range of others. We could see that the existing site was “stuffed” with the cosmetic term, not just on the home page but virtually every other page of the site – so-much-so that I was surprised that the website hadn’t fallen foul of the “Panda” aspect of the Google algorithm updates which is designed to penalise such practices. However, they seemed to have escaped it.

So for the new website, we cleared out most of the cosmetic keyword bias and introduced a much more balanced range. The plan was to maintain the cosmetic keyword ranking but hopefully also start showing for a broader range of terms.

What happened next?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Why old websites, even those which rank well, under-perform

mistake signI regularly see old dental websites sat high on page one of Google looking somewhat ill-maintained and quite unappealing. They likely rank well because they are on an old, well-established domain name and with plenty of decent quality links built up naturally over the years. Sites like this can still rank well even though they are out-of-date from a design and usability perspective.

The risk here is that the dentist who owns the website is lulled into a false sense of security by the good Google position and because the site probably still pulls in some new patients; despite being rather poor. What the owner probably doesn’t understand is the huge potential being missed and what could actually be realised in terms of new patient acquisition if the site was updated. Let’s look into this a little bit deeper….

Bounce rate

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by AdminPosted on Posted in email marketing

Why your patient email list is particularly valuable

One area which always surprises me when starting out on new digital marketing contracts for dentists, is how few practices actually have a well-developed and managed email contact list.

Often we will have examples where there is a partial list loosely maintained in the practice management software, but infrequently do we find a full contact list which has been built up and maintained for the purpose of marketing to existing patients.

Why is this important?

I don’t need to discuss in this blog why the dental market is so much more competitive these days; suffice to say that it is and that everyone in the business of dentistry knows about it. We are seeing the average salary for dental professionals decreasing markedly and an increasing number of practice closures as competition increases.

Consequently, more-so than ever before, the need to acquire new patients *and* hold on to existing ones is business critical. As we’ve discussed elsewhere in this dental marketing blog, it is commonplace for dentists to focus too heavily on new patient acquisition and neglect existing patient retention. Other than the standard six monthly recall, nothing much else happens. This leaves a huge window of opportunity for other suppliers to muscle in on your clients, particularly those who will be shopping around for more “high-end” cosmetic or restorative procedures.

So what can you do about this?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in local search

It pays to make sure your dental practice data is set up correctly!

Google + local for dentistsGoogle provides a number of tools and resources to help local businesses get found in the search results and to help optimise and analyse the performance of their websites.

All websites should be associated with Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics as standard. Additionally, all local businesses, dentists included, should register their business data with Google to ensure the best chance of appearing in the local search results and that their location appears accurately on Google maps.

Is the process straightforward?

Yes – and no. Over the last couple of years, Google has gone through a number of changes with its “local” business profiling and it’s fair to say that some of the changes have been somewhat confusing. Initially you could register you business via Google “Places” and in fact many still refer to it as that. However, Google then introduced it’s “social” aspect, Google Plus (or G+) and progressively integrated this with the local business set-up. So now we have Google Plus Local and Google “My Business” as (hopefully) the concluding episodes of this rather convoluted process.

So if you’ve followed the transition closely over the last few years, then you can work your way through it. However, for regular dental business owners, it may not be quite so straightforward and a little bit of experienced help would not go amiss.

As a consequence of this confusing transition, we see lots of mistakes made by dentists when they’ve attempted to set up their Google business data. In fact we see lots of mistakes made by dental marketing agencies too! Unfortunately, these mistakes, which you might consider to be relatively trivial, can cause an awful lot of problems and actually prevent a business from ever appearing in the local search results.

What can happen if your Google local business data is incorrect?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Don’t get caught out by companies who don’t have SEO as a core competence.

Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my big concerns in the dental marketing environment is companies who pretend to know about certain topics but really don’t.

Over the last couple of years there has been a proliferation of so-called experts and gurus lining up to sell marketing services to the unsuspecting dental community. More often than not, these providers actually do something else but see services such as SEO and social media as something which they can bolt-on to their service offer to make more cash.

There are video companies who now do some SEO work (badly), trainers and treatment coordinators who sell social media and email-marketing, print companies who try to build websites and more. In most cases they are good at their core competence but are they really delivering with the other “services” they decided to bolt-on?

So as a dental professional looking to ensure competence, good value and return from such services, how do you actually go about validating what suppliers can (and can’t) do? In this article I’m going to take a look at search engine optimisation (SEO) as a case in point. This is because SEO, done badly, can be really detrimental for a business and very difficult to recover from. So it’s one service which you really do need to get right.

Here are six questions to ask your potential dental SEO provider:

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Why achieving good search ranking takes time and which factors affect it.

As we’ve discussed on this dental marketing blog in previous posts, a website is really only of any use once it starts to rank on page one in Google searches i.e. when you actually start to be found. The benefits then increase as the site progresses up to the top half of the results page with the main goal being a place in the top three.

Whilst position one is still clearly the best, we know that people who are searching for services typically want more than one option – so they are very likely to take a closer look at the top three results and often further down the page too. So even if you’re not in the top slot, then at least you’re “in the mix” if you are there or thereabouts.

So the initial objective for a new dentist’s website is to get to page one and then upwards from there. But how long should a new website owner expect this to take and what factors affect it?

So which factors affect how a website ranks in Google?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Managing back-links to your dental website – what you need to know.

Whilst “content is king”, good quality back-links are still the holy-grail when it comes to improving the Google ranking for your website. Although perhaps not quite as dominant a ranking factor these days, it is widely considered that good links are still top of the web marketing wish-list when it comes to finding ways to push past your competitors’ websites in the search results.

But in the quest for new links, most small-businesses have failed to realise that they also need to monitor and maintain their existing link profile; not just seek out new ones. With the advent of Google algorithm changes (namely the “Penguin” updates) which are specifically designed to identify and penalise websites with poor quality link profiles, it makes sense to check your link profile periodically just in case something untoward is going on there.

So you think you don’t have any poor quality links?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in email

A nifty technique to broaden your email marketing reach

I always view a client/supplier relationship as one which promotes mutual success. Simply put, when our clients do well as as a result of the working together with us, then we usually do well too.

Such a relationship typically results in us being given first shout at new projects and also referrals to the client’s colleagues and friends. So it is worth making every effort to ensure a successful and profitable relationship.

This is also true when it comes to sharing ideas about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to marketing a dental practice. Whilst it’s fair to say that most of the information exchange flows from us to our clients (after all, it’s our job), occasionally some great ideas filter back to us from the client side. Where it’s appropriate, and without betraying any obvious secrets, we can then leverage on those good ideas to benefit other clients too.

Here is one such idea that came to us from a client which she uses to excellent effect in her MailChimp email campaigns – namely business co-promotion. (Note – some would actually call this cross-marketing but I’m not going to get hung up on definitions here as the objective is pretty clear).

How does co-promotion work?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

How the use of “keywords” within website text has changed significantly and how *not* to do it.

are keywords importantSometimes we forget that clients may not be as close to the ever changing landscape of web design and SEO as we, the designers and search marketers are.

For example, updates to how Google evaluates and ranks websites are fairly clear to us but may not be so apparent for the website owner. This is fine where we control all aspects of  a new website design as we simply build-in best practice as we progress; however, where the client is also involved, for example in generating all of the text content for the site, problems can arise.

This was amply brought home to me recently when I looked back at a website where we had provided a framework for a client who wished to add all of the text content themselves using the content management system. Normally we do all of this, ensuring that each web page is optimised correctly for Google. However, in this particular case, the practice manager advised that she knew a lot about SEO and would work this into the text that she was going to produce.

The practice had a very tight budget for the new site and decided to save money by using their own resources to generate as much of the web content as they could. This was fine in principle, however problems soon became evident.

Keyword stuffing

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