by AdminPosted on Posted in WordPress

WordPress is very popular but still prone to hacking if you neglect maintenance

Over 40% of all websites are powered by WordPress which is undeniably the “go to” tool for professional websites these days. This is also the case in the dental sector with designers and website owners preferring the enhanced portability and technical capabilities of WordPress over hosted web builders such as Wix and Squarespace.

There’s no doubt that WordPress is an excellent website content management system (CMS) but it has a history of being compromised i.e. hacked. This is due to two main reasons – the first is that it is so popular and hence attracts a lot of attention from nefarious hacker groups. The second reason is primarily due to the “plugins” which WordPress uses to enhance core functionality. These are developed by a whole range of 3rd party coders and unfortunately the quality and maintenance varies considerably.

A typical WordPress website may use 6 or 7 plugins in addition to the core installation and it is these which are very often the root cause of hacking problems. Even reputable and popular plugins can be hacked as there is typically no overview regarding how secure or indeed how well coded they are in the first place.

How we select plugins to use with dentist’s websites

To be clear, there is no guarantee that a WordPress plugin will always be secure, even where you do your very best to make sure it is reputable and fully-supported. All we can do is be diligent to check the track record of the plugin, how widely it is used and its maintenance and security record before we consider using it for client’s websites.

Even after careful analysis and due diligence, things can still go wrong and unfortunately this has happened to most web companies, ourselves included. Whilst this is fortunately a very infrequent event here at Dental Media, just a few weeks ago a very popular and highly regarded website plugin we used on a few clients’ websites was hacked, even though we’d diligently kept it up-to-date. We spotted this very quickly and intervened to stop any permanent damage, but had we not had monitoring tools and mitigation processes in place, the effects could have been significantly worse.

We immediately reported the issue to WordPress and the developer who took fast corrective action; however, other than an apology and a retrospective fix, that’s all you get.

Outdated plugins – a huge risk

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Branding

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

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Content Management

Why your website CMS isn’t as simple to use as you might have been told

These days, most websites use a content management system (CMS). For those who aren’t familiar with the terminology, a CMS is a database and code which sit behind the front-end of a website and allow control of content and styling. So in principle, you can control your website fully from the admin area of the CMS, a password-protected management portal which you can log in to from any web enabled device.

Sounds simple right? Well actually it’s not quite as simple as it may sound and you have to know how a CMS will help you before stepping in.

It’s fair to say that a few dentists we’ve worked with over the last few years were under the false impression that a website CMS operates just like desk-top software, for example PowerPoint, Keynote, InDesign and the like. These are all very powerful systems and allow inexperienced users to create complex presentations and designs with relative ease. “Drag and drop” features make the user interaction pretty painless and efficient and quite rapidly you can create something fairly noteworthy and professional-looking.

However, it’s somewhat different with a website CMS, simply because they are much less sophisticated than desk-top programs and consequently need a lot more skill and experience to operate, particularly for more complex tasks.

More than once we’ve taken ‘phone calls from a perplexed practice manager whose principle has asked them to create a new implants section or similar on the website and of course, they had no clue where to start!

The reality with CMS then is that you do need to know what you are doing if you are making any changes other than relatively simple ones on your dental practice website.

Here are a few examples of where a CMS can be useful for a typical user:

  • Making straightforward text edits to web page content e.g. updating a staff biography
  • Updating a fees table
  • Adding a new team member – albeit please note that here you will need some experience in editing images to make them web friendly and also how to add new layout sections to an existing web page

Here are a few examples of where the average user typically won’t be able to produce a professional website result using their CMS:

  • Adding a new page to the website including new layout and professional styling
  • Making more complex changes to existing pages, e.g. adding new features such as image sliders, new content areas etc
  • Technical changes e.g. adding features to improve SEO, user tracking etc.
  • Maintenance functions – whilst these are often automated, not infrequently they can go wrong and cause conflicts with other site functionality.  This type of work requires technical evaluation before proceeding, or a broken website can easily be the result.

So it’s very important to understand where and how a CMS might be helpful and what is reasonable for you or your member of staff to reasonably expect to achieve.

It really isn’t the case that a dental practice principle should just assume that a team member can make professional changes to the website simply because it has a content management facility. More than once we’ve bailed out a practice manager where the principal inappropriately foisted that expectation upon them. Unfortunately it’s just not realistic – professional web design is highly skilled and not something that can simply be picked-up quickly and without some form of training.

Maintenance of content management systems

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Mistakes

5 marketing “gotchas” dentists should avoid in 2023

Over the holiday break I took the opportunity to scan the websites of several dental marketing companies to see what they are offering and if there are any worthwhile services or novel systems we may have missed to offer to our own clients.

What I found was that nothing much has changed in the last 12 – 18 months in terms of dental marketing techniques and services; however what has changed is the rather desperate rhetoric around how those services are being sold. As more and more marketers attempt to enter the dental space, the “moon on a stick” promises have clearly increased both in frequency and volume – and they were bad enough already.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at five of the main dental marketing “gotchas” and promises that agencies are spinning in an attempt to book new clients. Forewarned is forearmed!

“Your new website is your own and fully portable if you decide to move supplier” – this was claimed by an agency building sites on WIX and another agency building sites on Squarespace, two ‘DIY’ website building tools. What they don’t say is that those websites have to use the specific hosting services provided by those companies and hence the sites are not portable – you are always stuck with WIX or Squarespace and hence effectively only ever renting your website.

That may be perfectly acceptable for you (notwithstanding other major downsides with those tools) but if you do subscribe, be sure to know that you’re stuck with it and very few other designers will be able to assist in future.

WordPress is even more user-friendly, accessible and secure than even a couple of year ago and currently powers over 40% of all the websites in the world. It’s still growing fast and supported universally – so why choose a niche, inflexible DIY system for your dental practice website?

“We do all of your marketing for you” – lots of agencies claim to do this but never state the significant disadvantages. For example, with managed social media services, you’re never really getting a true representation of the practice and your social feeds are very likely being filled with generic content that the agency is also using for lots of other practices. Your users will easily spot this and the chances of any meaningful engagement from new patients are slim.

To succeed with social media, your team will have to make some contributions. For sure, use a specialist agency for social media advertising but make sure that your day-to-day posting and user interaction is managed by your team.

You will also need to get involved with other areas of “done by you” marketing e.g. managing the Google and Facebook reviews process and the day-to-day interactions with patients when they attend the surgery and ask about new treatments.

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Are you missing out on new dental patients because of an underperforming website?

One of the key measurements of the performance of a dental website is how well it converts traffic to meaningful enquiries. We can measure this using the extremely useful Google Analytics software.

As part of our monthly reporting for our dental marketing clients, we show how well their website is working through various metrics, one of the most important being the “goal conversion rate”. This compares the number of visits to the website versus how many of those visits resulted in an enquiry. It’s easy to see how this is so important and what a useful metric it is. The measurements can be produced globally across the whole website, or defined more specifically for certain pages and different sources of web traffic.

What is a satisfactory conversion rate?

As a general rule-of-thumb, we like to see websites with goal conversion rate in excess of 3% – very simply, this means that for every 100 website visitors, 3 made an enquiry. There are different permutations for this measurement but this will suffice for the purposes of this blog and to give you, the dentist or practice manager, a handy metric to use.

If your conversion rate is above 3, then generally all is well and there is little to be worried about in terms of how well the website is performing. However, there is always room for improvement and we have a number of client sites which convert well in excess of 10% of their traffic.

Conversely, if the conversion rate is below 3%, then it’s time to start digging deeper to find what is going wrong. Very often it is simply a symptom of the age of a website and that it has become unappealing and no longer engaging for those people who are visiting it – for a dental website this of course means missed new patients!

Case studies

We have several real-time examples where our clients with older websites have upgraded on the back of this type of information and the results have been dramatic.

As website get older the conversion rates typically tend to fall progressively as the information and the aesthetics of the website become stale and degrade. In a couple of recent cases, we strongly encouraged our clients to upgrade their websites where we saw their conversion rates slowly slip below 2 and then down even further to near 1. The websites in question were 5 and 6 years old respectively and the clients had not had many updates done over the years.

Interestingly, both websites were still very prominent in Google and receiving good traffic, however, a lot of this was being wasted simply because visitors were bouncing away after they’d landed.

Following updating to modern new websites incorporating new information and features which are well-proven to engage users, goal conversion rates jumped very quickly to levels well in excess of the rule-of-thumb 3 which we like to see.

In terms of return-on-investment for the website upgrade spend, this was huge. The number of new patients and treatments requests coming in near tripled and the revenue potential from this was significant.

Despite the success stories, unfortunately we still have quite a number of clients who insist on running with an old website, even where we’ve illustrated just how detrimental this can be. Notwithstanding budgetary constraints, this really is a ‘no brainer’ to prioritise.

Key actions

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

What makes a dental website rank well in 2023 and beyond?

It’s long been considered that the most powerful factor for getting top Google ranking for a website is the number and quality of the back-links pointed at it from third-party websites. Indeed not so long ago, even websites with poor quality content could be ranked well by compensating with back-links, a process known as “off-site” SEO.

However, things have changed considerably in the world of Google ranking and lots of new factors are coming into play as we’ll discuss shortly. Perhaps one of the most startling revelations was revealed recently during an official Google webinar when one of their employees noted that back-links are increasingly less important for determining rankings.

He went on to say that other factors are starting to take precedence and that a website needs to be good all round to reach those coveted top positions in the Google search index. True to form, Google didn’t elaborate on the extent of these changes and just how much the relative power of back-links had diminished. Equally they did not quantify the other elements needed for great search rankings; however, we can be fairly sure of those elements which make the most difference.

Let’s take a closer look at those features we expect to help dental websites rank really well in Google in 2023 and beyond. If you’re having a new website built or perhaps upgrading an existing website, it makes sense to build these elements into the development road-map.

Excellent, engaging information

Google has said on many occasions that if a website works well for users, then it will most likely work well in Google too. Google has many tools at its disposal to identify high-performing websites and the ones that engage users will be recognised and rewarded with better search positions.

Google also advises that those websites which answer user’s questions most effectively will be seen as most relevant and hoisted to the top search engine positions. This makes absolute sense if you think about the whole rationale for Google – you search for answers to your questions and (usually) the best sources of information are returned to you in the results pages.

So when you are creating the content for your new dental website, or upgrading an existing one, make sure that the quality is excellent and that it clearly answers the questions most likely to be asked by your users.

Don’t skimp on content! Whilst some may advocate “minimalism” as the best way to keep users happy, this doesn’t necessarily work very well for Google. If your website is to appear authoritative and hence useful, it must have good quality information and in sufficient depth. A skilled website designer will be able to get the balance just right.

Appealing visuals

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

Inside the workings of an Invisalign marketing agency – is it all it seems?

There is very keen interest in selling Invisalign treatments at the moment, seemingly across the whole dental community. With short courses now making the treatment accessible to all dentists, it seems that most practices have someone on the team who can provide Invisalign.

The challenge is to actually secure those treatments and understandably lots of marketing companies have jumped on the bandwagon in providing patient “lead generation” services, often at a significant price! You’ll likely have been spammed in your inbox, at a trade show or as you scroll your social media feeds by these marketing companies who offer guaranteed leads; sometimes also offering your money back if they don’t succeed.

All of that may sound too good to be true and you might well be right in thinking that. But how do those companies really operate and what are you actually tying into when you take up their services? Let’s take a closer look so that you are fully informed and ready to ask the right questions before you jump in.

How does the Invisalign marketing process work?

The modus operandi for all of these companies is very similar and to be frank, not rocket science. Whilst you do need experience for certain elements of the process, it’s relatively straightforward to do and much of it can actually be automated. To be fair, you are paying an awful lot for experience and a “done for you” approach, and of course this may be exactly what you want. However, it’s worth knowing what goes on and that there’s no “secret sauce” involved, despite what some of the providers imply.

In all cases, the marketing agencies will use social media ads and/or Google ads to place your adverts in front of thousands of users in and around your local area. Typically they will also try to take control of your website, often trying to sell you a new one during the process.

In conjunction with ads, the company will also use landing pages, contact forms and possibly on-line booking systems to make the process compelling but also simple for interested parties to make an enquiry. They may also use a technique known as “lead-gen” where the user can enquire direct from the ad platform (Facebook) without having to actually click through to a landing page.

Depending on the level of sophistication, enquiries will either be directed to the practice email or a CRM (customer relationship management) system such as Dengro.

The company may also offer to qualify leads for you and train your team in the best ways to “convert” enquiries into treatments – but do you really need that if your TCO and front-desk teams are already capable? They really should be.

What might you expect to pay for Invisalign marketing services?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Look at the results as well as the cost….

Earlier this week I received an email from a dental client for whom we are running a very successful social media ads campaign, or at least I thought! The dentist concerned advised that he’d looked at his bank account and realised that he was spending just over £900 per month to run the campaign – this included click-costs and our management fee.

What took me completely by surprise is that the dentist had looked at the spend, panicked and decided that the campaign was wasting a lot of cash. However, unfortunately he hadn’t been looking at the fortnightly reports we send which indicated that the campaign had resulted in a large influx of patients with a cost-per-enquiry of just over £20 – a very good result.

This analysis was based on completed contact forms from the campaign landing page and did not include a large number of ‘phone calls or direct messages also stimulated by the campaign. So the actual cost per enquiry would have been much less than £20 – very good value for targeted new patient enquiries and one where most dentists would, as they say “snap your hand off”. Following explanation and a gentle nudge to read our reports, the dentist concerned was more than happy to continue with the ad campaign.

What happened above is actually very common in UK dentistry where dentists very often look at the cost of marketing but don’t connect that with the returns it delivers. This sometimes causes dentists not to proceed following an initial marketing proposal, or causes them to quit early because they incorrectly feel that active campaigns are not returning.

We also see dentists generally not spending anywhere near as much on their marketing as their counterparts overseas do. For example in the UK, dental marketing spend on average is less than 3% of practice turnover, whereas in the US it is over 10%. Of course within that UK average there is a huge variation, with some dentists spending well in excess of the average whilst many others spend next to nothing.

What are the typical returns for different forms of dental marketing?

Given that dentists are sometimes reluctant to spend on marketing I thought it would be useful to indicate the levels of return you might expect to see from a variety of marketing assets and campaigns. These are good rules-of-thumb to help you begin but of course you should also be confident that your dental marketing partner will provide transparent reporting so you can see exactly how your own campaigns are performing.

The dental practice website

I can’t stress too much how important a high-quality website actually is, particularly given how competitive dentistry has become. We cover the correct structure and content for your website elsewhere in this blog so I won’t go over that again now, but suffice to say that your website is effectively your shop window to the world and if it’s poor, then the perception you give will be poor as well.

Whilst you can get a cheap website built using a DIY tool such as WIX and the like, a good quality, professional website will cost anywhere from £3 – 4k. The return on your investment will vary depending on Google position and how many new patients it pulls in, but typically good websites with decent search engine rankings will pay for themselves in well less than a year, often just a few months. Please also keep this in mind when your website is getting stale and needs updating. Those dentists who are very successful with web marketing typically look to upgrade their websites every 3 or 4 years with regular updates in-between times.

When it comes to return-on-investment, a good quality website really is your first priority and it’s also the cornerstone of all your other marketing initiatives.

Search engine optimisation

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Financial

A well-ranked, high-quality website is very valuable – have you accounted for it correctly?

Here at Dental Media we’ve been helping dentists with websites and marketing for well over 20 years and unsurprisingly, some of our long-term clients are now approaching retirement and selling up.

During handover discussions with some of them it became clear that they or their appointed sales consultant had failed to properly assess the value of their website in the sales negotiation and worse, often disregarded it completely.

Following the sale, it’s typical that the website domain name is re-assigned to the new owner plus a call organised with our team to discuss the ongoing management of the website. At this point the ownership of the website has effectively been transferred and there’s no going back – if the value of the site has not been previously discussed and agreed as part of the sale, then it’s too late.

So what is a website worth to a dentist? Well this depends on a couple of key factors as we’ll see in the following discussion.

Understanding the worth of a dental website

Hopefully this will be a useful discussion not just for those dentists who are selling up, but also those who are considering a new website and its optimisation for improving search engine rankings. Understanding the value of a practice website is important for anyone owning, managing or selling their dental business.

Firstly it’s important to say that there is no definitive way of calculating the real-time worth of a website given that there are quite a few influencing factors, e.g. location of the business, search positions in Google, age, conversion potential etc. Please note that I haven’t included the initial cost of the website there as this is usually misleading – quite a lot of very expensive websites are actually very poor when it comes to their effectiveness and hence looking at how much they cost would not be a good indicator of their actual value.

What are the key factors to consider to help determine the value of a website?

There are two main factors we look at when trying to make a dentist’s website as effective as possible and it makes sense that these are also key when trying to assess just how valuable that website is at a particular point in time:

  • The potential of the website to convert users into patient i.e. how many people who visit the website actually go on to making an enquiry and subsequently become a patient
  • How much traffic does a website get and what is the quality of that traffic i.e. how useful is that traffic when it comes to delivering new patient enquiries. This is directly related to how well the website ranks in Google.

It is also very important to understand that, on average, websites are only second to word-of-mouth referrals for gaining new patients. So they beat social media, paid ads, newspaper ads etc. As such it would be remiss not to understand their true value, and not just if you’re selling.

When considering the two main factors noted above, fortunately there is a good way to ascertain this using Google Analytics in conjunction with any manual monitoring which goes on at the practice. If the practice uses telephone call tracking, this will also provide important insights into how many enquiries came from the website.

Using Analytics we can quite quickly ascertain how many enquiries the website is delivering per month and also other key metrics to help us determine the amount and quality of the traffic to the site. Other data will also quickly tell us how well the website converts traffic to enquiries, a key measure of how well (or otherwise) the website actually works.

We should also look very closely at how well the website ranks in Google across a range of important search terms. This and the data above will give us a very good idea of the number of new patients coming into a practice as a direct result of the website.

To give an idea, our high-ranking clients will typically get anywhere between 10 and 60 new patients per month from their websites alone, depending on location.

How do new patient numbers translate into value?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

Key things to consider when setting expectations for your ad campaigns

Social media advertising is more popular than ever right now and it seems like most dental practices are using it to some degree. However, lots of dentists are increasingly disillusioned by campaigns falling well short of expectations or worse, failing completely. So what is causing lots of dental social media advertising campaigns to miss the mark and what can you do to help ensure this doesn’t happen to you?

Set realistic expectations

Whilst your Invisalign rep, implants rep or even business coach might tell you that all is buoyant in dentistry right now, this isn’t entirely accurate. Whilst lots of people are searching for general dentistry and hygiene, the number of people looking for more expensive treatments is falling back.

The reasons for this are varied and it pays to understand what they are before considering starting your own dental ad campaigns. Let’s take a closer look so that you are well-informed and can set realistic expectations.

The current economic climate

The UK economy is under significant duress at the moment and this is set to continue for some time. This extends to the personal level with many folk now having far less disposable income than previously. This is affecting different demographics to different degrees and consequently their ability to afford certain types of dental treatment. For example, we are seeing more of a fall away for Invisalign treatment in younger people compared to implants in the older demographic.

However, in general we are seeing more folk think twice before starting their treatment journey at the moment.

Your location

There is quite a marked location effect when it comes to using social media advertising. For example, it’s easier to reach a lot of people with your ads in densely populated areas than it is in more sparsely populated areas. There are also “hot beds” for certain treatment types for example cosmetic solutions are more popular in the heart of Essex than in rural Shropshire. This may sound obvious, but it often appears to elude dentists when they are looking to get on the social ads bandwagon.

The competition

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