by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

How do you recover the search positions of a dental website which has crashed in Google?

Here at Dental Media we are well-regarded for our work with search engine optimisation, an expertise which we’ve developed over the last 15 years as Google has evolved.

One area of expertise we offer for dentists is recovery of their website rankings after their sites have been relegated by Google, i.e. where search results have fallen away significantly. This can happen for various reasons but the most typical one is where the website has been compromised by poor SEO. When this happens, Google can penalise a website and destroy its ranking results overnight – a pretty awful thing to happen, particularly where a dentist has been used to getting a significant influx of new patients from the web.

Before we step into how we help dentists recover from these ranking penalties, here’s a quick recap on why it can happen.

How does bad SEO get websites penalised?

This is a huge topic and one we can’t cover in detail here. In simple terms, SEO agencies are constantly evolving to try to stay ahead of Google and to give their website clients an edge with search ranking. However, lots of them have pushed the envelope too far in terms of what is acceptable and what complies with Google’s own web publishing standards. Google has progressively tried to tackle this by changing the way they evaluate the quality of websites and is quite punitive where SEO has been over-zealous.

It can take a while for Google to catch up with you but when they do, if you are pushing it too hard with your SEO, then expect a penalty to come and for your website positions to plummet in the search results. Unfortunately this can be very difficult to recover but it is possible and it’s exactly where the team at Dental Media can help.

Search ranking recovery – what needs to be done?

The extent of recovery work needed when a website has been penalised will depend on how bad the penalty actually is. Google can hit sections of your website but also the whole site where bad SEO has been widespread. Often, a small clean-up is all that is needed; however it can be the case where a domain is irrecoverable where poor SEO is egregious and has been going on for a long time. In some cases, it can be more cost-effective to start again with a new website on a new domain name.

So what do we do to evaluate a recovery project?

SEO audit

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Facebook

An Insight Into Facebook’s Algorithm And How It Can Work For Or Against You

The team at Dental Media provides a wide range of social media ad services for dentists and because of this we receive free consultancy services directly from Facebook to assist with our campaign management.

Whilst we already have a lot of experience, Facebook’s consultants have access to information that isn’t directly available to third parties and hence they have better visibility than we do when it comes to assessing the performance of campaigns relative to others. This is particularly useful in competitive environments and helps to give an edge for our dental clients. Of course Facebook won’t directly reference other people’s campaigns by name, but they will give insights to help with incremental improvements – and this can make all the difference between mediocre performance and excellent performance.

One of the key learning points from our discussion with Facebook’s own experts is a clear idea of how Facebook’s ad algorithm works. This is the “hidden” mechanism which works out how your ads will be placed and works in conjunction with the targeting you set up when the campaigns are configured.

Make Facebooks Algorithm Work For You

In simple terms, Facebook’s algorithm rewards success – so if your dental ads are popular and users engage with them, Facebook learns this and preferentially shows them to people most likely to convert i.e. make an enquiry about your services.

Conversely, if your ads are unappealing and users don’t engage, then Facebook will see these as less valuable and will preferentially show other ads to users rather than your own. This doesn’t mean that your ads won’t be shown at all, on the contrary. Indeed Facebook will still be very keen to use your budget. However, your ads will be seen as secondary compared to others which have historically proved more successful. Basically you won’t be first past the post and by that stage, your treatment enquiry will likely have gone elsewhere.

What does this mean for your own dental Facebook ads?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

What works and what doesn’t when advertising for patient bookings using Facebook and Instagram

Here at Dental Media our social media advertising team looks after the set up and management of hundreds of ad campaigns for dentists across the UK – many of them targeting Invisalign or implants. This work gives us clear insights into what is required for campaigns of this type to be successful and today we’ll share some of that information to help with your own campaigns.

With social media advertising there is a fine balance between campaigns which don’t deliver on expectations and those which are really successful – so let’s jump in and take a look at what differentiates the good from the bad and where mistakes are often made.

Assessing the competition

As with any type of marketing and advertising for dentists, you need to have a clear picture of what your competitors are doing. If you go-ahead and launch campaigns which are not as good as your competitors, it doesn’t take much insight to understand what might happen next.

With Invisalign particularly, competition is quite fierce and it’s usual to find several dentists in any town or city using social media ads to reach the local audience. So before you launch your own campaigns, be sure to check what everyone else is doing. There are online tools to help with this and any experienced marketing team will also be able to help.

Get the targeting right

This is essential if your campaigns are going to be effective and also to avoid wasting budget on random clicks. Whilst Facebook is reducing the range of targeting options available, particularly with dentistry, it is still possible to place ads in front of those people who are most likely to click and also who are likely to have a genuine interest in the service you are offering.

In your targeting assessment you need to evaluate where you want your ads to appear, for example a pre-determined radius around the practice or more specifically to particular areas. For example, you may wish to target “affluent” areas where you consider that more disposable income is available for certain types of dental treatment.

You also need to be aware of just how big the “pond” actually is and also how far you think people might travel for your services. For example, a small town with a limited urban conurbation and not too many surrounding villages, won’t yield as many enquiries as a city location. This may sound obvious but still get quite a number of enquiries where the dentist has unrealistic expectations on the number of cases these types of campaigns will generate. There are only so many folk within a particular population at any given time who will be interested in treatment. That said, even small-scale campaigns with moderate yields can still be very lucrative.

We also use re-targeting techniques where we can show new ads to people who have already shown some interest in dental services; for example where they have visited dental websites searching for specific treatments. This type of follow-up is essential to maximise the return from a particular area.

Get the offer right

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

If your SEO team proposes anything like this, move on….

Regular readers of our blog will know that one of our key objectives is to share useful information to help the dental community get the most from their digital marketing. One topic we try to cover is where dentists have been let down with poor marketing advice and service so that others can avoid similar pitfalls.

Today we’ll take a quick look at a couple of cases where clients came to us having experienced issues with SEO and were not getting the results they were promised by their suppliers; even after spending a lot of money.

Let’s take a look at two cases from this past week alone.

SEO sold on keywords without traffic or conversions analysis

It appears to be a recurring theme where certain dental marketing companies provide web optimisation services based purely on a set of keywords and then trying to advance searches for those keywords in Google. I’ll explain why this alone is hugely inadequate in a moment.

In this particular example, a client was recommended to us for search engine optimisation as his existing supplier was not delivering. We carried out our usual audit to see what was failing and made a set of recommendations. There were significant technical issues with his website but also the SEO campaign was ill thought out and executed really badly.

Essentially the dentist had been sold SEO based on a set of keywords which on analysis, were only minimally useful. There were a lot of keywords which were unrealistic to try to optimise in the first place as they were for searches too far away from where his practice was located. In addition, some of the keywords in the list were practically useless as they would have yielded very little traffic even if top of the search results.

What is possibly worse is that the marketing company was not monitoring anything other than the progress of those keywords compared to the last month. There was no use of Google Analytics to assess traffic to the website, no analysis of conversions (actual enquiries) or indeed any other metrics needed to assess the true performance of a website.

The charge for that failing service? £950 + vat per month! The dentist only realised 18 months down the track when his inflow of new patients was no different. He’d paid over £8k for the website and well over double that for ‘SEO’ that had delivered very little, if indeed anything at all. Looking into his own analytics account, we could see that the organic traffic to his website was actually worse than when the campaign started 18 months previously.

It’s difficult to know whether the marketing company was providing the bare minimum deliberately or whether they were just incompetent. I won’t name them but suffice to say that they are very well known and on face value, highly rated. But of course you need to look much deeper than a few articles in the dental press, lots of self-promotion and questionable reviews.

Sadly lots of dentists are in the same boat but haven’t realised yet.

3 practice websites combined into one and search results tanked

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Paid Ads

Which components are essential to ensure landing page success?

If you’re using paid ads, either Facebook/Instagram and/or Google in a meaningful way; you’re very likely already familiar with landing pages.

For the uninitiated, let’s quickly recap on what a landing page actually is, its essential role in generating dental patient enquiries and what features need to be incorporated to ensure success.

What is a dental ads landing page and how should it be structured?

Paid media advertising usually consists of the following components:

  • A set of targeted ads deployed on Facebook/Instagram and/or Google
  • A landing page(s) to receive the visits from people clicking on ads
  • A trained reception team to follow-up on enquiries proactively
  • Data collection to facilitate re-marketing and follow-up

In today’s blog we’ll look specifically at landing pages.

Quite often we are asked why a landing page is needed where a client already has a good quality website and this is quite understandable. After all, a decent website should be optimised to encourage people to make enquiries when they visit. However, it’s not quite as simple as that.

With a website, there are inherent features which actually detract from what we call the conversion process (the act of enquiring), for example the presence of a navigation menu which allows users to navigate away to different pages on the website. With a paid ads campaign, you are typically targeting a specific treatment type and hence need to keep users absolutely focused on that. So simply using a website page as the target, allows too many opportunities for users to get distracted.

There are several ways we can optimise a landing page to assist the conversion (enquiry) process – let’s take a look those features and how they work.

Landing page layout

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Is your website failing to generate useful patient enquiries?

When dentists approach us to improve their patient uptake from the web, one of the first things we do is analyse their website. This typically occurs in two main phases; the first is a visual inspection and testing to see if the website is suitably engaging and easy to use. The second is a technical evaluation to see where the website ranks in Google, a thorough investigation of the analytics data and also a check to see how well the site conforms to Google’s guidelines for best practice.

If any of the above elements are in poor shape, it is very likely that the website will underperform when it comes to attracting new patient enquiries.

Unfortunately we often find that the dentist who is seeking our assistance has paid a lot of money for a new website, only to find that it significantly underperforms expectations. Understandably there is often a reluctance to pay more to have the issues rectified, particularly where they’d been led to believe that a new dental website would be the answer to their quest for new patients. However, if the issues are not addressed, that website will never perform correctly.

What are the main reasons for dental website underperformance?

Very often it is one of more of the following reasons:

  • Poor configuration leading to bad usability
  • Insufficiently engaging – e.g. overuse of stock images, lack of personalisation
  • Too “glitzy” – failure to recognise the patient demographic and not representative of the business
  • Too many “bells and whistles” leading to poor page loading speeds (bad for usability and search engine ranking)
  • Failure to use key elements critical for attracting patients e.g. testimonials, case studies, personalised imagery, video etc
  • The website is simply too old and stale
  • The website has technical issues preventing easy use and/or compromising search ranking
  • Poor SEO has resulted in a demotion in Google searches

Rectification

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

What are they and why are they important?

For a long time, back-links have been a key driver for website search engine optimisation and helping generate great ranking positions. Get your back-link profile right and you can be fairly sure that Google will reward you with improved search positions; hence why you will regularly see SEO practitioners referring to back-links and their use.

However, there are good links, bad links and pretty much everything in between; indeed bad back-links can actually damage a website rather than improve its rankings. So it’s important to understand what is involved when discussing back-links for search optimisation purposes.

Back in the early days of Google, pretty much any type of link would bring ranking benefits, but this is far from the case today. Google is now extremely adept at evaluating website pages, including the links embedded in the page content. So long gone are the days of seeking out any old link and firing it at a target site as part of a dental SEO project.

Now we need to be much more selective and only use links which will be of advantage to the target site. Get this wrong and your website can easily be penalised by Google; sometimes irrecoverably. Indeed where we are asked by dentists to help recover their search engine rankings, investigation often reveals that they have been subject to outdated SEO techniques which have penalised their website – and as mentioned above, recovery can be very time-consuming.

In our quest to help you understand SEO better, today we’ll take a look at contextual back-links and why this type of link is favoured for website optimisation purposes.

Defining contextual back-links

A contextual back-link is one where the link is embedded within a body of text which is contextually relevant to the target website. So for example a link in a blog post about dental implants pointing back to a website page about implants would be classed as contextual. The formation of the link itself is important and may (or may not) directly reference implants, but we’ll cover that elsewhere in a different blog.

Compare this to a link which is not embedded within contextually relevant text or perhaps is stuck on the end of piece of content or on a business directory. This is still a back-link but it is not contextual and typically less valuable.

There are cases where a non-contextual back-link on a very important, popular website can be more valuable than a contextual link on a lesser site, but these cases are quite rare.

Why are contextual links more valuable?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Use Acuity Scheduling To Significantly Improve Paid Ad Conversions

The quest for new dental patients is not an easy one and typically takes time, effort and investment to do successfully. One of the main tools for gaining new patients and keeping treatment books full, is the use of social media advertising; but is has to be done well to ensure it pays back sustainably.

Whilst still an excellent way to promote a dental practice, it should be noted that social media advertising for dentists is becoming increasingly competitive, with agencies trying various new techniques to make sure their clients stay ahead of the pack.

Today we’ll take a closer look at one of the ways you can make a difference with your own social media advertising and how to make it as easy as possible for potential new patients to book consultations with you directly on-line. This could be in the form or registering for an open day or simply booking into pre-defined slots in a clinician’s schedule.

The tool we’ll discuss is ‘Acuity Scheduling’ but before we get into the details, let’s quickly recap on the basics of the social media ads process.

Social media ads and landing pages

This is actually quite an involved process and takes a long time to learn all of the facets and to gain the experience needed to be successful. It’s not really something to be tried ‘DIY’ and will usually involve employing an expert freelancer or agency to take on the task on your behalf.

In a nutshell, you pay Facebook to allow you to deploy a suite of ads across the Facebook and Instagram platforms. These ads are built to be as engaging as possible and are typically configured to advertise different types of treatments e.g. Invisalign, dental implants and so forth.

Unlike advertising in Google, social media ads can incorporate images as well as text and there is a whole science behind the best ways to do this. When a user clicks on the ad in their news feed, they are typically directed to a landing page – this provides more details about the treatment, its benefits and also any offer to encourage uptake. The landing page must be optimised to ensure the best chance of the user contacting you; a process generically known as engagement.

The key objective for a dentist is to secure new patient registrations or booking of a treatment and so the landing page(s) will be tuned to achieve just that. We need to remember that users are, on the whole, quite fickle and unless you grab their attention very quickly and also provide an easy way for them to interact with you, they will very quickly look elsewhere.

How Acuity Scheduling helps secure bookings

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

SEO for dentists – basic errors to avoid

I am regularly contacted by dentists whose websites are failing in Google and where they need to do something about it. This is understandable as the importance of a great website and prominent ranking positions is well-understood.

Normally where a website fails in Google it comes down to one (or both) of these reasons:

  • The site is poorly optimised giving little chance for ranking success
  • The site has been optimised over-zealously and Google has penalised it in the ranking hierarchy

Today we’ll take a look at the first element, poor optimisation, and in particular something where an inexperienced SEO provider or DIY’er has failed to understand one of the key fundamentals of website optimisation.

Very often we see cases where a dentist’s website is optimised for “dentist location X” when their practice is physically based in location Y. This isn’t going to work, particularly for the more generic search queries. So why is this?

This is all about search “localisation” and understanding how Google will always give preference to local businesses when it comes to what searchers actually enter as search queries. So for someone searching for “dentist in Preston” as an example, the search engine will always present them with results for dentists based in Preston or the immediate outskirts. It won’t present them with Google results for dentists in nearby towns such as Blackburn or Bolton or indeed some of the smaller towns in between.

What tends to happen is that dentists who have practices in a smaller village or town 3 or 4 miles outside of a major urban area will want to try to attract patients from that larger area – of course there are more people and correspondingly more potential patients. What the dentist then tries to do is optimise their website for the adjacent location without realising that it will most likely be unsuccessful – this is all down to the Google localisation issue discussed above.

What also happens is where unscrupulous SEO agencies (sadly there are lots) don’t tell their client that their wishes are unrealistic, but they take their money anyway and try to blame poor ranking results on other factors – this is all too prevalent unfortunately.

How should you optimise a website for location?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Paid Ads

Which is more effective, SEO or paid advertising?

Earlier this week I saw a social media post from a guy who noted that he is always surprised when dental clients are prepared to pay thousands per month on paid ads but won’t invest in search engine optimisation. I have some sympathy with this sentiment as, over the years, I’ve met quite a few dentists who understand the benefits of SEO, but still shun it in favour of paid advertising.

So what causes this reluctance, why is it somewhat misguided, and what data can we share to show the relative worth of dental SEO versus paid ads?

I thought the best way to show how effective these channels can be is to look at specific data and drill down to the actual cost-per-lead generated respectively. I selected five mature paid ad accounts and pitched them against five mature SEO accounts to get some meaningful data to share. Here are the headline details:

Cost per lead – SEO

Across five SEO accounts measured in the last quarter of 2021 we saw an average cost per lead of £27. So in broad terms, a client paying £450 per month (av) for SEO was receiving an average of 17 qualified leads.

With SEO, the average cost per lead ranged from £21 to £32 in the accounts studied.

Cost per lead – paid ads

This was a little harder to calculate as quite a lot of the campaigns we run are targeted towards specific treatments e.g. Invisalign and dental implants. However, we also have sufficient data on more generalised campaigns to make the comparison meaningful.

For paid ads, the average cost per lead was £36, in the range of £29 to £41.

SEO versus paid ads – which one to use? Or both?

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