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Increasing your web footprint to attract more patients

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Why your stand-alone dental website isn’t enough

2012 has seen a huge change in the tactics needed for a successful web marketing campaign. Historically, a decent website, perhaps supported with some SEO, was sufficient to ensure that you were in the mix for attracting new enquiries from the large number of patients searching for dental services online. However, the online marketing landscape has changed significantly and several channels now need to be exploited to ensure that your internet dental branding remains prominent. So just how important is this?

The new dental web marketing landscape

In April 2012, Google made significant changes to the way it ranks websites. Activity in several web channels including blogging, social media, video publication, mobile etc now yields great ranking results. In comparison, stagnant websites are falling progressivley in the search rankings. The other factor is perhaps more obvious in that it makes very good sense to develop your web marketing channels for the broadest possible in-bound marketing funnel.

Here are the key factors to consider when building and optimising your dental web presence:

  • your website “footprint” – this needs to increase over time. Web domains that support a lot of relevant content rank better that smaller websites. Blogging is a great way to support this accompanied by periodic introduction of new content into the main website
  • your mobile site – with over 20% of all website traffic now originating from hand-held devices, a mobile optimised site is important to capture this traffic effectively. Mobile sites can also be independently optimised to improve your overall prominence in Google.
  • publishing video – online patient testimonials are excellent for word-of-mouth referral and for valuable in-bound link-building
  • social-media – finally it does appear that “social signals” are starting to be recognised and valued by Google’s ranking systems. More specifically, information on Google+ is being crawled and indexed by Google. There is also the obvious non-SEO basis for social activity i.e. client engagement and the opportunity for word-of-mouth referral.
  • SEO and pay-per-click. Depending on the extent of competition in your location, a search engine optimisation campaign and/or PPC may be needed to help boost your visibility and maintain it long term.

Other tools are available to support your dental web marketing campaigns for example press releases, e-mail marketing systems etc but those mentioned above are the front-line “must-haves” for progressive dentists who really want to optimise the potential for new patient aquisition from the web.

If you would like some free advice about building a successful web marketing campaign, please call us on 01332 672548.