Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Can a Website Serve as a Dental Marketing Plan?

By Marcus Somani

Your dental practice's main website will not market itself competitively. There is a practical, cost effective solution that puts you in control. Don't let your website go to waste because it doesn't show up on Internet searches, or because you're too busy with your practice to spend your time working with keywords and Internet ranking.

In order to understand the value of having your own web site, you need to understand how search engines rank different Internet sites. That is critical because your website ranking produces results similar to the prominence of a Yellow Page advertisement For example, if you create one of the best dental web sites in your community but it cannot be found , it is like having your dental practice advertisement in the automotive section of the Yellow Pages. Any time you create a web site, the goal is for that web site to show up very high when people are online looking for the dental services you provide.

When a consumer begins searching on the Internet for a dentist, they keep in mind the things that they want in a dental practice. Keywords and key phrases are utilized in this way because a person may search looking for services such as teeth cleaning, gentle dentistry, or children's dentistry. It is very important that the website is rich in text describing the significant services offered at the dental practice, because these are the keywords matched by Internet searches when they direct consumers to the site. It is also important that a website is regularly recharged with changing and current information; if a website is not charged it will just sit and stagnate, and that is not optimum for successful marketing for a dental practice. Unfortunately, adding new content to keep a website fresh requires a lot of time.

An excellent solution and complement to having your own web site is to have a review web site. A review web site has several benefits to a marketing program for a dental practice. The key benefit is that it allows you to leverage the activities of your existing patients for the future growth of your dental practice. For instance, if you ask every patient who leaves your practice to give you feedback about your practice, and you control which of those reviews get published on the Internet, you've created a leverage mechanism, a fulcrum point, wherein you can push favorable information out onto the Internet.

Another good thing about choosing to market your dental practice using a review site is the low cost. You will not need to hire an expensive marketing company to do it. Ask your patients to write a review and make your review site easily accessible to them. You need the highest number of reviews you can get because according to original dental marketing research, just about half the reviews will contain good, relevant feedback that you will want to circulate on the Internet.

You do not want your dental reviews to be managed by some third-party site because then negative reviews are just as likely to show up as positive reviews. You want to put information out there that is representative of your practice, and the only way you can have any control over that process is if you collect reviews on your own review site, and you decide what to put out on the Internet.

If a review site is done the right way, every review, especially ones that have the name of the city, the name of your practice, and the name of the dentist in the practice will have an inbound link to your own main web site. The benefit here is the keywords that link back to your web site are related to content on your own web site because you have information about the dentist, the dental practice, etc. This pushes your own main web site much higher on search engine results.

The cost of having your own dental review website is negligible compared to an online marketing campaign that involves paid-per-clicks, banner ads or some sort of sponsored listing in some other directory service. You will not need to hire an expensive dental marketing company. Furthermore, you will have control of your online dental reputation, which is where many patients are finding their dentists.

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