Web Content | SEO Writing

Tips for Dental Office SEO

photo: Stock Xchang - Svilen001

Dental offices, like any other business, need an effective online marketing strategy to help them continually appeal to new potential patients, to help them continually connect with existing patients, to leverage the power of social networking, and to ensure that they manage their online reputation.  There are many ways to do this.

Whether you have an aggressive online marketing strategy in mind or want to start working on internet marketing to see what sorts of fruits your efforts can bear, here are some tips:

• Learn the basics of dental office SEO.  Have you claimed your business on Google Places so that you can be sure you show up in search engine results / on maps?
• Read your website traffic reports. They will tell you how you are doing. They will uncover opportunities. Read them and then action them regularly.
• Content marketing matters. You can’t simply put up a website and leave it to work for you. Continual additions to your website content and your off-page content marketing efforts are what will bring your site new and relevant traffic via rankings. Google looks at freshness when determining how to rank the pages on your site as one of the factors. An informative and regularly updated dental blog, off-site articles with links pointing to your dental website, and other content such as press releases can all help you in this regard.
• Content matters. Make sure your website content is unique, well-optimized, and informative.  Duplicate content will hurt your traffic rankings.
• Competitive Analysis. Do you know who your biggest competitors are online? Do you know why they’re doing well? Do you see where you could fill a gap that they are not filling?
• Conversion matters, too. It’s not enough to simply attract website traffic, you need to convert them as well. Conversion rate optimization will impact how your site ranks with Google and other search engines.
• Social networking  helps, too. An ongoing social networking strategy can bring in new patients, gives your content reach when your followers interact, alerting their followers, and it helps you continually re-connect with existing patients as well .
• Your internet marketing /  content marketing strategy should be fluid, based on continually measuring for success and opportunities for improvement. This can happen through a combination of paid search, social networking, search engine optimization, content marketing, and other efforts.

Is Your Website Bleeding Money?

Does your website generate money for your business?

A website should be a source of information for your customers, should be a source of leads for your business; it should be a source of profit for you because it generates leads as well as helps you manage relationships with customers.  But if you aren’t actively working on your website it could bleed money.

Okay, so it might not be expensive to manage so it probably won’t bleed money in that way (unless you have a marketing campaign in progress that’s ineffective and expensive) but it could bleed money in the sense that the way you handle it results in lost opportunities. Your site could be bringing you leads and opportunities but you could be missing them.

Signs Your Website a Place of Lost Opportunities:

1. You aren’t actively working to boost conversion rates
2. Your site misses the boat by not having clear calls to action
3. You aren’t trying to get visitors to opt in to future communications
4. You don’t know where traffic is coming from
5. You aren’t sure why you’re getting traffic but site rankings / inquiries/ leads / sales (etc.) aren’t looking good.

Are You Overlooking Opportunities to Boost Conversion Rates?

In your inbound marketing / content marketing strategy are you continually looking for ways to boost conversion rates? By doing so, you maximize the potential to benefit from every visitor to your website.  By looking at the pages that generate the most traffic, you can look to see if you are, in fact, appealing to your target audience.  And by looking at pages that are not generating traffic, you can also optimize them and boost your chances of success.

Examples:

Optimizing Blogs and Content Pages

A certain blog post gets a lot of incoming traffic. What do people do when they land on that page? Do they click through to another part of your website? Or, do they often leave that page? If the latter of the two is the answer, then perhaps you aren’t providing enough incentive for them to dig deeper into your website.  Every page on your site creates an opportunity to build a relationship. Things you can do include:

• Improve the copywriting so that you do a better job of converting the reader into a customer.
• Add banners and  / or links to the page to ensure that the reader is enticed into doing something on the page
• Add an opt-in to the page. Even if the reader doesn’t plan to buy today, if you can get them to opt in to receiving future communications from you then you’re leaving the door to relationship-building open.

Looking at SEO Keywords

It’s also advantageous to look at your keyword rankings. Whether you are ranking for specific phrases in organic search results because that’s what your strategy included or, by chance, you suddenly rank well for a specific phrase it’s important to look at what that ranking can actually do for your business.

• Does your web copy correspond well to people searching for that term?
• Where are you ranking well?
• Where could you improve?

Focusing More Efforts on Off Page SEO and Social Marketing

Are you getting good results from a certain social networking site, are you getting great results from press releases, or from guest blog posting? By examining your website analytics reports you can see where the outside traffic is coming from. In addition to striving for organic SEO results from the likes of Google, Bing, etc, you can see where there are opportunities for more growth.

Examples:

• If you’re getting a lot of traffic from Twitter, you’ll know to do more Twitter posting.
• If you’re seeing good conversion rates and /or opt-in rates via guest blogging, you’ll know to dedicate more time and resources to this effort.

Conversely, if you’ve been spending a lot of time on press release syndication and it isn’t bearing much fruit you’ll know to either look closer at the way you’re approaching this marketing method and either improve it or focus fewer resources on it.

Your Website Traffic Reports are Invaluable

Web analytics are crucial. Every website traffic report tells a story.  You can leverage that information to continually tighten up your efforts, capitalize on what’s working, and maximize the potential of every visitor that lands on your website.

Conversion Rate Matters to SEO

Increasingly, search engines factor conversion rate into rankings. If you finally achieve the milestone of ranking in the top spots for highly competitive key phrases in your niche, it’s not time to rest on your laurels. You’ll need to ensure you actively work to keep conversion rates high on the ranking pages. Search engines will not continue to send traffic to a page with a high bounce rate.