General

Orthodontist Marketing -Website Conversion

I just completed a fresh website for a McAllen orthodontist and used a fully mobile responsive framework. The result has been an immediate surge in conversion rate. This is not unexpected because visitors to this site are running at 55% visits on mobile devices which mea.ns that mobile users are a dominant factor in this particular orthodontist marketing strategy.

Bringing a better mobile experience to website visitors has had an immediate impact on inquiries and has been very valuable.

While this website was running a mobile version previously, it did not have the same visual impact and ease of navigation that the new fully mobile responsive site has. Orthodontist marketing is very much new customer driven with little repeat business. Because of this orthodontists need to caepture as many of their website visitors as possible. It also seems likely that the mobile percentage is driven by the specific demographics of an area. For example a dental website I am running San Antonio is getting 40% of it’s visitors over mobile, a considerable difference.

Orthodontist Websites and Inquiries

From what I have seen, call to action is very important on orthodontist websites and dental websites in general. Good eye trail and a clear and compelling call to action make a big difference in the number of inquiries. This is especially important where the orthodontist or dentist is also using paid advertising to drive traffic to the website. Paid orthodontist marketing is very competitive and if the visitor arriving is not immediately engaged, then they are going to bounce to the next provider. “Free consultation” or some other simple call to action makes a big difference in the results from paid marketing.

PPC Advertising and Mobile

Pay Per Click Ads (PPC) are also very significantly mobile driven. This website is getting 45% of all its paid visitors through mobile. So once again, strong presentation to mobile visitors has a significant impact on your return in investment for your paid advertising.

Improve SEO with Regular Blogging

One thing that anyone can do to improve SEO on their website is begin a program of regular blogging.

I am an San Antonio SEO expert and have done search engine optimization for some of the busiest websites in town. Good SEO in a competitive environment can be very time consuming an expensive. One thing that I always press hard with clients is that we will cross the finish line faster as a team. Yes, I can write great content and I am very familiar with the dental field and several other health fields as well. But somehow it works so much better if the owner of a practice writes the blog or at least contributes on a regular basis.

You can get a fantastic mix of great content that is specifically relevant to that practice (or business). And if you have no budget at all, and have decided not to hire a fancy SEO expert like myself, well then blogging becomes incredibly important. You can’t do all the technical wizardry but you can do the very foundation that all good ranking is built on – create unique on a regular basis and keep pumping it out on a steady schedule.

Steady Blogging Will Improve SEO Better Than Irregular

My experience is that you get a much better result doing a short post each Monday morning than doing four longer ones at the end of the month. Not to mention that it is so much easier to keep up a steady schedule if you have a set time to get it done by. We are all busy professionals, so setting a specific time to public makes it easier. Of course the fact that I build all my websites in wordpress and that it has an option to schedule when you post will publish helps too.

Search engine optimization and the state of your website is being judged by machines, not people. Machines can easily judge things like frequency of content. I learned a lot of what I know from a true pioneer in the field of SEO – a man who was doing search engine optimization before the words were invented. He taught me this trick and I have seen it keep working all the way up till today. Blog at a steady pace. Once a day is better than once a week. Once a week is better than once a month. But however you blog, keep it consistent. Publish every morning at 9am, or every Monday at 5pm. But make sure you publish on a steady schedule.

Blogging is a huge point to improve SEO and I could write a lot about owner blogging (and I probably will). But the purpose of this post is to express the importance of keeping a steady schedule. And if you need help, feel free to give me a tinkle (don’t get any ideas – that’s British for telephone call).

Increase SEO Ranking with Paid Ads?

Yes, you sure can. Increased traffic always impacts your SEO ranking. So this is not quite the way that conspiracy theorists might like to present it. Does Google skew search results in favor of their own Adwords customers? I have never seen evidence of this. But absolutely and categorically you can give your website a general boost in SEO ranking when traffic picks up. (To learn more information see my article about general SEO.)

My personal observation is that the amount of traffic across your website is a significant factor in ranking your website again competitors. This is especially true of websites that have a very low amount of traffic to start with. Extremely low traffic on a website is an immediate problem. It “proves” to Google that your website is not relevant and not interesting. However this is often the biggest hurdle for a website – the “Catch 22”. It’s hard to rank well if you don’t have traffic. But you can’t get traffic if you dont have good page rank.

The answer to the catch 22 is to work over your website and stick with it till you do have a good SEO ranking and start getting some organic traffic.

But the dentists I deal with often can’t wait. Few businesses can. For a dental website that is in trouble and is lacking traffic I always recommend as step one- “get some paid advertising running and drive traffic any old how”.

Having a good steady flow of traffic will up your ranking and Google does not seem (thus far) to penalize paid traffic. In fact, Google does not even seem to differentiate between paid or unpaid traffic.

Your SEO Ranking and Adwords Search and Display Options

My speciality is dental marketing, so I tend to do mostly dental websites and dental paid ads. I have done so for years now so I am very familiar with conversions and what drives them. When it comes to conversions – people who actually go to a dental website and make an inquiry the search driven ads drive dramatically more conversions. However display ads are much cheaper and thus you can buy sometimes 4 display clicks for the same price as one search click.

The reason that this is a good idea is the cost-benefit ratio means that you can pay the same amount per conversion for display, but also get the benefit of lots of cheap visitors- and thus increase your SEO ranking at the same time.

Website Conversions and What Drives Them

I have consistently seen a 50/50 split between organic conversions and conversions from paid advertising. In other words, if you have a website with a good SEO ranking and are getting a decent amount of traffic from organic search, you can expect to see steady conversions on your website from that alone.

If you would like to know more about SEO there are more articles here.

Dentists Best Use of Social Media

It is generally understood that the power of social media is something that any business must harness and use if they expect to get ahead of competitors in today’s busy marketplace.

However for dentists, social media is a bit more obscure. There are some age groups and activities that lend themselves very well to social media. Fashion has always been driven socially. For a business to understand how they can use social media they have to understand the two very different approaches.

First you have activies that have been driven by social pressures in the past and likely will be always driven by social pressure. Fashion, dining, most sports and many other activities are social activities. They are done with other people and driven by interaction. Any activity that is actually social can and should be driven hard with social media.

Dentists are Not Inherently Social Media Driven

The big question looms, “how can an activity that is done alone and which is not social driven, use and benefit from this strong medium?”.

Dentists have asked me this question many times over recent years. The problem is that things you do alone are not driven by social pressure. They are driven by other pressures. Beauty can be social driven and thus cosmetic dentists can focus on beauty and create followings and engagement. The more social an activity, the easier it is. Thus a cosmetic dentist has a harder job than a fashion designer. Similarly orthodontists can tap into the beauty pathway and also into the teen age group and effectively use social media.

The other approach is indirect and requires following your own interests to create a social media following and then use this to direct people to your specific services.

For example, a dentist who is also a tennis play can drive his social media through tennis. If you are imaginative and fun, you can gain a following and use this to direct your social circle to your services as they need them. This is a less direct path, but much more effective than just sticking to dentistry and trying to create a social following about a technical subject such as dental care.

Engagement comes first and if you have set yourself up well, this results in visibility and branding. Learn more about social media and our related services.

Obviously with enough investment of time, anything can be done. Any that includes building a huge following for your dental practice. But in real-life that costs a lot of money and the actual return on investment is very low. This is a case where for a dentist, social media works in reverse to say a fashion designer. A socially driven activity can get a big following very inexpensively and thus get a big return of sales on a small investment. As a dentist, the reverse is true. You must do a lot of work to get a large following and generally you will get poor sales compared to time/money invested. So seeking a huge following and spending a lot of money on social media is not a smart strategy. What is a good strategy is finding group-driven things you enjoy and then personally building a wide following or circle and using that presence to bleed visitors to your main website. Then you get the cost way down, the return goes way up and bingo, you are mining a great source of patients for your practice.

Search Engine Optimization Secrets? – Not Really

Google and Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is dominated by the Google formula for evaluating websites. Because Google has over 65% of all search traffic it’s results are the yardstick that most marketing people use to judge a website. And they have since early years kept the exact formula for judging websites a very closely guarded secret. Over the years internet marketers and SEO experts have searched for ways to “cheat the system” and get their site on top of the search engine results page through tricks or manipulation of the system. However as Google detects that their formula is being used against them, they create new releases that level the playing field once more.

Search Engine Optimization- White Hat, Black Hat or Fuzzy Grey.

If you are in a competition, there are two well known ways of winning. You can compete and win because you are best, or you can cheat. In the world of search engine optimization, there are achievers and cheaters – and quite a few who hedge their bets by competing fairly and trying to cut corners at the same time. My SEO philosophy is simple. Eventually cheaters get caught. If you want to be number 1 and stay number one, well don’t cheat, compete and win. My website contains more on Search Engine Optimization strategy.

In that regards, Google is very helpful. They don’t not say exactly the formula they uses to rank websites-but they do publish some pretty good signposts for the world to see. In fact the major google programmers often blog and try to make clear what google wants from your website to rank it well. They spell it out in great detail. They know that good ranking for a website can mean financial success and bad ranking through poor SEO can lead to financial disaster. So they have gone to great pains to tell people what do to.

Ask Yourself the SEO Questions.

One of the most educational articles in this regard is a set of 23 questions posed by Amit Singhal, a Google software engineer.

You can see the exact original 23 questions here- 23 Questions to Ask About Your Website, from the Google Blog

In summary, rather than use the latest SEO tip or trick, you are being asked to consider some very core aspects of your website’s content.

I was very interested to see the degree to which the questions posed by Mr Singhal concerned TRUST.

If you can look over your website and have 100% confidence that it would inspire TRUST then you are most of the way there. This expresses itself in many ways- the qualifications of the person writing the article, the quality and size of the article itself, the source material being referenced (if any).

Another huge factor is QUALITY. Hastily prepared pages, with spelling errors and lots of repeating keywords will not help your cause.

Experience also tells me that well written, authoritative articles that bring valuable information or insights to the viewer are a sure fire way to bump up the ranking of a website. If you are interested in search optimization then you should take a look at the article referenced above.

That’s the real secret of great Search Engine Optimization.

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