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How Dental Practices Are Being Ripped Off Their Marketing Dollars

After years of providing marketing services for dental practices as well as other health care professionals, I have seen quite a few ways that they have been lied to and deceived about what they are getting for the hard-earned cash that they are investing in marketing.

Most dental practices know that some form of marketing and promotion is necessary to be able to fill the schedule and truly be successful, even if only done during slow periods. Most dental and health practices are contacted by a wide array of marketing companies trying to sell them on all manner of marketing ideas – from billboards to yellowpages, postcard mailings, coupon mailings, radio and tv ads, websites, internet advertising and more. Some offer bundles, such as if you advertise in their hardcopy directory, they will also do internet advertising for you, and, and, and…

Since we have tested pretty much every type of marketing a dental practice might do, I can tell you what ones truly give the best return on investment. (This is something I will cover in more detail in another article.) But I can tell you right now that the #1 form of marketing that will get you the best ROI is most definitely through the INTERNET. Though there is a downside.

With the world going more and more internet, including through mobile devices (phones and tablets), your internet presence is most important because when it is done right, it performs head and shoulders above any other form of marketing you can do. If it is NOT performing, it is simply not being done, regardless of what you are being told.

The downside of the internet world is that this is where the greatest rip-off occurs – because it’s not something that is as easily tracked as a postcard, a billboard or a Yellowpages ad.

Here are the most common services where practices get ripped off and lied to:

1. Internet Advertising: only a percentage of what you think you are paying for internet advertising actually goes to Google. This percentage can range anywhere from 80% (unusually high) to as little as 10 or 15%.

For example, if you pay a company for $1000 per month for internet advertising, most likely anywhere from $500 or maybe as much as $900 of that money is going in their pockets and only a percentage gets paid out for the actual advertising on Google and other providers. Most companies will not disclose to you how much that percentage is. And often any numbers they do give are not specific breakdowns. An ad on Google is worth more than an ad on Yahoo. Knowing exactly what you are buying is vital.

2. Package “deals”: Some companies will offer you a package deal of a listing in their hardcopy directory and then also offer online listings, plus internet advertising, plus lead tracking. These can also be deceptive because no breakdown is given of how much of your fee actually pays for internet ads. Another problem can be that the internet advertising goes to some sort of mirrored website for you (so they can track the traffic that they generate for you). The problem is that traffic on your website increases the overall search value of your site- so you end up paying to push lots of traffic to a website that you don’t own. That could be adding to the power and performance of your own website.

3. Cookie-cutter content used in websites and blog posts. When getting a website built or expanded this is deadly. What I mean by this is that the same text used on your website and blog posts has been used on numerous other similar websites – it’s not unique. When this is done it looks like honest good work has been done, but actually it is doing more harm than good as your website will be penalized in its ranking for using copy from other websites. Your website and any blog posts must be unique.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services: Because the work that is done to optimize a website (for improved performance in search engines and better visibility of your website) is technical and generally you have no idea what actual work is being done, very often you can pay thousands of dollars for this service and only get a few hundred dollars worth of actual work done. You have no way of telling really unless you know how to check this.

How to get past the “smoke and mirrors”:

What you want is full disclosure and transparency. Demand to know upfront what exact percentage of the money you pay for advertising will actually go to Google, or if not Google, which advertiser you are paying for. If they won’t tell you and put it in writing or if this figure is less than 70%, don’t hire them.
Find out from your marketing company what key search terms they are targeting in the advertising that they are doing for you. Then you can search those key terms to see if your ads show up on the first page. Do any such search in the afternoon or evening as low budget advertising might be running in the morning but will disappear once the daily budget is used up.
Demand reports of the exact work that has been done each month for SEO services. It takes 10 minutes for them to detail out what unique content was added to your site, what valuable links to your website on other websites have been set up, what unique blog posts were done, etc. These can all be checked to see if the reporting is true.
Don’t let advertisers speak to you in terms you can’t understand. A true professional can explain things to you in a way that you can understand, and would do so out of courtesy. If you are getting a lot of technical babble – realize that someone is hiding behind a smoke-screen of “this is too technical for you to understand” – and take it as a red flag that you are likely being ripped off.
Periodically check your website in the search engines by searching key terms for your practice to see where your website comes up. Make sure to use a different browser than you normally use as likely you have logged on to your website from your normal browser and your browser will not show give you the same results that everyone else sees. If you use Chrome, then look it up in Firefox or Safari, etc.

Marketing dollars can build your practice up or drain it down. We offer free website analysis and internet advertising reviews. If you are concerned that your advertising dollars have not bought you what you were promised, I strongly recommend getting a free review as a second opinion. We will provide you with an unbiased report with specific issues that you can see yourself.

Call us: 210-601-1050

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.

Responsive Website Design

We just completed a new responsive website design and development project, which you can see here: https://jointsupplements.info/

This project was a fast development, which of course keeps costs down. Using the StudioPress base theme – Genesis, we were able to develop a website that was fully mobile responsive right out of the box. Because I am seeing up to 33% of traffic coming from mobile devices, having responsive website design is now of paramount importance. It has become somewhat customary to have a seperate website design for mobile but with the wide range of devices, each with a different screen size, it is far better to have a website that responds to the device settings where it is being displayed. One thing that I would recommend to any business owner is – update your website and place it on a fully responsive platform.

This project also was also an interesting because we developed all of the copy for this nutritional based website. As we normally work with dental websites, this was a fresh challenge and developing compelling copy was a large part of the project. Take a peek, I would love to hear any feedback.

Making Your SEO Efforts Worthwhile

SEO Ranking and Keywords

When you are doing your SEO, don’t allow yourself to be tempted by just “high rankings”. You have to ask the questions “high rankings for WHAT search terms?”. It’s low class SEO is to find the least competitive and least important keywords and offer to make a website to rank #1 for that. You may have a website like “rollingoakdental.com” and with very little work you can boast that this website is ranked #1 for the keyword “Rolling Oak Dental” or “Dental Clinic in Rolling Oak”. Which seems peachy and fine but in fact is not.

The problem is that when you go ahead and check traffic on these keywords, you find next to nothing at all. In fact, I ran a check on those search terms using some internet advertising I was running and found that search term example showed up 55 times out of 3,000 different searches. So that’s a problem. It means that you are spending money doing SEO on your website to get ranking for terms that will never result in any significant increase in traffic on your website.

I do mostly dental websites but it’s the same for all websites – traffic is all that matters. You need visitors and if you are paying for SEO that is not resulting in an increased level of traffic – you are throwing your money away. Or if you are doing the work yourself, you are throwing your hard work away.

For this reason it is really important that you have some kind of keyword research done before you start doing SEO. The simpler and broader the word, the more traffic it will pull and the more competition there is. Very broad words are highly competitive and may result in a long runway before you see any effect of your SEO. So finding keywords that are not too competitive but which will still provide a decent increase in traffic is incredibly important. If you are embarking on an SEO program for your dental office make sure you see the keyword resarch before you start. I am a San Antonio SEO consultant and have done search optimization on quite a few websites in central Texas and I always do detailed keyword research before I start any search engine optimization.

The other important factor for SEO is to set very specific goals. If you are not interested in brand awareness or number of visits you need to know this before you start doing keyword research. Some websites live on advertising and care only about number of visits. A dental clinic or other medical practice is not really interested in how many people are visiting the site, the interest is in inquiries. And again, it is possible to waste SEO on keywords that do not result in people inquiring about your services. So another step before embarking on a SEO campaign is to ask yourself this question: “Will this list of keywords result in new patients calling my office for dental services?”.

How High In The SEO Rankings Before I See More Traffic?

A troublesome aspect of SEO is that if you are going to invest anything in improving your website’s ranking, you really need to be willing to go all the way. If your website currently ranks number 150 for the search term “San Antonio dental clinic” then getting to number 100 will make absolutely no difference whatsoever. You will get the same number of visits – zero or close to it. Same when you go from 100 to 50. You should see perhaps a tiny volume of visits when you go from 50th place to 30th. It is only when you reach the second page of google will you see anything even worth mentioning in terms of traffic.

Studies over many years have never changed. You don’t see any significant traffic until you are placed on the home page of the search results. And then, you only start getting an important percentage of the traffic when you are in first, second or third place.

So if you are not willing to go the whole distance, don’t start the race. SEO is not about simply improving your position- it is about dominating in search. Then and only then do you reap the rewards of your hard work.

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).

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