SEO is working for some dentists and dental practices. But be wary of the HYPE! Dental website SEO is a 'well' of potential that cannot be fully understood or controlled – even by the dentist website SEO experts – because it is always evolving and not necessarily doing more for the money spent.
Make sure the dental website SEO well you are lowered into provides enough financial liquidity to pay back your investment not just a very long rope wrapping around your dental marketing budget.
Website SEO is NOT like dental treatment that has an upward trend of improvement over time – it is more like shifting sands of value with many areas of quicksand for your marketing dollars. Make sure you get the whole picture for your dental website strategy not just a service with a bunch of over-hyped promises. Your dentist web site strategy should focus on what YOU need, not mostly what SEO needs!
Your dentistry has a value that should standout from the GIMMICKS dental SEO firms have in their quiver. Make sure the dental practice Website SEO firm’s belief in their own service is not more overblown than their knowledge of other dental marketing services that might be more valuable to you.
Secondarily, dental SEO merely WAITS for new patients to search… so you end up fighting for the same limited patient base your dentist competitors are. Plus it is getting even more difficult to get those new dental patients as more of your dental practice competitors join in the online and SEO fray.
This means rather than enhancing the overall supply of patients, you are paying more and more dental marketing dollars for fewer patients than the first dentist that did SEO. While I do see issues with its SINGULAR potential for driving patients to your dental practice, SEO can help you gain a foothold in the dental advertising environment.
SEO – search engine optimization – the “free click” concept – is very seductive for many dentists. It is the “Free” dental PR of the web. However, there is REAL WORK involved. Either you do the dental web site search engine optimizing or your dental Webmaster does.
Dental SEO is an ongoing process. You also need to be wary of the many pitfalls and gimmicks that might hurt the high ranking potential of your dental web site. Think of effective dentist SEO as keeping ahead of periodontal disease with your patients. There are good days where you feel good about what has been done – but if nothing is done for months – much of the value is lost. Search engines change their rules and algorithms, and the basic technology of tracking results transforms constantly.
Effective dental website SEO is a matter of valuable content, updating, and some technical formatting and structuring. This is not all about “meta tags” as it was in the early days. Some SEO groups can even get your site blacklisted: using various schemes like “link farming” and “keyword slamming”. These are very shallow dental SEO strategies. Be sure the strategy is also about valuing your dentist expertise not just finding “a dental website”.
The most vexing dentist web SEO issue: there is no way to really quantify the value of any specific strategy that will get you at the top consistently because of all these variables. Unless they assess many aspects of their dental marketing, dentists will just pay more until “it happens”.
Finally, to gain the upper hand in this online dental advertising environment, it makes sense to have a decent offline proactive dental marketing campaign. Use SEO to gather up dental patients who are already out there searching for a dentist, but make sure you are ALSO introducing more people to the value of your dental practice brand through an external marketing strategy, a dental direct mail program for example. Even sending a few hundred or a thousand dental postcards a month, which direct consumer directly to your dental web site not to search for any dentist.
Remember dental SEO is a regressive strategy unless you are priming the pump with a proactive – get more consumers to log online – public (and patient) dental marketing communication campaigns. Avoid the quicksand of one trick pony dental advertising strategy. Get the right dental communication mix, Integrate!
Sincerely, Dick Chwalek - Niche Dental President
CALL 866-453-1026
Dentist Marketing Coach and Dental Consultant
NicheDental.com
PLUS - Go Proactive with your dental marketing...
Dental Logos With Standout POWER, Stationery Design, Dentist Websites Too!.
Grow Your Patient Base Fast with Personalized Dental or Orthodontic Postcards!
No comments:
Post a Comment