You’ll need to take time to evaluate the best strategy if you’re looking to expand your dental practice. Services like SEO and social media provide slow but steady growth, whereas pay-per-click advertising can aggressively grow your patient base, but with an increased cost. Our complete guide helps you make an informed decision on the best channels for marketing for dental offices.
Perfect Your Dental Website
Your website acts as the hub of your marketing efforts, giving you a home base that you can direct all traffic back to. It’s essential to give off a professional and modern impression, as potential patients will make a snap decision about your practice based on what they see. Here are some of the essential website design components that will help your practice convert visitors:
- Automatically resizing for different screens (including mobile phones)
- Securely encrypted (Beginning with HTTPS instead of HTTP)
- Dental care content to showcase your expertise
- Images and graphics that speak to your target market
- SEO-optimized pages for each of your services (cleanings, root canals, family dentistry, etc.)
- Forms to help new visitors book their first appointment
- Features that highlight your locations to assist with local search
- Reviews from existing clients to highlight your great customer service
Creating a beautiful, mobile-responsive website is the first step to marketing for dental offices. If you feel that your current website could use some improvements, schedule a consultation with one of ProSites’ marketing experts!
Maximize the Impact of Your Reviews
When patients are searching for a new dentist, they’ll likely start by looking at reviews. Websites like Yelp, Google My Business, and Angie’s List can help you showcase your practice and stand out from the competition. To make the most of these services, you’ll want to ask your dedicated patients to leave reviews and support your practice. ProSites helps you send automated review requests, but you can also do this manually. Since there are so many platforms to choose from, we recommend evaluating your competition. If they have more reviews on one site than the others, focus your efforts there as well. Once you have a comfortable amount of reviews on the first site, you can change the link in your emails and direct patients to another platform. By switching between all three reviews platforms, you can establish a great reputation across the web and maximize the impact of your marketing for dental offices!
Mastering Social Media
Once you’ve fully optimized your website and reviews, your next step should be to focus on social media. Platforms like Facebook make it easy to communicate with existing clients, build up your brand awareness, and even attract new patients. Fully optimize your profile by checking that your address, contact information, website, and hours are correct. We recommend checking these a few times a year to ensure nothing has changed, so potential patients always have the most up-to-date information.
You should also add a profile picture and cover photo that speak to your practice. If you don’t have professional photos, you can start with using your practice logo as the profile picture and a wide-angle view of your waiting room as the cover photo.
Once your profile is fully optimized, take time to brainstorm some content. To create sustained social media marketing for dental offices, you should post a few times a week. Rather than sitting down and coming up with one post at a time, write out a month’s worth of posts and have your office staff copy and paste the content on certain days. You can also use a service like ProSites to create content for you if your staff is too busy!
Use Search Engine Optimization to Gain Local Traffic
You’ve likely heard the term “Search Engine Optimization,” and it’s an essential part of marketing for dental offices. By tailoring your website content to the terms people search for when looking for a new dentist, you have a better chance of showing up on the first page of relevant Google searches. Since the average person will not go past the first page of Google results, having a comprehensive SEO plan is essential to finding new patients.
Since patients want to find a dentist close to home, local SEO is going to be your bread and butter. Focusing your content around terms like “dentist in [your city]” will help bring the right leads to your website. You’ll want to create separate pages for each of your services (for example, family dentistry, teeth cleaning, root canals, and more) all focused around your location. This will help potential patients find you when they search for the services they need most!
It takes sustained effort to create an effective SEO strategy, especially since Google frequently implements algorithm changes and re-prioritizes content. Since most dentists are busy focusing on running their practice, SEO may be the most important aspect of your marketing to outsource. Marketing services like ProSites will create content for you, make changes to your site to capitalize on algorithm changes, and monitor your rankings.
Utilize Pay-Per-Click Advertising
It can take time to build up both local reviews and SEO to bring ongoing traffic to your website, so consider using Pay-Per-Click Advertising to speed up your leads in the meantime. Go to Google and run a quick search for “dentist in [your city].” You may notice that the first few results are advertisements. If so, it means that your competitors are being aggressive in trying to grow their practice. On the other hand, if no ads come up, it means that you can be the first to market in your area.
Pay-Per-Click is an effective tool for marketing for dental offices, as you have complete control of your spending. You can set maximum bids for each term, as well as weekly and monthly spending limits. However, it can take a bit of testing to perfect your strategy. You’ll want to start by creating a long list of keywords you want to target, always staying focused around your city name. Since you aren’t sure what competitors are willing to bid, start with a low weekly spend targeting many different keywords. You can then monitor to see if any of the keywords have a dramatically high cost per click. If so, your competitors are bidding on that keyword as well. Once you have this data in hand, you can decide how to proceed.
If you decide to run your Pay-Per-Click campaigns yourself, check in frequently to see how things are performing. In addition to constantly testing keywords, you should also A/B test different copy and landing pages to maximize both click-through and conversion rates. If you decide to outsource all this work, ProSites can help!
Conclusion
While marketing for dental offices requires a lot of effort, it will quickly pay off as you grow your patient base. If you decide to bring in experts to support your marketing, reach out to ProSites for a consultation! Our team is entirely focused on dental marketing and will help you evaluate each channel and your competition to find patients in your area.
