TIPS FOR DENTISTS ON GOOGLE AND SOCIAL MEDIA

HOW CONTENT MARKETING CAN FIND YOU MORE PATIENTS

Many dentists across the country struggle to get leads through online marketing.  They’ve tried SEO strategies that worked a few years ago and watched their sites plummet to the bottom of the search engines.   They’ve tried Social Media Marketing, but tweeted and shared they’re website to a silent audience, until they were completely discouraged with the process.

Generally, this is a problem because the website doesn’t bring enough value or interest to the prospective patient.

ORGANIC GOOGLE TEST

This is a test of the top 3 websites that are ranking in Google for the term "dental" in the top 4 major cities.  The numbers represent the total number of pages per website.

HUMANS LOVE CONTENT

We have had several clients that couldn’t find patients until they wrote articles on dental related topics.  Why is that? Because, by writing something helpful to the general public, you’re communicating to that public that there’s a face behind the brand of the website: They will trust you when you show them you are a real dentist, you can teach them something that has value, and that you know what you’re talking about. 

WHAT SHOULD YOU WRITE?

You don’t have to be Shakespeare, just write to patients as you would talk to patients in your office. Teach them, with 750 to 1000 words, depending on the competition, at least once a week, the answers to topical dental questions that you’re patients personally ask you.  The great advantage in being a dentist for marketing purposes is that you are hands on with the general public, and know what questions and concerns that they have…and others don’t.

Side note: We encourage all of our clients to record their messages on smart phones, and upload these videos to their websites.  The benefit of video is (1) people will connect with you on video, (2) you can transcribe the video for SEO purposes, and (3) you can create a podcast with the audio from the video.  So, a video greatly expands your reach to future clients.

BOTS LOVE CONTENT

While it may be overstated amongst online marketers, Google considers content to be king, and they’ve engineered they’re search engine to favor sites that have great content.  Although it’s impossible to reverse engineer what Google considers and values as “great content”, it seems fairly obvious by what we have tested that Content + Engagement = Client Conversions

THE PROBLEM WITH CONTENT

Content marketing is the best way to find real traffic and build community trust, but the problem is that the market is saturated with content, and that makes it difficult for dentists .   We won’t smugly advise you to write better content to get better engagement (there’s no point to content if no one sees it), but we will advise that having a content distribution strategy is just as important as a content strategy.

DISTRIBUTING YOUR CONTENT

With the use of long tail keywords, you can create articles for terms that have low traffic but eventually add up to a lot of traffic.  When enough people engage on these articles through these long tail keywords, you’ll eventually start ranking for short tail keywords.

Less effective, but not totally ineffective, is Adwords, but is highly useful for brand recognition (but, you have to optimize your Adwords campaign effectively).

Here are some examples of short and long tail articles:

SHORT TAIL ARTICLE EXAMPLES

  • Dental Tools
  • Dental Implants
  • Cavity Prevention
  • Daily Brushing
  • Dental Amalgam

LONG TAIL ARTICLE EXAMPLES

  • What Dental Tools We Use and Why?
  • Why You May Need Dental Implants
  • How You Can Prevent Cavities
  • Electric or Manual Toothbrushes?
  • Should You Use Mercury in Your Amalgam Fillings?

SOCIAL MEDIA: CONSTANT CONTENT

The key to any social media platform is to engage with the community, but not to sell to the community.  Sharing your content is really important and will bring real traffic to your site, but connecting with people in your town—by +ing, resharing, liking, commenting, answering questions—will bring you a lot more conversions and followers.  This can take ten minutes a day, and be well worth the effort.

Social media is moving into the arena of community building, not simply broadcasting content to users.

THINGS TO AVOID

Dental SEO Hosting Sites (We have seen these penalized on Google badly before)
Keyword Stuffing (for some reason Dentists do this far too often)

CONCLUSION

If you’re below the first page of Google, have no presence in Social Media, it’s time to do something about it.  The market for dentists is competitive, and if you don’t have leads, then you’re not going to grow as a business.