Local SEO: How Far to Stretch for Your Dental Practice

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Search engines have come a long way when it comes to helping the user figure out the answers to their questions. The key is for businesses to figure out how to use that technology to their advantage. If you’re designing a local SEO strategy for your dental practice in San Diego, CA, particularly if you just have one or two locations, we’ll look at what you should know about the algorithms and how to factor in your customer’s needs and habits for even better accuracy.

Consider Your Location

San Diego is a big city with plenty of competition in your area. Deciding how to draw the parameters comes down to who you want your customers to be and why they’re likely to visit you in the first place. If you’re a general dentist providing general services, you may want to limit your local SEO to people within a 15-minute drive. Those who are more than 15 minutes away may be more likely to choose a general dentist who’s 10 minutes away or less.

Now is also a good time to map out a location radius based on your customer habits. If you’re in an area of town with nonstop traffic, you’ll want to factor that into your drive time. This may mean cutting down on how many miles your local SEO stretches (e.g., to people who are 4 miles away or less).

Consider Your Specialty in San Diego

Local SEO can get a little muddled when you consider your specialty in San Diego. For a specialist, patients may be willing to travel for longer, especially if you have proven skills that other dentists in the area don’t. For instance, if you’re a root canal retreatment extraordinaire who has worked with some of the most complex cases, you may want to branch out to people who are a half-hour drive away or more.

If you’re looking for a dental marketer in San Diego who can help you answer these questions, the staff at Digital Healthcare Professionals has you covered. Our team is not only skilled at local SEO, we can adapt it for any dentist in the area who wants to make their marketing more effective.

How Much Does SEO Affect Revenue for Dentists?

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If you’re a dentist, you likely wonder how your website’s SEO affects your bottom line. You might also ask a variety of questions about the type of time, money, and effort to spend on it. For instance, if most of your referrals are word of mouth, do you really need to keep up with Google’s ever-changing list of requirements? We’ll look at the crux of the matter and what kinds of resources a dental practice would need to part with to improve their website’s SEO in San Diego.

Mastering SEO in the Dental Industry

Search engine optimization for San Diego dentists refers to the work you need to do to stay on top of search engine rankings. So, if someone searches for dentists in the Gaslamp District, your practice would be the one to pop up if you fit the search criteria.

If you don’t happen to come out on top, the next questions are about which practices are coming up and how their business is faring. So let’s say that Dr. Smith, DDS is constantly outranking you, no matter what you do. If you call the practice and find that you can’t get an appointment for the next six months, it may have something to do with how they’re implementing SEO.

SEO and the Bottom Line

It’s not always easy to connect your bottom line with SEO. Yes, you can ask people where they heard about you, but you won’t know how many direct referrals could be traced back to the popularity of your website. What’s often more important about your SEO is the care that you put into the website. If you know that your patients are going to look up facts about you, you’ll want to provide them with a site that is not only accurate but easy to navigate and stuffed with content that they can actually use.

Marketing in San Diego

If you’re looking for marketers in San Diego, CA who understand the landscape out there, Digital Marketing Professionals can help. We’re here to give you the tips you need, especially as search engine algorithms adjust to changing search patterns. Contacting us today is a step in the right direction, particulary if you want to build up your client base.

Tips to Get More Dental Service Bookings

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The internet is vast and simply posting things online for your dental practice won’t necessarily attract the local market that you need for dental service bookings. You need specialized, local digital marketing strategies like the following:

Get a Custom Website

There are so many generic websites on the internet these days that it’s hard for customers to identify individual businesses. Expand your brand by getting a custom website that exhibits your practice’s unique identifying characteristics. This includes everything from personalized images depicting your office, brand colors, fonts and style. This is a great way to help cement your brand in your local customers’ minds so they instantly think of your dental practice when they need service.

Publish Blog Posts Regularly

Consistently updating your website with optimized blog posts helps to keep your website rankings high in search engines. They also create a sense of connection with your current patients and pique the interest of new ones. These updates serve as gentle reminders of your services, keeping your practice firmly in their thoughts and encouraging bookings.

Fostering Patient Trust with Online Reviews

Positive online reviews and testimonials from your past and existing patients help to instill trust in those who are searching for dental services in your area. Make it easy for your customers to leave five-star reviews, which gives social proof that can help sway potential patients in the area.

Boost Visibility With Local SEO

On your website, make sure your practice is easily discoverable to local prospects by implementing local SEO strategies on your front-facing pages as well as in all of your blog posts. By focusing on local SEO strategies, you can target specific searches related to the dental services that your office provides. This is also a great way to promote services that you have that your competitors don’t. Implementing these techniques will significantly enhance your practice’s local visibility, and increase the likelihood that you’ll get more dental service bookings.

When you’re ready to implement these strategies in your digital marketing, let the pros take care of it for you. At Digital Healthcare Professionals, we offer all of the above-mentioned services and more. Contact one of our friendly representatives today to learn more about how we work hard to increase your online local presence.

 

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A Look at the True Impact of Negative Google Reviews for Your Dental Practice

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As the old saying goes, you can’t please all the people all the time. No matter how stellar your services are at your dental practice and how many patients leave raving reviews, you are bound to have a few negative reviews show up on Google from time to time. These reviews can be pretty intimidating, and they can have more negative repercussions than you may know. Here is a look at the true impact of a bad review of your dental office on Google and what you can through reputation management for your dental practice do to combat the damage.

Here’s Why A Negative Review Needs Attention

One negative review may not seem like a big deal, but just one online negative review of your dental practice can bring along unwanted consequences. As much as 94 percent of customers claim they have veered away from a business if the business had negative reviews. According to some research, half of patients will actually travel out of their own insured network to see a practitioner with positive reviews.

How to Mitigate the Damage from a Negative Review

In some instances, fraudulent reviews can be removed. These reviews tend to be blatantly obvious; the individual may make extreme remarks about your services in an effort to provoke an emotional reaction. Or, the review may not even align with the types of services offered at your dental practice. When you can prove to a review site through reasonable doubt that a review is fraudulent, the host will typically pull the review.

Since you can’t usually remove the negative review, the focus must be on making that review look much less detrimental. A few tactics can help, including:

  • Making the review look less noticeable by harvesting as many good reviews as possible
  • Quickly responding to the review
  • Being polite and courteous by offering assistance or for the reviewer to contact the office

Google My Business Store Front

Get Help with Online Reputation Management for Your Dental Practice

While managing your reputation online as a dental practice is important, the process can be time-consuming. Therefore, many dentists trust reputation management to their digital marketing team. If you need help with reputation management for your healthcare practice, reach out to us at Digital Healthcare Professionals for a free custom quote.

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Sources:

 

https://info.zimmermarketing.com/blog/the-power-of-patient-reviews-for-your-dental-practice

 

https://www.dentistryiq.com/practice-management/marketing/article/16359859/online-dentist-review-use-is-climbing-are-you-ready

 

 

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What Is Local SEO and Why It Matters for Your Optometry Website

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Way back when, prospective optometry patients relied on word of mouth and local advertising to get to know the eye doctors in their area. Those days are long gone—the bulk of patients look for information about medical care providers before they ever schedule an appointment. When you take this action into consideration, you start to see why targeting the people looking for you online should be such a key component of your Optometry digital marketing strategy. Local SEO (search engine optimization) plays a huge role in this process.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a process of optimizing your website and business online to make sure key searchers within your geographic location are able to find your practice. If your online marketing strategy does not involve local SEO strategies, the people who visit your site may not be people who could logically be perspective patients because of their proximity to your place of business.

How Is Local SEO Incorporated?

Local SEO involves several facets, including:

  • Making sure your business is properly listed on Google My Business
  • Enhancing your website with key terms and phrases users in your area would most likely use to find an eye doctor
  • Making sure your practice is listed on pertinent review sites
  • Optimizing website content according to local information
  • Listing your business on directories specifically for businesses
  • Optimizing your website so it performs well for mobile users

Is Local SEO a Wise Investment?

Absolutely! Integrating a local SEO strategy for your optometry practice’s website can deliver an excellent return on investment. Consider some of these statistics:

  • Nearly half of all searches on Google are for local services
  • 88% of people who search for a service provider locally will visit that business within 24 hours
  • 78% of local mobile searches end with an offline purchase of products or services

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Work with Healthcare Marketing Professionals for Help

When done correctly, a local SEO strategy can mean substantial online and real-life traffic to your optometry practice. If you need help building a local SEO strategy, reach out to us at Digital Healthcare Professionals for a custom quote.

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Sources:

 

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/local-seo-stats

Google My Business Store Front

Why Is Google My Business So Important?

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Google My Business is a free tool from Google that allows business owners to take control of their online presence. When your patients search for a business online, the keywords they use can trigger the search engine to pull up your business name and location on the map.

Many business owners forget about just how important it is to reach the people who are physically closest to them, and just how much one search engine can impact their bottom line. Prioritizing their searches can be the key to boosting your revenue across the board.

Google My Business: The Business Profile

You may know from your own Google searches that there are plenty of businesses that show up in Google searches that don’t actually have a website. If you click on their information, it may provide little more than an address and a name. It begs the question: why would business owners establish a profile but supply practically no information about what they do?

The answer is that it’s possible the business owner didn’t set up their profile at all. Not everyone thinks it’s important to be online, especially if they’ve gone this long without it. A basic business profile only takes a few basic facts about the establishment to create it, which means that a total stranger can set up the profile and cause it to pop up on the map.

If you don’t want the narrative of your business to run away from, you need to have a concrete approach to how your customers are finding you. This will not only help you reach customers, but it can also help you find out what other people are saying about you.

Mastering the Strategy

Finding the right strategy for Google My Business starts with getting acquainted with the different features. Staying engaged with the available tools will show customers that you’re engaged with them. For instance, customers can ask you questions through Google My Business and get the answers they need to determine whether they want to take the next steps.

Local connections are powerful for a number of reasons. These are people who know everything from the customs to the streets of your city or town, and that common knowledge can be a foundation for the loyalty you need to both help your patients and get ahead.

You can also use analytics to determine how to adjust your profile and whether you need to add more information to it. From photos to hours to brand information, you’re building a bridge that can take your business to the next level.

Contact Digital Healthcare Solutions to Improve Local SEO

We are experts at finding out where your customers are, how they find you, and how you can find them. If you want to learn more about how we can best incorporate Google My Business into your larger local SEO strategy, contact us today to learn more.

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Is Your Dental Website Properly Utilizing SEO?

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Every single second, about 74,000 search terms are being keyed into search engines like Google. When these search terms get keyed in, there is one element that primarily dictates what an internet user sees displayed before them on a search engine results page (SERP). Search engine optimization (SEO) allows search engines to determine precisely what websites are worthy of being displayed higher on the list.

While many dentists do have a website, many also fail to recognize the importance of SEO to their success online. Here are a few things to consider about using SEO properly for your dental practice’s website.

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Facts About the Effectiveness of SEO

Did you know that 67 percent of web users will click on one of the first five results they see on a SERP? Yet, more than 90 percent of web content does nothing to help rank a website on a SERP. These big numbers go to show how important SEO can be for your website but also just how few website owners create content with the intent of garnering more traffic due to SEO. A well-optimized website will:

  • Have specific key terms and phrases worked into the content
  • Excellent metadata and metal titles with SEO incorporation
  • SEO-based imagery and graphics

SEO Mistakes Dental Websites Owners Make

Making mistakes with SEO is so easy to do, especially if you only have a basic understanding of the concept. SEO is about more than just keywords; numerous facets of optimization affect the overall quality of an SEO plan. Some of the biggest mistakes dentists make with their website include:

  • Keyword stuffing, which can actually lower your rankings on SERPs
  • Not utilizing all parts of their website to build a comprehensive SEO strategy
  • Assuming simply SEO alone will help give a website a boost

Get Expert SEO Assistance for Your Dental Website 

When it comes down to it, many dental professionals are so busy tending to the needs of their patients that tweaking dental website SEO is a task that falls by the wayside. Thankfully, finding someone to help you up the effectiveness of your website so it is both searchable and user-friendly is not hard. Reach out to us at Digital Healthcare Professionals to discuss how we can help you make sure your practice’s website is properly optimized for online markets.

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4 Reasons Your Optometry Practice Website May Not Be the Getting Web Traffic You Need

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The website you have published for your optometry website should be the ideal lead-in for prospects. However, if traffic numbers are not where they should be, there are some likely reasons behind the problem.

1. Your website is not as functional as it should be.

If there is one thing that can send a visitor to your optometry website off in another direction, it is a dysfunctional website. Every detail should be ironed out, including the functions of links and buttons, videos and slideshows that should be working, and any graphics you use.

2. Your website is not properly optimized using SEO best-practices.

SEO best practices involve incorporating the right keywords and phrases, optimizing visual content, and more. Bad traffic numbers are most often a sign that something with your SEO strategy is not up to par with everyone else.

3. Your blog is not extensive enough to draw organic traffic.

About 80 percent of people online interact with two things: social media and blogs. This speaks volumes about why your optometry blog should be carefully curated, valuable to visitors, and extensive. Blogs have the ability to fetch a 434% increase in indexed pages on search engines. Plus, the general statistic is that companies that have a nice blog can see an astounding 67% more leads in a single month than companies that neglect their blog. Your blog is vital, and in many respects, it can be your secret weapon as an optometrist looking for more traffic.

4. Your website is not optimized for local web traffic.

Yes, you want your website to be globally recognized on the world wide web, but your local traffic is just as important. In fact, your local traffic numbers should be outweighing global numbers unless you hit luck and gain a massive following for your practice from a wider base of consumers. If your site is not optimized to attract local visitors, your traffic numbers can be dreary.

The traffic you get to your optometry website can make all the difference in how well your practice grows and flourishes and stays relevant for the years to come. Reach out to us at Digital Health Professionals to learn how we can help.

Professional Dentist tools and chair in the dental office.

Geo-Targeting for Dentists: How to Increase Your Local Customer Base

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You’ve probably heard the term geo-targeting. You may even realize that it’s a marketing term that means aiming your advertising content toward local traffic. But how can you use geo-targeting to help increase the amount of business that frequents your dental practice? As a business owner, you have many options for geo-targeting. We explain several of them below.

Build a Geo-Fence

A Geo-Fence is best described as a virtual perimeter around a real-world location. For example, with help from a digital marketing firm such as Digital Healthcare Professionals, you can designate a physical area that encompasses the location of your dental practice. When a visitor with a mobile device steps inside that perimeter, they trigger your geo-fence, meaning they begin receiving ads for your business for up to 30 days. You can put whatever you like in those ads, such as a coupon for a free cleaning or dollars off a dental procedure of choice. You can erect your virtual geo-fence wherever you want, including the blocks around your competitors’ offices, too.

Add Your Location To Your SEO

It’s difficult to find high-performing search engine keywords these days without spending tons of money. However, by adding your office location to popular terms that people search for on Google, you can optimize your search engine results for local business affordably. For instance, if a majority of people are searching Google for “best dental office near me,” you can cash in on that term by using “best dental office near me West Main Street, Paducah.”

Localize Your Landing Page

Because geo-targeting lets you read the visitor’s location when they click through to your site, you can create location-specific landing pages for different demographics. As an example, a visitor that pings from a nearby suburban neighborhood may see a page that’s slanted toward preventive dental care for families. Alternately, a visitor who pings from a business park across town may see a page dedicated to improving the appearance of adult smiles. The more you learn about the prospective clients who visit your site, the better suited you are to appeal to their needs. This is what geo-targeting is all about. We can get you started. Contact Digital Healthcare Professionals today.

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Improving the Search Engine Results for Your Optometry Office

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As an optometrist, you’re required to know a lot about disorders of the eye and how to care for them. You’re not, however, required to know a lot about search engine results pages (SERPS). Still, if you want to utilize your website to its full advantage, it benefits you to have an optometry site that ranks well in Google search. Therefore, it’s good to have a digital marketing firm on hand to help handle the non-eye-related aspects of your business.

What Are SERPS and Why Should I Care About Them?

Your search engine results are important because they let new customers find your business. If your optometry site is buried on page 17 of Google search, no one will ever find you there. Your optometry practice needs to rank well with Google to stay competitive. Here’s how.

Add Quality Content

To what questions do visitors to your site need answers? Figure out what questions people are Googling when looking for a local optometrist and then add content to your site that answers these questions. For instance, people may type “When Do I Need an Optometrist?” into Google search when trying to decide whether to book an appointment. This is your cue to put up a well-written article that answers this very question, with bonus points for using the question as the title.

Additionally, content posted on your site must be easy to scan quickly. This means using subtitles, bulleted lists, images, and more to your best advantage. Short paragraphs are best.

Optimize Speed

Content is king, but speed is important, too. No online visitor is going to wait minutes or even seconds for your website to load. Your site to be responsive so it loads quickly without glitching or freezing up. Using an online template that features responsive design can help you achieve this.

Optimize Images for Search

Online readers love images, but they have to be high-quality images that load easily and are interesting to view. Use alt tags in your images, and caption them using popular keywords in your niche. Doing so will help your site rank higher in Google search.

Digital Healthcare Professionals can help improve where your site falls in the SERPS. Call us today for a custom quote.