Month: September 2013

Does Your Dental Website Wear Platform Shoes?

Websites age faster than cats. In fact, a three-year-old website can make potential patients believe that you’re still wearing a butterfly collar and platform shoes, and you believe lasers are science fiction. Every two years or so, dentists should budget for a website makeover. This means, every other year, you need to make sure that your marketing budget can accommodate website overhaul.

Trends in design, technological advances, and SEO changes can completely change in just 24 months, and to compete online, dentists must plan accordingly. The following list identifies 12 key reasons a dental website needs a makeover:

  • Your Site Looks Old – From color selection to layout, certain design elements can make a site look extremely dated. In turn, the image you’re sending to potential patients is that your office is dated – perhaps even your dentistry!
  • Your Site Contains Flash Files (instead of jQuery or HTML5) – Elements of motion look great on a website, and I suggest you use them. However, if your website has Flash files for motion, it needs to be rebuilt. Flash is bad for SEO and won’t render on any Apple device.
  • Text is Image-based, Not Live – When text is in images, Google and Bing can’t read it, therefore your website won’t get the SEO credit it should. The result is lower-than-desired rankings and traffic. Read More

Yelp Keeps Calling Me! What Do I Do?

First of all, do you have any idea what Yelp is selling?

In 2012, Yelp became a publicly traded company on the US stock market, so revenue is more important than ever. Today, about 70% of Yelp’s profit comes from paid advertisements, like those the company solicits you for by phone. Your listing at Yelp is free, so what do you need to pay for? Yelp offers local advertising on search engine results pages for a business’ location. The company can also add your information to your competitors’ Yelp listing (not search engines) and remove their advertisement from your Yelp listing. In addition, the paid services can include a slide show, call to action button, and video on your Yelp listing. Packages start at $300 and go up to about $1000 per month, according to Yelp’s advertising page.

Does your dental office need Yelp’s paid service?
As of January 2013, Yelp had over 100 million visitors per month, and about a third came from mobile searches. This sounds huge, right? Well, Google was pulling in 100 billion searches per month in late 2012. In July 2013, Bing claims to have had over 19 billion searches, and Bing is second to Google in the search market, so there’s no one in between. Yelp, however, is not a search engine – it’s a review site, like CitySearch. Google has a review site, Google+ Local, and then there’s Yelp. There are also industry-related review sites, like the government-based HealthGrades.com, and paid review sites like Demandforce and Rate a Dentist. Angie’s List also comes to mind. There is no unbiased research to tell us how many people search for dentists on any particular review site, so we have to make informed decisions based on our best judgement. Enter the statistics… Read More