Do you have a dental website? Why?
Whether you have a high-end custom website, a template site, or a WordPress blog website, you should consider why you’ve pursued online marketing. The goal, for most dentists, is to have a website that represents their practice online — because marketing on the Internet is a necessary, effective, and wise investment. The ultimate goal is to increase profitability, either by attracting a more targeted audience of patients or by increasing the number of patients in the practice. To meet these goals, you gotta get your message out, and just slapping a flyer on a domain isn’t going to do the trick. Promise. But marketing your dental practice online doesn’t have to be difficult, either.
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This week, we’re going to cover the main points you should consider when creating or overhauling your dental website. Let’s start with…
Drawing a Targeted Audience with Your Dental Website
This goal has two paths. One is search engine optimization; two is design.
First, you have to define the demographics of your target audience, or who you want to serve. What type of cases do you most enjoy? Which cases are most profitable? What’s the age, income level, education level, and lifestyle of your ideal patient? Do you like treating children? Do you like treating senior citizens? As for location, are you in the big city, so that you should try to attract professionals during the workday? Are you in the suburbs, so that you should attract the moms who will choose their family’s dentist? Are you near a retirement community, so that you should appeal to the growing number of Facebook and Internet users over the age of 65? Sketch out your target audience and keep your notes handy for your website design company’s keyword research and graphic design consultation.
As for SEO, you’ll need a list of keywords that your target audience will use in Google when searching for your practice. This sounds like a science, but initially, it’s a guessing game. (If you have data from AdWords, it can help.) If you’re starting from scratch, make a list of services, cities, and phrases that your target patients would most likely use to search for your practice. The design and, more importantly, the “live” text on your website should center on these keywords. Words are the most important attractant to search engine spiders.
As for design, your website must be friendly for search engine spiders, ie: no big Flashy opening page, the text should be “live” (when you mouse over it, you should be able to highlight it), and the text area should be sufficient to hold a good amount of content on each page. In addition, Google and marketing professionals will tell you, to compete in the SEO world, you must have a regularly updated dental practice blog.
But beyond appealing to search engine spiders, your design has to appeal to humans — those people who will become your patients. the website design must capture their attention, then the content should entice them to contact you. Find us, Contact us. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about conversion, or how to get website visitors to become patients.
At Modern Dental Practice Marketing, we design dental logos, websites, and blogs. We also provide regular phone consultation to our clients, working as part of the office team to effectively represent the practice online. A consultation will cost you nothing. If you have questions about dental website design, dental blogging, social media, or search engine optimization, call MDPM today at 972-781-8861. We will be happy to answer your questions and explain how we can make your marketing more effective and your life a little easier. At MDPM, we’re in the business to make dentists smile!