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Download print version of “Truth #2: The Importance of Search Engine Positioning – Who Wants a Dental Website at the Top of Google, MSN & Yahoo?
Truth #2: The Importance of Search Engine Positioning
Who Wants a Dental Website at the Top of Google, MSN & Yahoo?
9 Truths of Dental Marketing – #2
For the complete online video series at no-charge go to: www.InternetDentalAlliance.com/9Truths.htm
Welcome! This is Jim Du Molin, Editor of The Wealthy Dentist Newsletter. I’m here today to give you a brief introduction to segment # 2 of our 9 Truths Program.
The importance of positioning your Internet Dental Marketing campaigns with the major search engines is critical to your success. Your Internet marketing information must be easily found by dental consumers searching for your type of dental expertise.
As you view this segment, take note that we are targeting specific types of high-value new patients. In these tough economic times, dollars are a scarce resource; they must be highly targeted for the exact results you are looking for.
There’s only one thing that counts on the Internet and that’s your location with the search engines. Now, almost everybody uses the search engines to find a dentist. Everybody’s been trained now to go to Yahoo, MSN, Google and Ask Jeeves. Those are the top four search engines. So let me explain to you how it works in case you’re not familiar with it.
Our job at the Internet Dental Alliance, that’s our website division of TheWealthyDentist.com, our goal is to make you one of the top dental practices for the list that’s on the Internet for your geographic market and area of focus. So lets look at what it means to you if you’re a family dentist and how that’s searched for on the Internet.
So we select Family, and we go to MSN. This is a standard search; I just clipped it out. And were putting in Family Dentist, Portland, Oregon. That’s how people will search for a family dentist. They’ll say family dentist or general dentist, or just dentist, Portland, Oregon. And we press the search button and this comes up. And #1 is Dr. Ken Waddell from Tigard, Oregon. Its a suburb of Portland. And he comes up with a nice, family-oriented site. And its important that these things be tailored to the type of patients you’re looking for.
You’ll notice the three photos. Actually, in real life those dissolve in and out. And you can customize the photos so you can have the types of patients you want showing in your photos. Its kind of important.
Now Ken is really into family dentistry. He has 11 children. He didn’t do them all by himself; he combined two families, and he’s a real family dental practice. And, he supports families and that’s what he’s targeting.
Lets look at sedation dentistry. That’s one of the newer, more advanced dental practitioner groups, dental target markets we’ve been working with extensively. And we put this in, and lets put in Sedation Dentist MSN for Lexington. And #2 that comes up is Dr. Tony Feck.
Many people know Tony because he’s a speaker on the market and he does a great job talking about marketing and sedation dentistry. He’s in Lexington, and you’ll also notice that he has a little spot on his home page. This is an article that changes every day that tells people what’s new in dentistry. This means that your patients can come back every day and see a different front page article. It also helps you with the search engines because they see that the content is changing. It means that you’ve got a site that is being refreshed more often and it’ll give you a better rating with the search engines.
The last one here in our example is cosmetic dentistry. And we pop in Cosmetic Dentist Salinas. That’s a town in the middle of nowhere in California. And up comes, first one, is Dr. Klugman, and he comes up with Bianco Dental Care. And as you can see, its a completely different site targeted to cosmetics. The photos are different. The copy is different, and so forth. And its targeted toward cosmetic dentistry.
Before we leave this part of the program, it is important to note that search engine results can be broken into two segments; Organic and Paid.
Paid results are what you see at the top of the page, usually the first three listings, and along the right side of the page. These listings are paid for by advertisers. Every time you click on one, a fee of from .5O cents all the way up to $100 is paid to the search engine. These are called Pay Per Click or PPC ads.
The second type of search engine result is called Organic. These results are based on the search engines analysis of your dental website or directory listings. These listings are free.
Generally Organic results pull a better response from potential dental patients than paid ads, in some cases as much as 8 to 1.
It is important not to let anyone tell you that they can guarantee you, consistently, the top position on Google, Yahoo or MSN’s Organic results. While they can have an effect through proper website design, no search engine optimization company can control these results.
The only way a dental website optimization company can guarantee consistent page one results is to buy a paid ad for your practice. Beware; this can be a very expensive proposition.
In the next segment, # 3 of the 9 Truths series, we will take you, step-by-step, through the concept of how to use multiple dental websites to target high-value new patients.
For the complete online series at no-charge go to: www.InternetDentalAlliance.com/9Truths.htm
