Digital marketing is one of the core ways that Dental Practices are reaching new patients. The dental industry is becoming increasingly more competitive. More and more people are aiming for bright white smiles and cosmetic dentists are merging their services with general oral upkeep. As well as an increasing number of specialized dentists which are bringing the cost per treatment downward. It is now more important than ever to be found where prospective patients are looking; that’s online!
How To Be The Top Dentist in Search Results?
There are several ways as a dental clinic you can work to be more prominent on the Google search results. Firstly, by ensuring your website is kept up-to-date regularly. This does not necessarily mean you need an expensive shiny new website to achieve the desired effect. This is making sure your current website is technically sound, loads promptly (especially on mobile), is easy to navigate, and contains the core information about all of the services you offer.
Google determines your website’s positioning using keywords, this means any searches you wish to be found for must be present on your landing pages. One of the easiest ways to grow your reach without cluttering your core web pages with information is by creating a blog section on your website. Google bots love you posting fresh regular content and potential patients will too. Here you can address more in-depth aspects of the dental procedures offered, clinic news, as well as answering questions that potential patients may have, and really prove to your prospective clientele that you’re a trusted expert in your field!
Another important up-keep task is your Google My Business account (if you don’t have one you can create one here). Google My Business is a free company profile that allows you to appear on Google Search Results and Google Maps. It contains information about your opening hours, location, services, contact information plus more. This is particularly important as most of your patients will be local to your dental clinic and Google will likely favour showing this profile at the top of their search results. You can then also use this platform to collect patient reviews as this has the power to influence consumer decisions by strengthening a practice’s credibility. The higher the reviews the more inclined the search algorithms will be to show you first too.
What Should a Dentist Be Posting On Social Media?
Being a local dental practice you will want to build up a community feel about your online presence. Social media will allow you to personify your clinic and reassure users who are not sure whether to visit, that they are making the right decision. The aim of your social media channels will be to create bite-sized infographics that contain a variety of information that make it worthwhile following your content and your social pages. This is where often dental offices go wrong and push their ‘sales pitch’ a little too aggressively. Example posts could include:
- Dental Practice news
- Aspirational before and after results
- Preventive care tips and quotes
- Service information
- Team photos (put a face to the name)
- Plus more!
Partaking in a strategy like this will not only ensure you generate credibility to grow your dental practice but also retain the patients you have with streamlined communication.
Visiting a dental practice can be quite a daunting thought to many users for varying reasons, you can use social platforms to instill confidence with a trustworthy, yet friendly appearance. You can use key social media dates to piggyback on trends such as Word Health Day, National Dentist Day, National Trivia Day and more!
On a similar topic, get your hashtags in! Hashtags on social media allow users to explore content that is of interest to them and helps you to expand your overall reach. You should be hashtagging your practice location, the service/topic your post covers, and have a set list of tags that you use regularly. Examples of these include #dentistrylife #dentisttime #dentistsofinstagram #dentistsselfie to name but a few! Try and mix a combination of high-volume hashtags and low – if you are just starting out on your digital journey using #dentist might be too much of a stretch to rank for.
As well as this, it is a good idea to make sure your additional touchpoints (asides from posts) are up to date. This includes using story highlights with Booking Information, FAQs, Dental Services, and Practice Photos. As well as tagging your location in posts and ensuring the dental practice location and contact information is clearly visible within your profile.
We recommend that you should be posting a minimum of twice a week and actively respond and follow dental themed tags for inspiration.
What Kind Of Paid Advertising Is Useful For a Dental Clinic?
Paid advertising is the quickest way of putting yourself in front of prospective patients – but unfortunately, achieving this position in your industry can be expensive. Two of the most popular avenues for general dental practices are Google Ads and Social Media.
Google Ads is an intent-based marketing platform which means that users are actively searching for your services when your advertisements become visible to them. Naturally, due to it being at the end of the consideration cycle, the profitability opportunities can be high – which means more people are fighting for that prime real estate. Depending on the area of dentistry you wish to focus on and the saturation of competition in your local area, this will dictate the cost. In general, from our experience, carefully selected keywords tend to have an average CPC of $5/£4 to around $12/£9 for cosmetic terms. This would mean you would need around a $450 / £350 budget minimum to make this strategy worthwhile. We would recommend you start your campaigns close to home using radius targeting settings as these users are more inclined to consider your services and ensure you don’t spread your budget too thinly. You will need to pay close attention to the search terms this pulls in, as it is very easy to waste money on people looking for DIY solutions etc.
The second PPC strategy we recommend you partake in is Facebook Ads. This looks a little different to Google Ads as we can only target by audiences rather than specific terms. You would use this for a combination of remarketing to specific users that have visited your website, to guide them through to contact you, as well as brand awareness techniques. Facebook has a specific ‘interest’ audience available for your industry with ‘dentist’. You need to tailor your communications to your typical patient to get the most impact for your advertisement. For example, are you a family dentist whose patients value convenience or older patients that require maintenance services, etc?
What Are The Most Important Marketing Consideration For Dentists?
This might sound obvious when we say it out loud, but make sure anyone you introduce via any digital platform can clearly see how they contact the dental clinic. Where that’s making sure someone answers any form/phone enquiry or social media messages. You’ve gone to all this effort to get their attention, don’t lose them at the last hurdle. The more touchpoints that potential patients can reach out using the better. Convenience is really key!
If you would like to discuss your digital marketing options in greater detail or quite frankly do not have the time to focus on the methods of acquiring practice market share from other dental clinics in your local area. Our specialists at Click Convert are here to help! You can call us on 1-888-225-0466 for any US / Canadian Dental Clinics or 01244 470067 if you are a UK / European based dental practice.
