Social Media has become a bit of a buzz word in online marketing for local businesses recently – as a result many Dentists have almost become pre-occupied with building their online brand through channels such as Facebook and Twitter. In doing this are they guilty of neglecting the current ugly sister in online marketing – search engine optimisation?
Social Media is a fantastic way of building your brand online and engaging with your patients, and we at Dental Design certainly don’t feel it is mutually exclusive from other online marketing channels, but if it is new patients and long term return on investment you want, SEO is the channel to concentrate on!
Here are 5 reasons why SEO should still be very much considered in your online marketing strategy for your Dental Practice.
1) Increase your web traffic
A recent study by the Kelsey Group & ConStat stats that 74% of all search engine users now use the internet when shopping locally for products and services. Do you want new patients? Your website needs to rank well in the search engines then! SEO is the process of optimising your website in order to rank highly for your selected keywords. A well optimised website will rank highly for its targeted keywords, higher rankings mean that your website will receive more traffic; and more traffic means more new patient enquiries.
2) High ROI
Pound for Pound, search engine optimisation will bring your practice higher return on investment than any comparable form of marketing – with SEO you are essentially getting free clicks so your marketing spend will be the same whether your website gets 100 clicks or 1000 clicks a month. Coupled with the fact that up to 70% of users only click on the natural listings , a well optimised website will give high returns on any marketing spend.
3) Targeted
SEO is a highly targeted form of marketing, you can optimise your website to appear in the natural search results for keywords or keyphases that are relevant to the services offered by your practice. The fact your website will show in the results for a service that a potential new patient is actively searching for means they are more like to convert when they visit your website.
4) Improve your Brand Awareness
As mentioned above Facebook and Twitter are great for increasing your brand awareness but SEO is also a well useful channel for this. Psychologically, the higher up the search engines your website is listed the better it looks for your Dental Practices brand. The reason being is that everyone knows and trusts Google to provide them with relevant and respectable results. Therefore by simply occupying results on the first page for your targeted keywords, your brand is gaining authority in the eyes of current and potential patients.
5) Competition
If the above reasons aren’t enough to kick start SEO as part of your marketing strategy – just know that much of your competition WILL be optimising their websites, they WILL be getting more patient enquiries and getting good return on investment. Internet usage for searching for local businesses like Dental Practices is rising, and with the advent of the smart phone – this trend will continue. Stay ahead of your competition now and in the future by outsourcing your SEO to a company with proven local search experience.