It’s amazing what you can find in old closets. I
was cleaning out one of mine the other day when I
ran across an old, dusty, beaten up Yellow Pages. The
fact that it made its way into my closet where it lived
for years and not immediately into the nearest trashcan
is astounding! I even thought back to 1987 for a
couple seconds as I shoved that sallow beast into the
Hefty bag. How many of you recall placing expensive
ads in the Yellow Pages?
When I graduated from University of Missouri-
Kansas City dental school in 1987 the Yellow Pages
was a total cash cow. Back then all the “older guys”
wouldn’t place an ad in it because they thought it
would harm their reputation. So, of course, in Howard
Farran fashion, I did it in a huge way and it worked
like a winning slot machine for more than a decade!
But then every dentist caught on and it eventually
started to break even and then lose money. Ten years
ago my practice, Today’s Dental, had three full-page
ads in three different phone directories. Today we have
one small ad in our small local phonebook that covers
my neighborhood of Ahwatukee in Phoenix, Arizona.
The slow and steady decline of the Yellow Pages
was simply caused by the slow and steady rise of the
Internet. And because Mom switched from the stale,
static scarcity of limited paper ads in the Yellow Pages
to endless Internet search engine results which link to
an endless number of Web sites containing information
ranging from meet the dentists to blogs
on every subject, I now spend $500 a
month just on pay-per-click Google ads!
We get so much bang for our buck
with online marketing! On the other
hand, there are a lot of moving parts
with online marketing; things start to
add up and it requires a lot of upkeep.
You’re not just tweaking the content or
the usability of your own Web site
anymore – you also have to be
mindful of social media, search
engine optimization (SEO)
and ads on Google; and
then throw in all of
the tracking that
needs to happen to ensure you’re getting a decent
return on investment (aka, inquisitive phone calls and
new-patient appointments), you’re talking about a
full-time job! Unless there’s a member of your staff
completely devoted to your online marketing efforts,
you’re probably not going to achieve the results you’re
hoping for (read: “paying for”). I don’t know about
you, gang, but I can’t afford to have one of my assistants
or hygienists or even my practice manager
spending time updating the practice’s Facebook status
– times are tough, we’re a lean crew and we’ve got
patients to tend to!
There are a lot of components to juggle and they all
channel into the one most important part of online
marketing – SEO. Becoming the top practice in a
search on Google and Yahoo is the gold medal for every
practice’s marketing plan. When someone types in
“Ahwatukee dentist” we want our practice to be the first
thing potential patients see. It’s what earns you the most
new patients – the lifeblood of any dental practice.
The recent recession hit Arizona pretty hard; it
was second in state home foreclosures after Nevada,
and thousands of Arizonans lost their jobs. The dental
industry in Phoenix was hit hard and more than
150 dental practices closed their doors. Some were
my very good friends who opened their doors more
than 25 years ago like me! But like I’ve written time
and time again, when the going gets tough you cut
your costs; lower your prices; join a few dental PPOs;
add more services to your now smaller patient base
like placing implants, using CAD/CAM, treating
sleep apnea, incorporating Invisalign; and last but not
least, you double or triple your marketing efforts.
The Yellow Pages died in my area, maybe your area
is different but I doubt it. You will only know if you
track it all meticulously! I went from creating my own
dental office Web site in 1999 with my own full-time
programmers to now outsourcing it to Sesame
Communications because its team did it better than
our team could do it internally. Building our B2B
(Business to Business) Dentaltown.com Web site was
an entirely different set of skills than building a B2C
(Business To Consumer) TodaysDental.com Web site.
The biggest reason was search engine optimization (SEO). Dentaltown.com does not show up on a
Google search because it is a private dental Web site
community (which, by the way, recently passed its
150,000th member). We do not want patients doing a
search for dental-related questions and answers by trying
to become a member of Dentaltown.com. That is
not our focus and it’s not why Dentaltown.com exists.
I want patients who live in Phoenix, Arizona,
“Googling” dental-related searches to land on my
TodaysDental.com Web site, and that is what Sesame
did for me in spades! I usually show up first, third and
fifth on Google and Yahoo searches. Now my Web site
and Google ads are cash cows!
It simply doesn’t make any sense to hire someone to
handle our dental office marketing internally. The skill
set to understand SEO is far beyond the scope of handing
it as a part-time job to any one of my current staff
members! People who understand SEO have to do it
full time, just to stay on top of it, and all of the good
ones earn six figures. I knew this was an outsource play
and I needed to find an SEO expert. We needed someone
who could be a master of this new, lucrative online
marketing tsunami.
You are all likely familiar with my 5 D’s: 1. Design
Your Plan; 2. Drop Everything You Don’t Need to Do;
3. Delay Everything You Can’t Drop; 4. Delegate; and
5. Do. This decision, obviously, falls heavily on number
four – Delegate.
Since 2008 we’ve been working with Sesame
Communications, which has overseen and worked on
many of our marketing efforts from Web site development
to tracking phone calls. I seriously thought I
knew of what we needed to do to increase our SEO and
be front and center in Google searches in my area. I was
so wrong.
From the get-go my eyes were opened to the myriad
components that work together to increase SEO.
Did you know you have to have a presence on
YouTube? Did you know you need to focus on creating
a special mobile Web site for iPhone and Android
users? Did you know the fresher your content, the better
your SEO? Did you know you really needed your
Web site to go live years ago instead of last week (yes,
even that impacts SEO)? Did you know posting on
Facebook and linking directly back to your Web site
impacts SEO as well?
(Speaking of Facebook, I want you to “Like” my
three Facebook pages so you can always see what we are
posting on...
Today’s Dental: www.facebook.com/todaysdental
Dentaltown: www.facebook.com/dentaltown
And please follow me at www.facebook.com/drhoward
to see my daily tips and where I will be lecturing
again near you or some place fun in the sun!)
Because of our decision to outsource to a marketing
company, we have coherence between our Web site and
mobile site, search engine optimization, pay-per-click
advertising and a social media strategy, as well as our
patient portals and patient engagement tools. On average,
we get 148 calls each month from our online presence
alone – 41 of those calls can be specifically
identified as new patients.
Because 30.43 percent of our prospective patients
visit our Today’s Dental Web site before they make their
first appointment (as shown by our Sesame analytics
dashboard), we decided it was in need of a redesign.
Our original Web site had become outdated – and it
was merely three years old. With the goal of our site
being to get patients to pick up the phone and call our
practice, we worked with Sesame, who came to the
table with solid research and helped us understand
what content needed to be present, and what design
elements would keep prospective patients on the site
longer. Since we launched the new site in 2011, our
bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter our
site and immediately leave) has decreased from 47.79
percent to 40.52 percent.
And while mobile sites might currently make up a
smaller percentage of online activity, it has been suggested
that they will exceed desktop browsing in the
next three to five years. Think about it, guys! How
many of your friends own an iPhone or an Android?
Probably everyone! It’s pretty rare to find anyone using
a candy bar phone that only makes calls anymore. It’s
for this reason we had to develop a mobile site. The
mobile site gives patients an optimal view of our site. It
reduces image sizes and contains only the information
prospective patients need to make a decision, including
links to appointment requests and click-to-call functionality.
On average, our practice gets 17 calls per
month from our mobile site with three of those calls
specifically identified as new patients.
One of the key agreements we have with Sesame is
improving SEO on popular search engines like Google and Bing. You can’t get to the top of a Google search
and just forget about it. It’s a continuous method and it
needs to be constantly updated – and every couple of
years, the pesky powers that be at Google change up
how their engine pulls up information. I’ve learned a
good SEO strategy doesn’t just focus on the term
“Phoenix dentist,” but also what are called “long tail
terms” and terms that aren’t as popular. In September
2011, we decided to focus our efforts on improving our
SEO for sleep apnea in Phoenix – and in three months
we moved up 66 places.
We’re fairly new at integrating Google AdWords
into our marketing plan, but basically when someone
types in key words, like “Ahwatukee dentist,” our ad
should come up first next to his or her search. Then you
set a limit as to what your monthly budget is. The more
you spend, the higher up your ad will appear. We spend
about $500 a month, but a lot of the effectiveness has
to do with how those ads are written. My practice
would have a hard time doing it alone, because it is
extremely time consuming to come up with new ad
ideas and also to track the performance of each ad. You
have to keep coming up with fresh content and you
have to make sure your staff gets involved.
I was shocked to find out social media has a
major impact on SEO as well. Facebook, YouTube
and practice blogs all contribute to higher rankings
on search engines. We designed our Facebook,
YouTube and blog pages to match the look and feel of
our Web site. Basically we feed Sesame bits of information
about our practice from time to time, which
they turn into Facebook posts. We also take 30- to
90-second videos and post them on YouTube, which
Sesame optimizes within YouTube.com. Everything
connects as well – so when we put a new video up on
YouTube, we use Facebook to link to it, and also back
to our Web site. Or maybe my associate, Dr. Michael
Glass, will post a new blog about sleep apnea, and we
will link to it via Facebook and our Web site. In the
last five months, we’ve increased our likes on
Facebook by 39 percent and we now have 233 percent
more patients using Facebook to “check in” at
our practice (aka, let all their friends know they’re at
Today’s Dental).
(Before you write your next blog you should read
our blogs for ideas! I actually think the best dental blogger
in America is Alan Mead, DDS, and you should
check out his site: MeadFamilyDental.com.)
If that’s not enough mind-blowing integration for
one practice to worry about – all of our SEO strategies
work well into our patient reminder system. Through
our practice dashboard, we know 13.3 percent of our
patients prefer phone reminders, 4.35 percent prefer
SMS text and 86.86 percent prefer e-mail (in which
we’ve recently integrated a “refer a friend” button –
which, so far, has been used by 13 of our patients). We
give all of our patients the option to choose which
reminder method they prefer. And all of this automation
puts downward pressures on your number-one
largest cost, labor!
And when all those calls start coming in, you need
to make sure your staff is trained how to close each and
every call by getting each one to schedule an appointment.
One of the best guys out there to help you with
this is Jay Geier and his Scheduling Institute. Jay and
his crew just about doubled our close rate of newpatient
phone calls. I know this because we can track
everything with Sesame’s help.
You know why this sounds like a lot of work?
Because it is! If you can manage all of these things
yourself, do it! If not, I strongly suggest you work with
a company like Sesame that can help you out. These
are merely my suggestions to you, and I hope you
consider them, that is unless you’d prefer your practice
to end up old, dusty and unused in years like the
Yellow Pages.
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