5 KEYS
practice marketing
to Attracting More Patients,
Building Your Brand
and Protecting Your
Reputation Online
A
by Marc Fowler
ccording to a study by the Local Search Association, 51%
of patients use search engines to find a new dentist.
This means that if your practice is not visible in local
search results, you are missing out on a valuable source of
new patients.
With this in mind, let’s look at what Google, the leading search
engine, evaluates in order to determine which dental practices
to show in local search results.
1. Consistent information.
Consistency is important to Google. Whether you have one or
several locations for your practice, you need to ensure that you
use one standard name, address and phone number for each of
those locations. For example, if this is the information you offer
on your website for your practice:
Great Smiles Dentistry
123 East Laney Dr.
Richardson, TX 75014
(972) 111-1234
then that exact address and phone number needs to be used on
every other presence you have online. You can’t use the above
information on your website, then create a Yelp listing with
123 E. Laney Drive and a CitySearch listing with 123 East Laney
Drive.
In other words, you want everything to match consistently
everywhere you are online. This includes the following places:
2. Your website.
There is no substitute for having a website (yourpractice.com)
for your practice. Your Facebook page, Yelp listing, and your
20 NORTH TEXAS DENTISTRY | www.northtexasdentistry.com
Google+ listing are important, but they should not be in lieu of
having your own website.
Your website is the one presence you have online that is fully
under your control. You can share as much information as you
want about your practice. You can display the testimonials from
patients that you’ve hand-picked. You can tell Google exactly
who your practice serves and what procedures you offer through
proper website optimization.
Most importantly, you never have to worry about your website’s
design suddenly changing or closing down with little notice.
And, unlike social media and review websites, you never have
to worry about anyone saying anything on your website that you
do not want to be there.
3. Your local listings.
After your website, your local listings are the next online properties for your practice that you should closely manage. While
you do not have complete control over them and what is published on them, you do have the ability to ensure that they are
presenting accurate information about your practice.
Choosing the right local listings to focus on when you start marketing your practice is tough, mainly because there are so many
different local directories to choose from.
First, you have the main local directories like Yelp, CitySearch,
Yellow Pages, MerchantCircle, and many, many others. Then,
there are the health-specific directories. And finally, you have
directories that are specific to your city or neighborhood.
That’s a lot of listings to claim and manage. This is why you need
to make sure that before you begin the process, you have a con-