North Texas Dentistry Volume 8 Issue 5 2018 ISSUE 5 DE | Page 24

practice marketing 5 Steps to More & Better Patients in 2019 by Marc Fowler Working with nearly 400 dental practices over the past 13 years has provided Bullseye Media with a wealth of real- world data. Enough data that we can confidently say what works and what doesn’t when it comes to attracting the right patients to a practice. As they say, the numbers don’t lie. Below are a handful of proven steps you can take to maximize your growth potential in 2019. 1 Update your website Prospective patients form an impression of your practice within seconds of landing on your website. Does your website give the right first impression? Here are a few of the most common website issues we see: Outdated aesthetics. An outdated looking website sends the wrong message to prospective patients. A common response to an outdated website is to wonder if the business is having finan- cial issues. This hurts your reputation and can result in prospec- tive patients heading to your competitors. Outdated technology. This sends the wrong signals to Google. Non-standard code, Flash content, lack of responsive design are just a few old web technologies that have gone the way of the dodo bird. When Google sees these, it immediately judges your site as being antiquated which will negatively impact your abil- ity to show up in Google searches. 24 NORTH TEXAS DENTISTRY | www.northtexasdentistry.com Duplicate content. A large percentage of the websites we ana- lyze have content that is exactly the same as found on multiple other dental websites. If the text on your website exists on other dentist’s websites, that raises a red flag for search engines. Google only gives credit to the first website they found it on, and assumes all others plagiarized. Visit copyscape.com to see if you should be concerned about your content. Stock photography. You probably have before and after photos of your work, so do we. You’d be amazed at the difference cus- tom, professional photography makes on the look and feel a dental website. If you are using the same stock images that are on dozens, if not hundreds, of other dental websites, please con- tact a professional photographer. This is a small investment that pays dividends across both your web presence and your other marketing efforts. Weak or missing Meet the Doctor page. According to our data, this is the second most visited page on client’s websites after the home page. Prospective patients want to virtually “meet” the person who will be providing their care. You need a professional photo (or even better, a video) and a bio that includes more than just where you went to school and the dental associations you’re