Are You Getting The Traffic You Need From Your Dental Practice’s Website?
Whether you’re new to search engine optimization or you’re currently using a marketing company or website vendor service for your dental practice’s e-commerce needs—you’ll want to make 
sure your website is getting the traffic you need to bring in the business you need. Extensive research indicates that many dental practices are significantly behind the times when it comes to web design, search engine optimization and e-commerce.
Does Your Website Compare to The Competition?
As you may already know—Yellow Page’s ads can run up to more than $50,000 per year to advertise in; however, the paper advertising industry (like yellow pages) is being phased out by the overwhelming number of internet users that (in today’s interactive market) rely almost entirely on the web to make their decisions. If your practice doesn’t have a website, you’ll unequivocally be passed up by the fierce competition of dental practices that have gone interactive. If your dental practice does have a website, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Generally, most dental practices don’t even have a website, and the ones that do are lacking in the fundamental marketing and SEO concepts that comprise a fully-optimized website that will drive the business and referrals needed for your business growth.
5 Ways To Improve Your Website For Optimal Traffic
With a vast array of specialties in the dental profession and oral surgery, it’s necessary to advertise and market your niche to drive business.
• Web Design: A major problem ubiquitous with websites in the dental profession is the overabundance of indistinguishable websites. By that, many dental practices opt to go with website vendors or niche dental/medical website management companies that service web development and optimization. The problem is, however, these types of vendors also service a multitude of other dentists in the local area. This poses a number of inherent problems because your website’s design appears identical to your local competitions’. In addition, many of these vendors comparatively charge exorbitant sums in monthly fees and deliver additional sub par services that make your website anything but friendly to the search engines. The cause can be related to a serious lack of quality content, web design, navigation, keywords analysis and SEO. To get the optimal results your practice needs, look for a company and web designer that’ll take the time to research your individual market niche and deliver the hand-tailored quality your website needs to stand out in the search engines.
• Opt Ins: If your dental practice puts out a newsletter or sends out mailers, an excellent way to boost business, referrals and clientele base is to take advantage of opt-in email blasts.
• Video: Whether you specialize in oral surgery, prosthodontics, pediatric dentistry or cosmetics—video and other multimedia tools used with appropriate alt tags can help boost your website’s authoritativeness and serve as a lucrative advertising vehicle for your practice.
• Content: From general dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, patient education, dental tips, to FAQs—regularly updating quality content is key to ranking in the search engines. Fresh authoritative content serves as informative information for potential clients as well as the search engine spiders that crawl your website. The more authoritative content you have, the more authoritative Google and other search engines will deem your site, thus ranking you higher in the search engine results and ultimately bringing more traffic to your site.
• SEO and PPC Focused: If you’re practice specializes in a specific specialty, target keyword in both your PPC and SEO efforts to maximize your marketing potential.
Bottom Line
In a profession that’s significantly behind the times with interactive marketing and e-commerce, having a search engine optimized website is vital to your dental practice’s success. Today, just having a website isn’t enough. By optimizing your website’s design, updating content, and marketing your specific dental niche with an SEO and PPC focus—you’ll be outranking the majority of local competition in a matter of months.
