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When you are a small business, your marketing is one of the toughest things you will have to tackle. When every dollar you spend on marketing comes directly out of your pocket, decisions can be tough to make. You have to maximize your return on investment or at the very least be able to track your spend. Traditional advertising outside of using traceable 800 numbers offers very little tracking. Taking out a billboard, a newspaper ad, or yellow pages ad makes it very difficult to trace impressions, and in our world becomes known as “spray and pray” marketing (since you just shoot something out and pray for results). Internet marketing was traditionally thought of as something for big businesses and pure online companies.

The fact of the matter is that Google and other search engines are amazing when it comes to local type searches, and there is a shift in the way people are looking for businesses from traditional sources like phone books to online. Having a good mix of search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, a great website and email marketing is now a necessity.

Search Engine Optimization

For most local businesses, we serve a strong push for roughly 12 months, and continued upkeep can keep your business outranking your competition on your choice of keywords providing they use a local identifier like “plumber Chicago.” We have found that, in most market niches, competition is limited to just a few players (except in highly competitive areas like personal injury law, where the competition is a little stiffer). Still, most competitors in these markets will be overtaken in time.

It is important that your current and potential clients find your business in the organic search results. This instantly provides a feeling of authoritativeness and trust. It says, “Google says my site is the most relevant,” and these customers will be typically more likely to do business with you. It takes time to rise in the organic search results, but if you go about it the right way your rankings will be fortified against your competition.

Pay Per Click Advertising

This is typically known as the ads that appear on the right hand side bar of the search results. They often appear on the top as well. For small businesses, this can be a pesky thing to handle. You will really need someone to work with you and make sure you have landing pages, tracking 800 numbers and conversion tracking working properly.

That said, even the smallest business in the smallest town should be running pay per click advertising. It is literally the one form of advertising that is 100% traceable and attaches directly to the bottom line. Bidding on terms related to your business, your business name and even the name of your top competitors will all drive significant traffic to your website and eventually to your office.

Email Marketing & Website Design

These are two areas local businesses sorely lack. From our experiences, we think the reason is that too many crummy vendors wanting to charge $10,000 for a website. The fact is that most website we build look very professional, do everything they need to do and are built for under 3K. With that said, there are good web design companies out there that aren’t trying to rip people off. We are not trying to make a living selling websites, and we are not trying to turn this into a sales pitch.

Businesses will spend tons of money on a nice showroom or billboard, but they let their website look terrible. Your website is your business. It is what people will associate with you. If you have a professional, clean looking website with loads of information, customers will be much more likely to do business with you and spend more money.

As far as email marketing goes, it’s just a small thing, but it helps build value with your current and prospective clients. Don’t just blast them with sales and buy now offers. The key is to add value, show them you care and earn their trust. As small business owners, you already know how important trust is and know how much easier a sale is when you have this key element.

The point is that small businesses, no matter how small, don’t have to be the little guy (nor should they act that way). The internet is the great equalizer, a place where you can compete with the national chains and big box stores by showing your potential clients a first class experience on the web.

Tracking your websites traffic is very important. Knowing where your traffic is coming from, what visitors are doing on your site and which keywords are driving traffic is a key metric. The thing is, most websites we see stop measurement there and that is keeping you from literally some of the most import information you can get, conversion keywords. These are the words people typed into the search engine that eventually bought something, or submitted a lead. It is actually very easy to setup and can be used in a variety of ways.

Goal Conversion Can Guide Your Marketing Efforts

Tracking which words end up getting leads is one way to build your PPC keyword list. If you already know which words are producing leads from organic traffic it makes sense to also bid on those same words in pay per click advertising.

By the same logic, as your website gets more and more long tailed traffic, you can start to break down long search terms and concentrate on commonalities in your link building and content creation efforts. As you notice traffic trends that produce a good amount of leads, you will be able to flex your organic efforts to also include highly converting keywords.

Many people use PPC to discover which words convert to leads and eventually sales. This is a great way to get your answers quickly. That said, if you don’t have the cash or already have a bunch of existing traffic, setting up goal conversions in Google Analytics can provide an equally clear picture.

What is Goal Conversion Anyway How Do I Set It Up?

Goal conversion is as simple as placing a thank you page on your website. Simply put, sometimes people fill out a “contact us” form. A lead such as this is the simplest form of a conversion. It isn’t necessarily a sale, but knowing which keywords are used by people that submit leads shows you who your captive audience is. After they submit the form you need just setup the form such that they are automatically redirected to for example www.yoursite.com/thankyou.html. All you need to do next is setup the conversion in analytics and it will begin tracking the keywords people use that end up filling out that form.

You can have multiple conversion setups on your site and name them each something different. Each conversion will require its own specific thank you page, and other than that you are all set. Maybe you have some form of contact us and also something people can buy right from your website that would represent two kinds of goals, both a lead and a sale.

Setting up goal conversions in your Google Analytics account is quick and easy. After maybe a few hundred conversions you will have a good enough sample to start making decisions. It is, of course, all relative to the amount of traffic you are getting in a day. If you are getting 100 conversions a day, maybe you want 1,000 before you make a decision, maybe 10,000. The longer you wait, the more secure you can feel in the decision you make.

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.

If you have ever done any Pay Per Click advertising, or even considered it you know there are a lot of things that can affect what you pay per click. It isn’t all about who offers to pay the most. Google and others want to see continuity on your ad copy, your sites URL, and the on page copy. For many pay per click advertisers this is a afterthought, or something they passively work on. For our clients that start out on the right path for SEO find their cost per click drastically reduced, their cost per acquisition as much as 50% less, and their overall conversion ratio higher. The point is an early commitment to SEO whoever small will help your website greatly when you want to add some pay per click advertising for a couple of reasons it will also save you a lot of money in development costs since you will have to redo very little work. We will list a few of them below.

Relevant URL Structure

One of the early steps in search engine optimization is creating a nice clean relevant URL structure. It should be inline with the content on the page. If it is a page selling discount widgets naturally the site address should be something like www.yoursite.com/discount-widgets. The reason having this already done helps is that Google likes to see a nice relevant URL on your website especially on landing pages. If you have already make a commitment to this it can save you loads of time and money with it comes to launching a Pay Per Click campaign.

Good on Page Content

Another basic exercise of traditional search engine optimization is having relevant on page content. If your website is about selling oranges, you would have content on your page about oranges not apples. Now while this seems sort of obvious when put to an example like this we see it all the time when taking on SEO clients. The problem isn’t so much on the index or home page but on the inner pages. If your orange website has sub pages about say mandarin oranges don’t make the content about oranges alone make sure it is specific. This is the basic fundamental behind getting a great quality score with Google’s Adwords program as well as ranking well in traditional search results. Making a commitment to this early will groom you in the future when you start doing PPC.

Good Meta Descriptions & Title Tags

Another beneficial step on all organic search engine optimization plans is having relevant title tags and Meta descriptions on each and every single page of your website. When it comes time to start running pay per click advertising you will already be trained to produce top quality title tags, and meta descriptions further helping you when you have to develop landing pages and increasing your quality score.

Just these three items are only a small part of what is important in pay per click advertising but we can guarantee they will have a big effect on your websites quality score according to Google and reduce you cost per click significantly. As always any questions feel free to comment or submit an email to support@indieresults.com

CPC:
This is short for “cost per click” this is the amount you pay each and every time someone clicks on your ad that is running. There are several things that can affect the price you pay. Some of them are quality score, this is basically Google’s score of your landing page. It means with the ad’s you are running how in line is your website. If you are selling toothpaste you had better make sure the page you are sending people to is very much about tooth paste, right down to the url, title tags, and meta descriptions. The higher your quality score the lower your cost per click. Another way you can manage the cost you pay each time someone clicks is by having a better click through rate. You can control this by having great ad copy and bidding on the correct keywords.

CPA:
This is short for cost per acquisition. This is the real number, the one that means the most. It can tell you if any PPC campaign is profitable or not. Basically it means what did it cost you to make a sale. Now, sale can mean whatever you want it to, it really depends on what the goal of your campaign is. If you are simply wanting people to sign up for a mailer that can mean a sale too. You have to know what each sale costs you and how profitable each sale is. The goal is to be in the black of course, sometimes that takes a little while and most pay per click campaigns start out losing money. The key is to be patient and let the natural progression of testing, and refining take place to work towards profitability.

CTR:
This is the short way of saying click through rate. This is basically the number of clicks over the number of impressions. Say for example your ad showed 100 time and received 10 clicks. That would give you a CTR of 10%. The better the CTR the better the price you will pay per click and you can increase this by working on your ad copy as well as bid on better terms. It is tough to say what a good CTR is, it really varies by market and vertical. The short way of looking at it is whatever percent is profitable for you is what you should shoot for as a baseline, and then always try improving.

Conversion Ratio:
Now conversion ratio is often confused with your cost per acquisition. The truth is it really is just the percentage of clicks that turn into sales, leads, or basically do whatever you had intended them. If you had 100 clicks and 8 people filled out your form for more information you would have a 8% conversion ratio. Again, like CPA a good conversion ratio is strictly tied to return on investment. At whatever percentage you are profitable is the baseline you should shoot for. There are a lot of ways to improve your conversion ratio with different ad copy, bidding on more targeted terms, and using things like split testing.

ROI:
Most business owners know this one by heart return on investment. This is what drives every single marketing decision, or at least should. The only advice we have on this is to take the long view, and not get too excited by really high or really low points. Pay Per Click advertising is a battlefield that can often change, your competitive landscape will change often and you have to allow yourself time to adjust as new competition joins the fight or as others drop out. Let the overall return on investment drive all your marketing decisions, but give them time to level out.

There is a a great way to get your local business to the top of the search engine results pages. It will take you about 15 minutes of your time, and at most 10 minutes of planning, but the amazing amount of instant value it provides makes it one thing every single business owner should do regardless of their size. If you have a physical address, adding your business to Google, Yahoo, & MSN local will help your current and potential customers easily find your companies information regardless of if you even have a website.

How To List Your Business On Local Business Centers

Google Local Business:
Start by setting up your Google account
here. Then make sure to be as descriptive as possible about your business can be. This will help increase the odds of your local business ad showing up when people are searching. Make sure and include all hours and payment information. Google local business ad’s will have the most power of the three and can really generate a lot of results within Google. Many times it will simple be people searching for your specific business but there is a lot to be said for making things easy on them. The easier you are to find the better.

MSN Local Business:
To add your local business to the MSN local business center you will follow a similar procedure except it’s a little quicker. Start by heading over to this link and start signing up. As with Google local business you will want to be as detailed as possible and take the time to list everything right. Going back to make changes later can be very difficult especially on the MSN Local Business Center.

Yahoo Local Business:
Yahoo Local Business can also send your company lot’s of great traffic. The first step to doing that is heading over to this link. Like the other 2 take enough time to be very specific in your business listing. Going back to edit these listings later can be a total pain. That said, once you have completed the yahoo local business center ad you will be complete. The entire process will take you less than one hour and drive tons of phone calls and website traffic.

We realize that this method of online advertising certainly isn’t groundbreaking. That said, it is free and pretty much the most effective free advertising you could possibly do online. Before listing your website on any of these sites make sure to place your companies address clearly on your website, usually in the footer. This will also help your website get more local traffic.