I know it seems counter-intuitive to narrow your marketing but you need to hear me out on this.  You can strengthen the ROI of each marketing dollar you spend if you narrow your focus and occupy only one niche of the market but dominate that niche in the area of your dental practice.

There are several small segments of the dental market that can be targetted.

• Children’s Dentistry – Example Site
• Sedation Dentistry – Example Site
• Cosmetic Dentistry – Example Site

There are dozens of other niches out there.  Ask yourself these questions:

1.  What is it that I am truly best at?

2.  What type of dentistry do I enjoy the most?

3.  What type of dentistry is most lucrative for my practice?

Then, go out there and target those markets.  Dominate them with your marketing spend.

This doesn’t mean you need to turn back your regular clients and convert your entire practice over to a niche.  However, when it comes to your marketing spend you should consider honing your message rather than applying a “shotgun” approach that attempts to be all things to all people.

A great place to hone your message is on your website.  Use SEO to target keywords specific to a niche.  Niche keywords are much easier to begin ranking for quickly.   If you need some help developing a list of niche keywords, get the first lesson in the SEO training videos entitled ‘Professional Keyword Research’ FREE by filling out your name and email on our home page.

The search engines do it by sending a search engine “spider” (automated program) to your website to “index” the content on your site. They then return and dump your content into their index to be categorized. Your job as a website owner and my job as an SEO is to make it as easy as possible for the search engine to index and categorize your site.

“AH HA! This page is about crowns!”
“AH HA! This page is about porcelain veneers!”

This video has some great examples of sites that are making it hard on Google and the others by not including enough content. If you want a real crisp and clear version of this video you can click here.

Check out your site in SEO Browser and ’see what the search engine sees.’

If you are seeing that you have no content for the search engines to index, you have an easy fix. Add some good, keyword rich HTML content to your site. Consider moving your site to a platform that makes it easy for you to add content to your site. Wordpress is the most SEO friendly and user friendly system available and it is FREE! Wordpress will give you the ability to add fresh content to your site with just a couple of clicks.

As always if you have questions, please let me know by leaving a comment on this post or contacting me here.

The “head” of your website code contains three extremely important components that should be optimized:

1. Title Tag

2. Meta Description

3. Meta Keywords

Why is the Title Tag Important to Your Dental Website?

The title  tag is the most important piece of real estate in your code because the search engines treat it like a signboard that is telling them exactly what that page is about. This tag needs to be optimized using the keyword phrases that you are targeting on that page.

This tag is also the piece of text that will be displayed by the search engines in the search results page (see image below). An optimized title tag will increase the number of times someone will click on your result.

The title tag should be unique on each page, containing keywords that you are targeting on that page and your geographical location. DO NOT have the same title tag on every page of your website!

Example Search Result with Title and Meta Desription Notated

Why is the Meta-Description Important to Your Dental Website?

The meta-description is the text that is very often displayed by the search engines (see image above) in the search results page. An optimized meta-description will increase the number of times someone will click on your result.

The meta-description should be unique on each page, it should read naturally and contain keywords that you are targeting on that page and your geographical location. DO NOT have the same meta-description on every page of your website!

Why is the Meta-Keywords Tag Important to Your Dental Website?

The short answer to this is that the meta-keywords are not important anymore. Search engines used to use this to decide which keywords to display a website for but spammers took advantage of it by cramming it full of keywords that were not relevant to the page. This tag is less important now but it is still good practice to optimize your meta-keywords.

Include keywords that you would like that page to be ranking for in this tag but don’t stress over it too much.

OK… let’s find these tags on your own dental practice website. Use this image and follow the procedure below to find them on your own website:

Website Head Example

Follow this procedure:

1. Navigate to your website

2. View the source code of your website — In Firefox you will use Ctrl + U, in Internet Explorer 7 you will select “Page” then “View Source” and in Safari you will select “View” and then “View Source”. You are now viewing the code that the browser (Firefox, IE, or Safari) uses to determine how to display your site visually.

3. Find the title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tags in your head using the image above as a guide.

At this point you have determined one of three things:

1. You have all of these tags in your head and they look great.

Remedy: Sleep well knowing the head of your website is working while you rest.

2. You have all of these tags in your head and they don’t look optimized.

Remedy: Optimize those tags. See the rest of this post.

3. You don’t have some of these tags in your head.

Remedy: Create those tags and optimize them.

How to optimize your title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tags for Search Engines

You will need to be able to make changes to your code through an editor like Adobe Dreamweaver or you may be using a website Content Management System (CMS) in which case you will need to find the place in your system to change these components. Contact your web professional or contact me here … this is not a big job but it is an important one.

Hopefully you have been reading this blog for a while and have read this post about doing keyword research. If not, no worries — read the post and do some keyword research then return to fix the head of your website.

I also have a video that I will give to you when you sign up for our Free eNewsletter that goes into depth about doing keyword research. You can sign up for the newsletter in the upper right of any page of this site.

If you have your keyword research completed, now is the time to break it out.

Ensure that all of your head tags contain the keywords that you are targeting for that page. It is really that simple. Craft your title and meta-descriptions for both readers and search engines. Don’t just cram them full of keywords.

One tricky thing to consider is that your title tag should be shorter than 64 characters in length to ensure that Google will be able to display the entire tag in their search results. If it is longer, they will crop anything after these 64 characters. The meta-description should be kept to a well written sentence or two that describes the content on that page.

The text in the title and meta-description should not be “salesy” but instead informational. Leave the selling to the call to action on the web page itself.

Let me know if you have questions by contacting me through the form here or leaving a comment on this post.

Your reading this blog because you understand that internet marketing is the way to bring in new patients for the least amount of money. You or your office assistant are capable of doing what is necessary to bring targeted traffic to your website.

Here are some ways that you should set yourself in motion in 2009 to ensure the success of your dental practice:

- If you don’t have a website, GET ONE! It really is a simple process to get online in 2009. If you need guidance, contact me.

- Install Google Analytics on your site so that you can see how your visitors are interacting (or not interacting) with your website.

- Google your name and the name of your practice and determine your online reputation. Take action to own your name in the Top 10 search results for your name and the name of your dental practice. Read this post.

- Consider running a Pay Per Click campaign.

- Do some keyword research so that you know what you are aiming to increase in the search engines.

- Claim the listings of your dental practice in local directories like Yahoo! Local or Google Maps. Add detailed information about your dental practice in these local directories.

- Ensure that your name, the name of your dental practice, the address of your practice, and the phone number are on every webpage in HTML text. This is for both your website visitors and the search engines.

- Make sure that visitors to your website know exactly what to do to convert from website traffic to dental patient. For example – “Call 555-555-5555 to set an appointment today!”

Don’t overwhelm yourself with all of these at the same time. Tackle one of these items per week for the next two months.

You or your office assistant can handle this! It’s not difficult, but it does require that you take action!

If you have any trouble with any of these action items please click on the NEED HELP link above or leave a comment and I will do what I can to keep you in motion.

Keyword Research

Every online marketing strategy hinges on keywords and this is where you must begin. Do you know what keywords people are using to search the internet for the services you provide? There are several paid tools you could purchase and I use all of them. However the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool is going to be all that 99% of you will need to get good keyword research.

Get a list of 10 keywords you are interested in and put them ino a spreadsheet. Use the spreadsheet to mark your progress from week to week on these keywords.  Don’t be greedy, you will not rank #1 in Google for the term ‘cosmetic dentistry’ without several months of extremely hard professional work. However, the term ‘cosmetic dentistry joliet il’ may be something you can set your sights on. Consider appending your geographic location to all of your keywords.

Find Google’s free keyword tool here.

Title Tags

Now that you have your keywords, it is time to update those title tags. Title tags are given the most weight of any other piece of code on your website.  The title tag is a “signboard” that says – “This page of my website is about X,Y,Z.”

The title tag is also the text that is displayed in the search engine results page and is the link that will take a searcher to your page.  See below:

Click to enlarge

Having a good, relevant title tag can increase the chances that a searcher will actually click on your result.

Your title tag is located in your code.  It is the words that come between <title> and </title> on each page of your website.  For each keyword you have selected, find the page that is relevant to that keyword or keywords.  It is best to optimize each page for no more than two to three keywords.  Put those keywords in the title tag of that page.

If you don’t have a relevant page for a keyword that you selected, ditch the keyword or create a page that is relevant to that keyword.  What do I mean by relevant page?  Ask yourself this question:

“If I typed the phrase “example keyword” into Google, would I want to land on this page?”

Duplicate Content

Search engines do not like to find the same content on more than one page on the internet.  When they find copies of the same content, they are forced to choose which one will be displayed in their results.  If you know that you have exact copies of your website on drdavis.com and doctordavis.com, you should choose one of the domains and 301 redirect the secondary domain into the primary.  If you are having trouble choosing which one to use as the primary, choose the one that is 1) oldest and/or 2) getting the most traffic.  (See Analytics below for help with gauging traffic)

Visit Copyscape and type in your domain name.  Copyscape will scan the web for any duplicate versions of your content.  It is a free tool, so you will only get 10 results.   If you find that there are copies of your website on the web, you need to do something about that. You may find that someone has stolen or “scraped” your content from your website.

Refreshing Content

How long has it been since you refreshed your content?  Search engines like fresh content to crawl when they visit your site.  Don’t change more than 10% or so of the content on your site during a months time, but you should be slowly refreshing your content from month to month.

Consider adding a blog to your site.  Search engines, especially Google, really like blogs.  The reason is because websites with blogs are providing fresh, new content to their users.  Remember that Google and the others are in the business of providing their customer (the searcher) with relevant and fresh content.  Give them what they want.

Claim your Listings

Do a search for your address, the name of your doctor or dental practice, and your name in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  Find every local directory where you have a listing and claim the listing.

What I mean by this is that your practice is already on the internet, likely in dozens of directories (example below).  Most of these directories allow you to “claim the listing.”  Once you have claimed the listing, verify that everything is accurate and add as much information as you can.

Click to enlarge

Address in Footer

Your address and phone number should be in HTML text on every page of your site.  If your address and phone number are contained in an image (which a search engine cannot see), put it in the footer of your website so that it appears on every page.

This site is a good example of a site with the address in an image: http://cbddentalcare.com/

This is a good example of a site with the address on every page in HTML text: http://www.phillydentistry.com/

Why is this important?  The search engines do not want to give out false information to their customer (the searcher) about the location of your dental, chiropractor, or physician practice.  They are counting the number of times that they see your address, phone number, and business name in the same spot.  It gives them confidence that they are displaying accurate information to their searchers.  Give them what they want.

Analytics

A full description of how to use an analytics program is beyond the scope of this post.  I will be following up with a post geared toward interpreting analytics in the future.  However, there is nothing that will have more of an impact than installing an analytics program on your site.  How do you know if you are doing better, if you can’t measure it?  Google Analytics is absolutely free.

Check out the free analytics program here.

Build Links

In a recent post I graded 10 different doctor and dentist websites on ten different criteria.  One of the criteria that most sites failed miserably was the presence of backlinks to their website.

Try this:

Go to Yahoo.com and type in ‘link:drallen.com’.  Substitute your website name for that of Dr. Allen’s and omit the quotes, of course.  The number of results is the number of links that your website has according to Yahoo.  Now do the same thing with your competitors that are outranking you for keywords that you want.  Do they have more?  Probably so.  And if they have more links, then you need to concentrate on getting better links and a higher volume of links.

As I mentioned before, it is also important for your address, phone number, and name of practice to be found in as many places as possible.  These are called “citations” and you can read more about them here.

Optimize Meta Descriptions

Your meta-description tag is located in your code just like your title tag. You will find it in the code and it will look like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”Our Joliet, Illinois dentist office provides 30 years of experience in cosmetic dentistry.” />

Firstly, this tag should contain the keywords that you are targeting on the page.  Notice ‘joliet illinois dentist’ is a good keyword as well as ‘cosmetic dentistry joliet il’.  Secondly, the meta description tag is likely the text that will appear in the search engine results below the title tag.  Take a peek:

Click to enlarge

Having a well written, keyword rich meta description tag will increase the chances that a searcher will click on your result.

Implement these nine high impact strategies and you will be ahead of many of the dentist, chiropractor, and physician websites that I have found on the web.

As always let me know if you have questions by leaving a comment or contact me in person here.