Which of the following is most important to the bottom line of your dental practice business?

A.  Higher rankings in Google

B.  More traffic on your website

C.  More links to your website.

D.  More patients in your appointment book

I won’t insult you by pointing out the obvious answer to the question.  However, I will point out that 80% of the dentistry practice websites that I have viewed do not address this problem appropriately.  Read on to find out how to graduate to the next level of internet marketing.

Why did I save this post as the finale of this series on the categories of professional SEO?  Because it is by far the most critical and the most often left neglected.  It is the bottom line.  It is what pays the bills.  It is “Conversions.”

A “Conversion” for the sake of this post is the act of converting a website visitor to a patient of your dental practice.  For an e-commerce store it would be the sale of a product and for a charity website it would be a donation to the cause.

It is the most neglected of the four C’s because it is often considered to be the last piece of the puzzle.

Quick Check-Up

Try this:

Navigate to your website and have a look with fresh eyes.  Do not scroll down the page or click on any of the links.  Can you identify without a doubt a clear Call To Action on your screen?  If you can identify the Call to Action this post may not be worth your time.  But if your website is like most that I have seen — read on.

The Call to Action

When we are searching the Internet for the solution to a problem (I have an achy tooth, I need to reach someone that can discuss the cost of Invisalign) we are wanting needing someone to smack us over the head with clear instructions describing how to ENGAGE with your business.

“Contact us Today for a Consultation”

“Get your Smile Analysis Today”

These communicate urgency.  They tell the prospect what to do.  They are clear Calls To Action.

The Offer

Give me a reason to ENGAGE with your business.  Consider the difference between the above and the below:

“Contact us Today for a FREE Initial Consultation”

“Get your complimentary Smile Analysis Today”

As a potential patient, I need to know why I should choose you over your competition and (again) I need to be hit over the head with the message.

Observe the difference between this:

Example of No Offer

And this:

Call to Action with Offer

The Vehicle

Give me as many clear methods of ENGAGEMENT as possible:

-  A phone number

-  A lead form

-  An email address

Make it Accessible

Make these methods of contact available on EVERY page of your website.  When I visit your website I may be ready to fill out a lead form, make a call or send an email immediately.  I also may be interested in reading about your staff, the atmosphere of your practice or finding more information about your location or the services you provide.

At any point while investigating your practice I may decide that you are the dentist for me.  It is at this point that you must have these methods of Conversion available.  Make it available on EVERY page.

By signing up for the free eNewsletter you will get access to the video “6 Proven Methods to Generate Dental Patients From Your Website.”  In this video I show two websites that are doing a phenomenal job at displaying Calls to Action and Conversion Methods.

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

Interactivity.

This is the third of the Four C’s of Professional SEO.  If you have not read the other posts I would encourage you to start from the beginning by reading the first two C’s — Content and Crawlability.

The Internet gives us the ability to interact and connect to other individuals and organizations anywhere on the planet with a few keystrokes.  Your ability to create a network of connections on the Internet will be paramount to the success of your website.

Why?

The search engines have placed a lot of algorithmic stock in what I call your “footprint” on the web. Your “footprint” on the web consists of all of the connections that the search engine spiders find that can be attributed back to your contribution to the world wide web.

How the Search Engine Spiders Work

Notice that in my definition of footprint I used the term “contribution.”  Search engines are in the business of finding and ranking websites based on their usefulness to the searcher.  Your network of connections acts as a gauge of the popularity of your website content, business, and brand on the Internet.

A lack of connections on the Internet indicates your lack of “contribution” to both the Internet and the physical world to the search engines.  If you are not creating connections your website and your business must not be worthwhile and is thus unworthy of being displayed in search engine results.

The “spiders” are programs that scour the web at all hours of the day returning information to the search engines index.  The main objective of the spiders is to gather information and return it to the index to be categorized.  For example – “This page is about dental veneers and this other page is about crowns and bridges.”

At the same time, the spider is also indexing any connections that they find that can be attributed to another website on the Internet and returning that information to the index.

How to Get Connected

Inbound Links

An inbound link is any link that is pointing to your website from another website on the Internet. As a rule of thumb “any link is a good link.”

However, all links are not created equal.

- You should be looking to garner links from websites that are relevant to the content on your website.

- You should be looking for links from pages on the Internet that other people are linking to.

-  You should be looking for links where one domain is linking to you but you are not linking back to them. Known as one-way links.

-  You should be looking for links that do not have the no-follow attribute appended to them.  For more information about the no-follow tag read here.

Outbound Links

An outbound link is a link from your website to another website.  This is a great way to make connections on the Internet.  Since website owners understand the importance of having inbound links to their website, linking out to other websites is a great way to get noticed and drum up a connection.

The search engines are also beginning to rank sites based on whether or not they share “link love” with other sites.  If a site would be useful to the users of your website, then link to it. 

Citations

A citation is similar to a link except it doesn’t necessarily need to have an actual hyperlink to your website.  Any time your dental practice or your name is found by the spider along with the address and phone number of your practice you receive a citation.

Citations are important because each time one is found it reinforces the confidence that the search engine has in the location of your website.  A search engine DOES NOT want to return local search results with an incorrect address or phone number.  More citations that are consistent with what they have seen before will lead to an increased chance of your site being displayed in local search results.

Check out this oral surgery practice that has 38 citations noted in the Google Local Business Center.

Citation Example in Google

Reviews of Your Practice

Reviews of your dental practice online indicate that you have a thriving practice.  Encourage your patients to review your practice in Google Maps or Yahoo Local.

Social Media

What’s all they hype about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?

Connections.

You should be using these as outlets to create connections that the search engine spiders can use to verify that you and your practice are active on the Internet and open for business.  At the very least create profiles for you and your practice at the aforementioned social networking websites.

Forums and Blogs

Making it a habit to post useful information in forums and on blogs that are relevant to your dental practice is a great way to make connections online.  Do not SPAM.  Forums and bloggers have no tolerance for SPAM and it will create a bad reputation for you and your practice if you give in to this temptation.  Consider regularly posting on Yahoo Answers or adding your expertise to a Wikipedia article.

It Won’t Happen Overnight

The Internet is known for moving at high speed but your “footprint” won’t grow as quickly as you hoped it would. I promise you that. I will also promise you that if you stick to the above practices for several months it will start to pay dividends.

Search engines are on a constant quest to find the 10% (that might be being too generous) of content on the web that is useful amongst the 90% that is useless. Creating a website that is useful to your user will ultimately lead to connections. Do you see why I advocate blogging on your dental website?

I hope that you have found this content useful and if you have I encourage you to increase our “footprint” by linking to our website or passing the word along to friends and colleagues.

The next of the Four C’s is more important than all of the others combined – CONVERSIONS.  Look for it next week on the blog or sign up for the free newsletter if you would like to receive it via email.

The first post about the importance of SEO Content is here and I recommend that you read it first.

Crawlability

The second of the Four C’s is Crawlability. In the previous post we discussed that if you have no content for the search engines to index you will have zero probability of being returned as a search result. The same is true for Crawlability. If you are creating “speedbumps” or “walls” for the search engines to navigate over or through to index your content, you are increasing the probability that search engines will not index your site and thus you will have zero probability of being returned as a search result.

Here are some things to avoid:

Frames
A website that is built in frames cannot be indexed by a search engine. You can see a great example of a site that is in frames here: Roger Washington Dentistry. When you visit the site you may think that it looks fairly normal. But to a search engine it does not. Try clicking on the “Office Information” link on the left of Dr. Washingtons site. You will notice that the URL does not change from rogerwashington.com to rogerwashington.com/officeinformation.

This is because all of the content for this site is being pulled from a frameset. If your site is in frames, you have erected a wall for the search engines and they are not able to climb it.

Remedy: If your site is in frames, this is a relatively easy redesign procedure. It should be fairly cheap and painless to get your content out of frames.

Flash

Although Google has lately released information claiming that they can now index Flash content, it is not a good idea to have your ENTIRE site built from Flash. This is a speedbump and if you are having trouble getting your site indexed, this could be the reason.

In addition, if a visitor comes to your site and does not have Flash installed on their machine they will not be able to view your content.

Remedy: Consider a redesign that will create an HTML version of your site to be displayed if someone (like a search engine spider) visits your site and doesn’t have Flash installed.

Robots.txt File
The robots.txt file is a file on your site that a search engine will visit when it hits your site (if one is present.) Don’t be afraid of the technical name. The “Robots file” is simply a place that a search engine spider visits to determine if there are any pages on your website that you DO NOT want the search engine to put in it’s index.

For an example visit the “Robots File” on my website: www.thesemfirm.com/robots.txt

Here is what you find:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The first line says (in code) “Attention All Search Engine Spiders”
The second line says (in code) “Feel free to visit and index any page on this site”

If your robots.txt file says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

you are saying (in code):

“Attention all Search Engine Spiders (first line), Go Away! (second line)”

The robots.txt file can get tricky if the person who created your website wanted to exclude many different files from being indexed for any reason. If you need help interpreting your “Robots file” contact me and I will be happy to help.

Remedy:  If your robots.txt file is not allowing search engines to index your site, change it to reflect what I have in mine.

XML Sitemap
The three reasons above are the most common problems that we encounter with Crawlability.  The best way to determine if you site is being crawled is to follow the instructions in this 2 minute video about verifying that you are in Google and Yahoo’s index.

If you have determined that your website is crawlable, you should move on to improving that crawlability by adding an XML Sitemap. Don’t be afraid of the word XML, I am going to give you a link to a free tool that will create this file for you in the XML programming language. You won’t ever need to know or care what XML means.

An XML Sitemap is a road map for the search engine to find all of the pages on your site quickly and easily. Remember that the search engines have a huge job to do. They have to index billions of pages on the Internet and adding an XML Sitemap will:

- Increase the depth that they crawl your site
- Increase the frequency that they crawly your site

These are good things. Get your free XML Sitemap by using this tool and let me know if you have any problems.

Upload your sitemap to your website at the same level (directory) that your home page is located.

If your trying to figure out whether your site is indexed at all and thus may be having crawlability issues, have a look at this video.

Let me know if you have questions by contacting me here.

UPDATE: The third of the Four C’s concerning links to your dental website is located here.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not difficult, your office assistant could be making drastic improvements to your website from their desktop computer spending approximately an hour a day.

The fact is that professional SEO’s do not want you to know that you or your office assistant can improve the visibility of your dental website easily.

SEO boils down to four categories: Content, Crawlability, Connection and Conversion. I call these the Four C’s of SEO because if your dental practice is spending time working these into your online marketing strategy, you are doing everything that a professional SEO would do.

Content

The first issue on the checklist for the first of the Four C’s is that there is actually content present on the site.

Content is king.  This is something you will hear most professional SEO’s saying when they are evaluating a website.  It’s true… if you have nothing for the search engine’s to index (AKA spider, crawl, “sink their teeth into”) you will have nothing that can POSSIBLY show up in their search results.

Add Content to Your Website

When I say add content, I mean keyword rich HTML text that the search engines can:

1.  Crawl

2.  Index

3.  Return as search results when potential patients need a root canal. 

This is why I am a huge advocate of blogging on your dental website.  A blog is an easy place to add content and if you use an easy platform like Wordpress you or your office assistant can be adding SEO friendly content at the click of your mouse.

If you don’t have a blog or have no interest in blogging you should add content to the HTML pages on your site.  Do some keyword research and find out what people are typing into Google when they are looking for your services and especially in your location.

Bottom Line — If you have no HTML content for that search engine to see, you can forget about getting any traffic through a search engine.

Do you want to know what Google sees when they visit your website?  Click on this link, type in the name of your domain and see what Google sees.  Essentially this tool is returning everything that a search engine spider can see when it visits your website.

Here is a good example website:  Dallas Dental Spa This site has lots of flaws from an online marketing point of view but it does have a lot of content in HTML.  The content does not contain any targeted keywords (Do some keyword research!) but at least there is lots of HTML content present for the search engines to index.

Unique Content

The second issue is that the content that is present on the site should be unique. Yes — that’s correct, search engines do not like to have duplicated content in their index.

Imagine this… you run a search in Google for the following keyword phrase:

‘are dental veneers painful?’

When you click on the 1st result returned in Google you find an article that talks in depth about the veneer process but does not address your question about the relative pain that you can expect from having the procedure done. You hit your Back button and head to the 2nd result. WHAT! This is the same article that you just saw but on a different website. You leave Google and head over to Yahoo for some better service.  Google doesn’t like that.

To avoid your leaving for their competitor Google is going to penalize sites that have duplicated content either on their own site or a duplicate of any other content they have indexed on the web.

If you have duplicate content on your site you run the risk of that content being filtered out of the search engine’s index.

Do you want to find out if there are duplicated versions of your web content on the Internet? Try this tool… just type in the name of your site and check the results.

Fresh Content

The search engines have a big job to do.  Each day there are 100’s of thousands of web pages added to the Internet.   They have to separate the good from the bad and ugly.

One of the ways that they do this is by giving preferential treatment to websites that update their content frequently.  When a site is keeping its content fresh it tells the search engine the following:

- The site is probably not SPAM

-  The site probably has up to date information

-  The site is being maintained by a business that is still operating

Search engine’s DO NOT want to return SPAM, outdated information, or sites associated with businesses that are no longer in operation.  Your dental practice can send a signal that you have a vibrant, up to date website associated with a thriving business simply by updating your content.  Again… do you see why I advocate for blogging?

Next week…  we dive head first into the 2nd of the Four C’s — Crawlability.  Sign up for our free eNewsletter (upper right corner) to receive the next installment via email.

UPDATE:  The second of this four part series about the crawlability of your website is located here.

As always, let me know if you have questions or comments by leaving a comment or contacting me via the web form.