Misconception: Websites Cost Too Much

I am amazed when dentists grumble at the going price for developing a website to represent his/her practice on the worldwide Internet and generate quality clients in the context of other competitively designed and positioned dental websites.

Let's put the cost of a website in perspective: What did you pay for a practice brochure? How much did it cost your practice to place an ad in the Yellow Pages last year? What did you invest to record an "on hold" answering machine message? And what do you pay your practice’s employees to answer the phone and provide driving directions to your office? And how effectively are these investments working for you when your office is closed?

Yet how much would you invest in something that could perform all of these tasks 24 hours a day and 7 days a week? On top of that, it would showcase your expertise and accomplishments, send you additional clients, and allow you to update information at any time you choose. All this without interrupting your ability to create a credibility-building first impression to people who are have a sincere desire to find a dental specialist to help them pursue their interest in dental health?

Your practice’s website could pay for itself in a day, in a month, or in a year, but be assured that the cost of a good website is nothing when you compare it to the results it will eventually generate.

Dentists Are Richer, Teeth Are Poorer

Recently I read an interesting article in the NY Times about the dental crisis that is affecting America. While the dental industry is booming, American's teeth are going untreated. Because of the rising cost of dental fees, which are rising much faster than inflation, there are over 100 million Americans who cannot afford dental insurance. The result? A decade of rapidly increasing untreated cavities. This pretty much reverses close to 50 years of dental health improvement.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 2003 and 2004, 27% of children and 29% of adults have cavities that are untreated. This is at it's highest since the late 1980s and has significantly risen since the late 1990s. But, despite these staggering numbers, state dental boards and the American Dental Association continue to fight efforts to have dental hygienists and non-dentists provide basic dental care to those who do not have access to a dentist or dental insurance.

Most dentists will only accept cash payments and insurance plans and will not accept Medicaid. What few publicly supported dental clinics exist end up having waiting lists that can be months long. Some children are waiting over six months to have major surgery on decayed teeth, something not to be taken lightly, considering that this year two children, one from Mississippi and one from Maryland, died from infections caused by their decayed teeth.

A lack of proper dental care among nearly 100 million Americans is not just restricted to the poor. Data shows that many Americans, including those who have incomes well above the poverty line, are still without access to dental care. This is mostly due to dental fees rising much faster than inflation, along with the fact that the number of dentists in the US has remained pretty flat since 1990, even though the population has increased by 22%. Also, the average dental procedure has risen by 25% in the last 11 years. To top it all off, most dentists are working part time.

This is a problem that will remain and continue to get worse as the shortage of dentists increases, due to fewer dental schools and dentists in training. The average age of a dentist is around 50 years. This shortage will only increase as more and more of current dentists head into retirement. And unfortunately, there seems to be little action by the states and the ADA to implement plans to solve this growing crisis.

The whole article can be found here, on the New York Times website.

Jessica Espinoza
Marketing Assistant
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Blogging about blogs

Blogs seem to be all the rage these days. The Iraq war is sometimes called the first “blog war” since so many soldiers are chronicling their stories on Blogs. It has changed political landscapes as well, forcing Trent Lott to step down as majority leader in 2002 and put pressure on Dan Rather to resign after “Rathergate”. Blogs and bloggers (people who write blogs) have provided nearly instant commentary on everything from celebrity gossip to political commentary. I read a baseball blog almost daily.

You’re reading a blog right now.

These things seemed to have popped out of nowhere. To make matters more confusing, the word “Blog” is thrown around so freely when not many people truly understand what it is and how it is created.

It is, however, a rather simple process. Blogs are simply online interfaces that let you type in what you want, when you hit submit, it makes a webpage for you. In the simplest of terms, it is a text-editing program, like word, that makes a web page.

What’s great about a blog is that after it’s all set up, all you have to do is add content. The blog takes care of itself.

To sweeten the deal, blogs work amazingly well with dental search engine optimization. A regularly updated dental website blog (at least one or two submissions each week) can enhance your dental practice’s website rankings astronomically. We have seen client blogs outdraw the main website with search terms as broad as dental surgery and general dental care, on Google no less.

From a marketing perspective, if a potential client sees that you are personally and actively updating your own website, they might be a little more open to getting in touch with you in return.

So join the blog universe, it’s all the rage these days.

Paid Listings versus Natural Listings

The question about what are more effective, paid listings or natural listings, is one that arises consistently. Although ROI is influenced in many different ways and can be very difficult to distinguish between each, there are some studies that do shed some light on the subject.

In a study conducted by iProspect (surveyed search engine marketers that did both SEO and paid listing advertisements), they found that more of these marketers got a better ROI from natural SEO than from paid search engine advertising. Although it was not unanimous, (over a 3 to 1 margin) marketers generated a higher ROI from SEO than from paid search advertisements.

Of the survey responses, 35% indicated a higher return on SEO, 11% indicated a higher ROI on paid search advertisements and 9% got similar returns from each. This also indicates that a large percentage of search engine marketers that outsource their search engine marketing don't, or can't determine whether they get a higher return from either natural SEO or paid listings.

Although this study tries to differentiate and quantify the value of each, the fact of the matter is that ALL the survey responses were completed by web marketers that implement BOTH paid and natural search engine campaigns. This information should not be viewed as an either/or question. As with most marketing campaigns that implement multiple strategies, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Bill Fukui
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