Search Engine Registration for Cosmetic Dentists

So you've got your dental website up and you want to get it registered on the search engines. There are literally thousands of search engines and directories where you can submit your site. A successful search engine optimization program will get you listed in as many of these as possible. However, if you are a do-it-yourself kind of person, here are a few of the big ones:

• The Open Directory - It takes a while, but it is worth it. Don't use self promotional language describing your site in your submission.
  
  
• The Yahoo Directory - In addition to the Yahoo! search engine, Yahoo also has a directory. The cost is $300 per year, but it is well worth it.
  
  
• Google - some people say that you should not submit to Google. Let the Googlebot find your site. If your site is listed as a link on other sites that Google spiders, this strategy will work, but you can also submit to Google directly and avoid the wait.
  
  
• Yahoo - Also covers FAST And AltaVista.
  
  
• MSN - The last of the big three.

There are many more places to submit your site, but this is a starting point. You should also check for any websites that list local businesses in your area.

Good luck with it!

Dan Goldstein
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Pay Per Click Search Engines

Many cosmetic dentists are now familiar with the two major pay per click options - Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. There are others, but these are the two most important ones. If your practice is using (or considering using Pay Per Click - PPC), you should start here. The way that I look at PPC is that it is great for a limited time focused on a specific campaign, especially when there is a lot of news on the subject. With YSM or AdWords, you can pretty much ensure that your site gets a lot of play and a lot of traffic - as long as you are willing to pay.

With Pay Per Click, you pay every time somebody clicks on the sponsored listing for your site. If they see your site, but don't click, you don't pay. Typically, the ads run above and to the right of the search results.

YSM is used on Yahoo and MSN as well as a number of other medium sized search engines. AdWords is used on Google and AOL and other search engines as well. They each control slightly less than 50% of the market.

With YSM you can control where you are positioned in the sponsored results- first, second, third, fourth, etc. It is all based on how much you are willing to pay. If you want to be number one for a particular search phrase, you either need to have software that constantly monitors your position/ranking or you need to manually update your bid. You can set caps on how much you want to bid per click, per day, per month, etc. You can also just prepay a fixed budget and when it runs out, you stop showing up until you put more money in.

With AdWords, it is more complicated - everything with Google is more complicated. With AdWords, your ranking depends not just on how much you want to pay, but on how frequently people click on your listings/ads and how long they stay on your site. Theoretically, you could be willing to pay more than your competitor, but he could get the top spot because people click on his ad more frequently and stay on his site longer. (Yes, Google tracks this.) This means, you have to have a very compelling ad and a strong site to keep people on it. Google also shows your ad on an irregular basis if you do not have a large enough overall budget to ensure that you can pay for all the click throughs. One major advantage of AdWords, however, is that you can be live with AdWords within minutes (they have an editorial review after you go live and may turn off or pause your campaign at that time) while YSM does a review before you go live which may take a day or two.

PPC is a great tool if you know how to use it, but don't ignore the natural listings. That is how you win the marathon. Both PPC and natural listings require lots of work and time and attention.

Dan Goldstein
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Marketing in an Economic Slow-Down

Most dental practices pull back on their marketing spending when economic times get tough. This is a mistake. Especially where web marketing is concerned, practices will fair hard economic times better if they stay strong in their marketing. They will see more new patients come in the door.

Sure, they'll have to work harder for the patients that they get than when the economy was flush with dollars for elective medical procedures like cosmetic dentistry, but the point is that the patients will come - IF you continue to market for them.

Web marketing is the most cost effective marketing medium out there. Imagine trying to launch a TV campaign for $20,000. There are monthly costs to doing SEO, but they pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that you might spend on TV air time. The web is also cheaper than radio and direct mail. The beauty is that Internet marketing is also more effective because, unlike TV, radio, direct mail, and other forms of interruption advertising, the internet is targeting people that have already signaled that they are interested in dentistry by searching for dental phrases on Google and the other search engines.

There is an added penalty for pulling back on web marketing. Websites have intertia on the search engines. The more you put into your web marketing, the more that your website will build momentum and will be more likely to show up for searches in the future. When you pull back on your web marketing, you lose momentum and can even begin building negative momentum that is hard to recover from. If the search engines begin ranking your website as a has been, it is difficult to turn that impression around and show them that you're a source of high-quality, new information. This means that if you pull back on your web marketing now, when the economic market turns around and dentistry is hot again, you will suffer a lag time in getting your web marketing back up to speed.

In these times of economic slow-down, swim upstream and surpass your competitors that use the economy as an excuse not to market. Take this opportunity to be aggressive in your web marketing.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Jonathan's Web Marketing Blog
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The Importance of Prominent Contact Information

Almost every day I come across beautiful dental websites with rich, well-written content, but they overlook some mighty important things and therefore fall short of their potential to generate new patients. Since people who are searching on the Internet for a cosmetic dentist proceed in a "scan mode" until a website can draw their attention into more of a "reading mode," it is vital that your website include prominent displays of practice’s location, contact information (especially a phone number), as well as graphic and textual links to a main practice contact form.

Getting your website to the first page of Yahoo!, Google, MSN, AOL, etc. search results is critical, and will certainly increase your practice’s exposure to people looking for a dentist. But too many practice’s websites neglect to register as high up on the page as possible the fact that their offices are in the locale that matches the consumer's search, and fail to display their phone number in the field to which the consumer's eye is initially drawn. If I need a dentist and conduct an MSN search for "cosmetic dentist San Diego," and then click onto one of the first page links in the search engine results, it gets my attention to find immediately that the website on which I have landed represents a practice located near me. Having a phone number prominently displayed in the header of the landing page increases the odds that I will contact that practice.

It is also important to provide graphic and textual links on every page of the website that navigate site visitors to what should be the primary target destination page of your site: the main contact form. Graphics with human images of surgeons or other office staff begin creating the bonding with site visitors that evolve into actual relationships, and if these graphics are associated with mini-contact forms or link directly to a main contact form, odds are greater that site visitors become practice contacts. Links within the text of every website page are essential, too, such as "Click here for a free consultation,” or “0% financing on dental procedures."

If the goal of having a website is to help generate patients for your practice, or if you are only interested in being as helpful to site visitors as possible, providing prominent location and contact information is fundamental. Prompting site visitors to your main contact form via purposeful site navigation is indispensable to getting the information and developing the relationships that will bring you new patients.

Jessica Espinoza
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