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Be Local With Your Dental Practice Site

August 8, 2008 – 11:52 am

Unless your practice is a cosmetic practice that targets a national clientel, chances are most of your business is coming to you from within 20 to 30 mile radius.

While the internet is a big place, it’s still possible to focus on that traffic thats coming from homes nearby.

ADWORDS

AdWords allows you to target within a radius of your home. This means your ads only show up for browsers with an IP address (the computer’s address) in the region selected. You can essentially only advertise to those that are within a reasonable distance without wasting money on clicks from users far away.

SEO for Local Keywords

The copy, or text, on your website should also be optimized for search engines with a focus towards the local. This means using the town name, city name, major road ways, nearby school districts, etc, throughout your sites copy. Making short articles that focus on smaller sets of these keywords will further raise your relevancy for a search like the following: “Dentist in -town name-” or “-town name- dental services”, etc.

Just keep in mind that the internet can be as big or as small as you need it to be. Using smart strategies and thinking before you write can help make sure your site is most visible to those nearby and within you area of influence.

Greg | Dental and Medical Marketing | Comments (0)

Medical Practice Marketing: Big Issues

August 8, 2008 – 11:43 am

As we’ve mentioned before, medical searches make up a huge portion of search engine traffic. If your medical practices deals with some of the big health issues, like diabetes, for example, you need to be talking about them on your site.

The form in which you talk about them can vary, but short articles are always a good bet. In 500 words or less, discuss warning signs, the history of the disease and what it is, how it is treated, why it happens, etc.

People are actively seeking this information and, chances are, a doctor like you and those are your practice.

If you’re highly specialized practice its even more important that you’re writing these short articles, or having them written for you. People seeking specialized treatments and help will be looking for people just like you. Make sure you can be found.

Once the articles are on your website, consider posting edited versions on free article databases like ezinearticles.com, which can further increase the exposure of your content, website, and expertise.

Greg | Dental and Medical Marketing | Comments (0)

Searching Becomes More Prevalent, Study Finds

August 7, 2008 – 12:24 pm

The Pew Internat and American Life Project reported that the search box and searching have become more common after a surveys results were posted.

According to the survey, nearly half of internet users will conduct a search on a typical day. In 2002 only a third of those surveyed said the same.

Searching has, according the to the report, replaced an older method of browsing that revolved around bookmarking and revisiting favorite sites.

Now users use searches to find what they want, exactly.

This is good news for the search marketing industry and those interested in using online search ad placement. Prospects and impressions will continue to grow as the internet community continues to embrace the search and incorporate it into their daily life and tasks.

Source

Greg | General Marketing/E-Marketing | Comments (0)

Online Marketers Unhappy with Microsoft/Yahoo Fiasco

August 7, 2008 – 11:56 am

Search Engine Marketers are unhappy with the aftermath of the Microsoft/Yahoo talks and failures, which has ultimately led to Google gaining an even stronger hold over the search market share, now nearly 70 percent.

“We always have a need for multiple sources of quality traffic and we don’t see that need going away as Google’s share increases,” Will Margiloff, CEO and founder of Innovation Interactive, an online marketing agency, said during a panel discussion. “Complexity is good, consolidation is bad.” (source)

While online marketing spending has remained rather solid through the economic downturns of the past year, the consolidation of power in Google is hurting some.

AOL’s ad unit reported a weak 2% growth in quarterly ad sales, where as both Google and Yahoo have reported double digits.

Marketers report that Yahoo and other competitors remain attractive and high converting areas to invest in advertising. Users of Yahoo, for example, often spend considerably more time on the site than at Google.

In the end, however, all search marketing companies interviewed had reported an increase in business for 2008, so things can’t be all that bad in the end.

Source

Greg | Yahoo! | Comments (0)

Real Estate Agents: Use Your Traffic!

August 6, 2008 – 11:27 am

Brandon Cornett of Arming your Farming shared a scary tidbit on his blog recently: “The average real estate website gets enough traffic to support the real estate agent’s marketing and business goals, but her or she is not capitalizing on that traffic”.

Can it be true?

I bet it is.

Brandon went on to give 5 general rules about lead generation, but I’m going to give you some specific advice.

  1. Communicate Clearly: Visitors landing on your website or browsing your listings should have a crystal clear understanding of who your business is, where it is located and how to use and navigate your website. This accomplished through smart and direct copy and design and aesthetics.
  2. Be Relevant: Make sure your website is addressing issues outside of the house listings — neighborhoods, reviews of area schools, basically anything relevant to a homebuyer in your area.
  3. Give ‘em the Goods: Make your listings as complete and attractive as possible. Photos are essential, and as many as you can give the better. Videos are even better. You want browsers to get a very strong idea of the property, motivating them to make the call to your office.
  4. Trade the Goods, Too: Some of your best and relevant content can be traded with visitors. Maybe you can put together a few focused articles on home improvement, or a detailed review of a particular neighborhood, something more indepth than the short articles you wrote. Interested visitors will be willing to trade their emails and contact info for the report, giving you a way to follow up on leads and convert interested browsers to buyers and clients.
  5. The Internet Isn’t Magic:

    6. Of course, I wish it were. The reality is that buyers have the same mentality when shopping on and offline. Empty promises, flat copy, terrible pictures and a poor, unprofessional website is the equivalent of opening a shop in a terrible neighborhood with a leaky ceiling and a receptionist that doesn’t know what’s going on. Yeah, I’d walk out of that place, too. Make sure you’re representing your business and your skills to the max online.

Greg | Real Estate Marketing | Comments (0)

PPC Advice: Google’s Vision of a Landing Page

August 6, 2008 – 11:17 am

Google has it’s own list of advice for making a landing page, and as usual, its chock full of good practices.

Google breaks a landing page down into three categories:

  1. Relevant and Original Content
  2. Transparency
  3. Navigability

Remember, the page your AdWords ad links to has an effect on the ranking and relevance of your ad, which in turn effects both placement and cost per bid.

Now, what do they mean by all of these things?

Be Relevant and Original

No surprises here: make sure visitors quickly find what you ad promised. In other words, if you dump them into a homepage for a ecommerce website, thats not relevant. You should dump them on a page made specificaclly for the product(s) in your ad or at least to the catalogue listing of the product(s).

Secondly, make sure the written content is unique on these pages, not to be found anywhere else on the web. IE, don’t use the manufacturers description of a verbatim copy of another page on your site. Create something unique and relevant.

Transparency

Don’t try to dupe anyone.

Unless you absolutely need a form to capture visitors information, don’t put it on the landing page, save it for the second page. Why? Because people just don’t trust forms they land on without doing so on purpose. You want to establish trust by being straightforward about your business, what it does, what it sells, and how its going to interact with the visitors computer to do this.

We’re not talking about a technical treatise on the subject. Just no misleading or empty copy with false promises or other mumbo jumbo. Let the visitor get a quick and clear image of who you are, what you offer, and how you deliver it.

Navigability

Visitors are stupid. Ok, maybe they aren’t, but you have to think about your navigation as if they are. It needs to be super simple, super focused and clear. Too many options are distracting, vague button names and link text leaves us unsure of where to click.

If you want them to click there, tell them to do it!

You can read Google’s full advice on landing pages here.

Greg | PPC Campaigns | Comments (0)

Use Your Dental Practice Website To Get New Clients

August 5, 2008 – 12:11 pm

Many business know they need a website, but they’re not sure why. In the rush to be ‘modern’ they pay someone to throw up something that in the end is little more than a webpage with photos and maybe an address.

Your Dental Practice’s website can be, and should be, much more.

A website is a unique medium with unique qualities, and if you only use it in the same way as a paper medium, like a brochure, you’re missing out.

Your website allows you to interact quickly and clearly to potential clients, capture their information to be used in future marketing, to communicate with current clients to remind them of upcoming appointments or to book future appointments, and the list goes on.

Essentially it can function both as a marketing vessel as well as a hub of communication and organization with existing clients.

Getting New Clients

Getting new clients with your website means generating focused traffic and converting them into leads.

For example, you optimize your site for a few sets of keywords aimed at capturing the attention of families moving to your area (focused traffic) then design the site to make it easy for them to submit their information or contact you directly via email or phone (conversion to leads).

Once you have their info and get in contact, you want to convert those leads into customers.

Put together a plan before you launch your site, knowing that this is the function it must serve. Make sure the design is able to hold the important content you need (articles geared at new comers, news, types of services, history, etc) and that can also capture information (is able to funnel visitors towards a contact form, page, or have your contact info easily found at the very least).

Once you’re plan is in place and only then, start talking with a web design company or professional, explaining to them exactly what your site needs to do. Chances are, this professional will have specific ideas of their own to help you accomplish this.

Without a plan or clear communication, you’ll end up with an expensive brochure that nobody cares about and that doesn’t earn you any money.

Greg | Dental and Medical Marketing | Comments (0)

Rank Well on Google: The Building Blocks

August 5, 2008 – 11:40 am

There are probably hundreds of different tips, tidbits of advice and tutorials available on how to rank well on Google, but today we’re going to discuss things to think about before you even build your website.

Whether you’re building the site yourself or are hiring a web design team to do so, you need to make sure that you’re not employing poor development practices if ranking well on Google is of high importance.

Frames & Flash Are Out

Frames were common several years ago. They are, in a way, pretty neat. You can lock information in parts of the screen so that they never change. Nowadays, however, they’re unneeded thanks to advances in design and development practices.

The only thing Frames are good for now is ruining your ranking on Google. The information held in frames just isn’t coped with well and will always cost you, so just say no, and tell the design shop you hired not to use them.

Flash is the second “really cool but maybe not a good idea” design method. Flash is, of course, all right when employed to enhance a site — cool buttons, banner ads, etc — but not for building an entire site.

Flash let’s designers make sure that visitors see there site exactly as they want them to, which is a big attraction on top of the wow factor flash can provide. In the end, however, making flash-only websites easily indexed by Google is hard, and most likely the design firm you hired isn’t planning on going that extra 20 miles.

Flash sites show as empty to Google. All the text that would be used to index and rank your site is invisible, which means your site is invisible on Google.

Think It Over

Give your site some thought, and make sure its clear from the get go with the designers and programmers that you want to rank well on Google, and any technologies or flashy graphics that might interfere with that are out.

Greg | Google | Comments (0)

Online Marketing for Attorneys: Build a Message Board

August 4, 2008 – 10:43 am

We’ve talked about being active on other forums related to your practice to generate a larger profile and increase the exposure of your practice, but maybe you should just bring the discussion to you.

Putting a message board on your website has two big things in its favor: 1) It’s free or close to it and 2) Can work miracles for your image and site traffic.

A good example: You’re an immigrations specialist, handling paperwork and advising people how to best arrange their residency applications and all the other complicated details. Go type in a search a simple question about a visa and look at the results: tons of questions are being asked about it every day.

A message board on your website gives those seeking answers another place to seek answers, with the benefit of having your around to answer them and encourage the conversations to continue.

While you’re helping folks out with simple questions, you’re going to accomplish two things.

  1. Make it clear why you make a living doing this (Immigration is complicated and scary!) and why they might need your services.
  2. Create tons of SEO rich content for the very terms and Q’s we want to be optimized for.

The nature of the message board works in our favor. Most results for “How do I file for a K-1 Visa?” will link directly to message board topics with the same title. You’re going to benefit in the same way. People are asking pointed, specific questions naturally employing powerful keywords.

Depending on your practice a message board may or may not be the be-all-end-all marketing strategy, but it certainly can’t hurt. Take a closer look at your clients and how they usually approach you and determine if the message board approach is right for your practice.

Greg | Legal Marketing | Comments (0)

SEO Tips: Do Your Research

August 4, 2008 – 10:34 am

Before setting out to Search Engine Optimize your website for the magic words, make sure you know which words are the magic ones to begin with.

There’s a sea of software out there that can easily run you more than $1,000 but doing research doesn’t have to break the bank or cost you a single cent beyond the time you put in to it.

Use Your Brain and a Search Engine

Start out with Google or Yahoo or MSN Search, think up a few keyword combinations that sound right to you, and type them in.

Take a look at the results — do you see your competitors? Is it thick with highly relevant sites? Click a few and look over their webpage. Search the page for the keywords you typed in using your browser ‘Find’ function (CTRL+F or CMD+F on a mac) and see how dense those keywords show up.

After analyzing your competition and finding words that have results that seem off, worthless, or undesirable, assemble the keywords that have the least competition and the best potential.

Free Software Tools

Feel free to use some free versions of powerful SEO tools during this process as well.

Keyword Discovery and WordTracker offer less powerful free versions of their software to use. Take a look at search volume for your keywords.

You can also use Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which will give a general idea of the competition for certain keyword phrases.

Using your brain, a search engine, and a few helpful freebie programs you should be able to get a great start on optimizing your website for search engines.

Greg | SEO | Comments (0)