If your practice’s patient numbers have come to a stand-still or you have decided to open a brand new practice of your own, it may benefit you to take a look at your practice’s online presence. These days people use the internet for all sorts of research, including what dentist they should go to, and there are thousands of practice websites for them to choose from. If you want them to choose your practice then it is important that you take your dental marketing very seriously. The slightest mishap or forgotten element could result in a page three Google result placement instead of on page one. This can make all the difference when considering your website traffic and number of new patients you are gaining each month, as you are likely to remain invisible on page three. It has been statistically shown that people who search on Google often never look past the first few top results that Google provides, and over ninety per cent of people never click past page one.
Locations for local business
It is likely that a majority of the patients that you have will come from within the local area, or the areas surrounding it. It is important that your practice appears on the Google Maps page, as people often search for things such as ‘dentist in Sydney’ or ‘dentist near me’ and Google optimises its results to show a map of the area that has been specified and a list of all the relevant places that the person has searched for. If you are on the map it means that people can find you quickly when they are searching online, and a multitude of information about your practice can be discovered with a simple click. They will be able to contact your practice directly, find directions and even read reviews that other patients have left.
Make sure people enjoy using your website
These days it does not matter if you have a well-made, visually pleasing website. It is simply not enough to get your website noticed. There are millions of websites in Australia, so standing out among them can sometimes seem like an impossible task. Google has been developed over the years to fine tune its results and optimise them for the searcher, so they see the most relevant, up-to-date results on the web. If you want your website to be appearing within the top results you need to make sure it is relevant, contemporary, but also user friendly. It is often easy to forget to think about how people are searching for their information when the focus is so often on producing the information that they want to find. These days people are glued to their smartphones, and this is reflected in the statistics of how many people are using their smartphones to search on Google. One in every two people search for something through Google on a mobile device, and they expect the results that they find to be websites optimised for mobile viewing that load without hesitation. Not having your website optimised to display effectively on a mobile device could mean that you are losing several new patients each month.
