How do you find a doctor near you? How did you find your latest dentist? How do you find how much the new mattress is for your bedroom? You go to the internet and search, right? These days, no one uses the phonebook anymore. Everything happens on the internet. That’s why if you haven’t incorporated your dental practice marketing online, you may find your dental practice in the bottom pit of the industry.
Simply put, you need the internet to survive. There are basically two methods marketers use to advertise websites on the internet. One is SEO, which everyone is familiar and the other one is paid advertisements, which everyone should be familiar with, too.
SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO means optimizing your website to show up higher in search results. The most popular search engine is Google with over 63,000 searches per second. When people search online, they are more likely to click on the first five links that appear on the search results. If you are not on that list, your chances of getting visited by your target market are slim.
Research shows that more than 75% of web users do not bother going past the first page of the search results. When your website isn’t optimized for search engines, you’re making it hard for your target market to find you.
For a local business like a dentist, local SEO is very important. Aside from optimizing the content on your website, you also need to claim and validate your Google My Business page. That way, when people search for a local keyword (for example, Lakeland dentist), your page will be on top of the list.
Paid Advertisements
Paid search will put your practice at the top of the search results for relevant keywords. Pay-per-click ads, for example, work by only having to pay for the number of times your link was clicked on by a web user. You pay for each click on the ad. This means you are essentially buying visits to your site instead of “earning” them the natural way, which is through SEO.
But it’s not as simple as that. You need to bid on a keyword so your ad will be displayed prominently on the search results page. Search engines will award you the bid depending on the relevance of the keyword on your website. Using paid advertisements is the easiest way to advertise a dental practice. Dentists will see results quicker than they can with SEO or other dental practice marketing methods.