What you need to know about online marketing

Part 1 - What is SEO and what does your website say about you?

Instructors:

Peter Boulden, DMD

Peter Boulden, DMD

Dr. Peter Boulden graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry and practices in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Boulden has experience lecturing locally and nationally.

Dr. Boulden reviews search engine optimization and why before looking at where you rank you should look at your website and find out how well it reflects your practice.

Today, we're going to talk about SEO and online marketing. So basically what is SEO? It's a very very broad term, very broad term. There's so many components of SEO. The main goal is obviously to drive people to your website to convey your message. Hugely important. I think it dominates all form of marketing. And the reason being is because online marketing does not interrupt people. If you think about radio, if you think about TV, if you think about print ads, almost every form of marketing interrupts them in the day. They're bombarded with it all day long. But the converse is true when you talk about online marketing because someone is actually seeking out answers to what you can possibly provide them. So it's a superior form of advertising because you're getting people who like I said really really want the message, the product, the service the benefit that you can give them. So we're going to kind of breakdown a lot of the components of what search engine marketing, search engine optimization, online marketing, you know whatever you want to talk about. You know, there's a lot of tags or titles that you can give what I'm talking about today. But it really is just to acquire more people to your website and convey your message in a manner in which they're able to receive it. It's a little bit deceiving when you try and talk about you know am I on page 1 or do I have a no. 1 listing. You know it's a hard thing to do. I'm not going to lie to you. It's a very competitive world we live in especially online. Everyone wants page 1 listing or no. 1 listing, no. 2 listing and for a good reason. Ninety percent of the people who land on the site or when they're typing it on Google, most people, 50% I should say, 50% of the people will click on the no. 1 listing. That obviously goes down as you go to no. 2, 3, 4, 5 and there's percentages. But like I said 50% of the people will click on the no. 1 listing regardless of what it is. So is it important to get there? Absolutely. A rule of thumb is you kind of want to be on page 1 for whatever service you're trying to offer. So if you're nowhere on page 1, if you really nowhere on the internet choose three things, and this is my advice to other dentists, choose three things that you really really want to do. That you really want to say I love doing veneers, I love doing implants and I love doing Invisalign. Focus on those three things. Don't try to be all things online to everybody. So focus on those three things and say I'm going to focus my SEO efforts on veneers, Invisalign, implants. Unfortunately, that's something you have to continually, continually work at. You cannot set this and forget it. And that's one of the myths out there that I struggle telling people is you have to continually work at it. You know I joke around. I told people I didn't make the rules. Google and Bing and Yahoo they made the rules. You have to stay dynamic and you have to continually add content and continue look for other ways to rank higher than your competitor. In summation basically to what I'm saying that if you're not ranking let's just say to the top 5 categories, the organic categories which are right below the paid listing, you may want to consider in the meantime doing Google AdWords. Now I'm not a big proponent of it cause because I think organic listings like I said the 1 through10 have a little bit higher value. But if you're not being represented there and SEO takes time getting your listing up to page 1 is going to take time. Hands down. You're going to have to work at this and it's going to take 3 or 6 months to see any kind of visual results in my opinion. So in the meantime you might want to consider doing Google AdWords because that day you can get to page 1 and get clicked on. That's it. Like I said if you don't have a presence of 1 through 5. Although, I'm not a big proponent of AdWords I do think in the instance of being, if you're not represented, it is a good thing to do temporarily. One of the biggest things I want to discuss with fellow dentist is kind of looking at your own current website and this may not be ìSEOî. But until you build that beautiful house that represents your perfect and I say house cause I'll use that analogy. Imagine your website as kind of like it's a big mansion. It's glorious. It's your practice. It's all things there and the object is to get people to drive up to your mansion and kind of look at your beautiful mansion. But if it doesn't represent you then, you know your practice is awesome, your employees know it, your patients know it's awesome but if it doesn't represent you then doing all this SEO is really kind of pointless because you're sending the wrong message. So one of the things that I like to tell people about is look at your website. Click on it or even watch someone who's never been to it. Click on your website and if it doesn't establish the credibility that you have and the intent of what you're trying to do in at least 2 seconds, 5 seconds whatever it may be immediately then you need to seriously have the conversation with someone about rebuilding your website. So looking at your website is a huge thing. Make sure it has gorgeous pictures, not just stack photos. Make sure it has actual cases that you've done. Again not stack photos. Make sure it has content that is relevant to the modern times. Is that content from 2005? No one wants t read that. Does it have videos that personify you as the dentist? You know people want to get to know you and your staff before they've ever arrived. Because going to the dentist let's face it is already a daunting enough task to get people in the office. The more you can decrease that anxiety by kind of introducing them to you through video, through text to whatever, the more they get to know you the more comfortable they will feel. So look at your own website. Look at it with a sharp unbiased eye and make sure it really portrays your best vision, your best day, whatever you want to say. Make sure it portrays the best you and your practice. If it doesn't like I said maybe it's time to kind of revisit having it rebuild. All right, now let's just jump in and kind of go over the anatomy of what a good website looks like and should look like and I'll talk about the pertinent details. If you're like me I'm a very visual learner. So I like to see things in real life form. So here I have a website. Here my friends in Houston Tom and Kathy, Tom Hedge and Kathy Frasier. And this is one of the sites that they have just launched recently and I think it kind of epitomizes the way a site should be built from the ground up. And it has the component like I want to discuss. So the anatomy of the website and this goes back to what I was talking the credibility and intent. So the first seconds when this site loads, the credibility is right there. It shows the office in all its splendor. Bam. People know wow this is a nice office. They check that off their mental checklist. Then there's more credibility up here. Here they have kind of the CBS. You know some of the staff that gone ABC, Fox, USA. You know that kind of stuff makes people, the consumer. When I say people I mean the consumer that makes the consumer feel good. You know people are scared to go to the dentist and when they see that credibility it kind of warms out the idea. Okay. This person is probably not going to hurt me. You know they know what they're doing. They're the authority in my area and that's really a huge thing to kind of focus on, is you want to establish yourself as the authority in your specific market. You want to be the go to guy and this kind of things help. And a website actually can speak for you. You don't even have to say I'm the authority. A great website will say it before you open any words of your mouth. And it's not bragging, it's just kind of presentation. Cause presentation as we know is everything. Okay. So let's step right in to some of the anatomy of a good site. So up here at the top this is something that's called the title tag. And this is talking about, when we talk about SEO this is one component of SEO. This is called the on page or on site optimization. So it's the way that Google is going to look at your site to make sure that it's structured correctly. So this is what's called the title tag. So you see right away and this is one of the most important things. One of the big mistakes I see people having in their HTML coding is they won't specifically write this out in a very concise manner. Meaning it will say like home or it will say just the same thing on every page. The page title needs to be customized for every single on your website as does almost everything I'm about to talk about. Every page needs to be specific for exactly what you're talking about. If it's an implant page, talk about implants. If it's Invisalign page, be very specific of what you're trying to talk about. Okay. Cause Google is going to look favorably upon that. Don't try to be all things to all pages to get all the traffic and have all the stuff. Be very very customized with your linkage. So, here the thing that's obviously going for Houston dentists, cosmetic dentist Houston. It's a very big search term that is typed in Google and obviously they're trying to capture that search term. This is their home page. This is money page. This is the one that they're going to get the most clout and credibility from on Google because most of their links, I'll talk about that later, most of their linkage that they have is going right into their homepage. So that's their most powerful page and it's something that you want to put your most powerful term or get your most traffic from. So obviously it's cosmetic dentist Houston. Very broad. We can put a broad term on that because it's their main page. The next thing they kind of talk about is some of the services they offer veneers and Invisalign, sedation, dental implants. So list of five things that they want to get some traction for. Okay. So page title again needs to be customized for every page. As I click down to a different page down there, I went into one of their interior pages which is just a secondary page, interior page is secondary page off of their main page and it's their dental sealant page. Let's just use that as an example. So here the title page, the title has now changed to dental sealants in Houston. Okay. So let me go back. So now we've cover up one title page. Everyone knows you need to customize every page on your site. You have the title page to be talking about whatever it is you're doing. Pretty simple but you'd be surprised how many websites aren't doing that. If you're doing that, great, check it off the box. You know don't worry about that.