How Online Reviews Help Gain Exposure For Your Dental Practice
Apr 30, 2018
Apr 30, 2018
10 min read
10 min read
Imagine a scenario where potential patients are looking for your dental services online and come across this review - "/social-media-marketing-services/" 
Or this…
What do you think will be their reaction? Obviously, they’ll be impressed but will it be enough to get some foot traffic?
Absolutely!
Online reviews are the 21st century equivalent of word-of-mouth and they can serve as a powerful catalyst in driving patients towards (or away) from your practice.
Seems like an exaggeration? Answer me this… when was the last time you went to or ordered from a new restaurant without checking its reviews online?
I bet you do that everytime! And everyone else does it too. Don’t think people look for reviews only when it comes to restaurants, they do it for all things imaginable and dental practices are sure one of them, so it becomes all the more important for you to handle online reviews with care.
According to a BrightLocal study, as much as 93% of consumers read online reviews to decide if a business is worth their time or not, which is huge!... and should be a clear-cut sign that you need to take your review game up a notch if you want some more exposure for your dental practice.
Here are some more reasons why you absolutely must embrace online reviews -
1.Helps propel your marketing efforts
Almost every dental practice of today is engaged in some online marketing efforts, be it Social Media Marketing or Content Marketing or any other outreach efforts. And I am sure you do it as well in one form or the other. So, you’d know how difficult it is to market your dental practice online and the amount of insane efforts it takes to do it well.
Do you want all those efforts to go down the drain? They will if there are a plethora of bad reviews about your practice scattered online.
Bad reviews can also be the reason your dental practice is not able to take-off despite consistent marketing efforts, doesn’t matter how amazing they are.
On the other hand, if there are glorious reviews about you and the way you run your dental practice, they can prove to be the last push a potential patient needs to come to your doorsteps and make your marketing efforts an absolute success.
2. Helps in ranking on search engines
According to a Moz study, cumulative reviews can have a 13% effect on your search engine rankings and quite evidently, it’s a lot!
Source - Moz
Major search engines like Google gives a lot of importance to user-generated reviews. The more you have it, greater are your chances to reach the top.
From there, it becomes a self-feeding review generating cycle. As businesses with more reviews gain more visibility through search engines, it results in more foot traffic which in-turn leads to even more user-generated reviews. The main task is to figure out how to get that cycle started (which we will talk about in the next section)
3. Builds customer trust
Which practice will a potential patient trust more - a dental practice with a ton of happy user generated reviews or a practice with many 1-star ratings?
The answer is quite obvious ain’t it. When you read a bunch of good reviews about a dental practice or any other business, it builds your trust with the brand. You’ll be sure that they’ll take great care of you and will provide you with the best of services.
And when a potential customer starts to trust your brand even before availing your services, that’s where the magic happens. Prove to them that you are worthy of your reviews and bam!... you have a customer that’ll stick with you no matter what.
Only a thing like reviews can make that happen.
Where to begin?
Unless you provide a service so good that customers start posting marvellous reviews for your business themselves, to kickstart your review cycle, you’ll have to ask for it explicitly. Most dental practices lack that. Just simply ask for a review and show them the easiest way to do so or the platform you’d want them to specifically review on. Or you can include asking for reviews in your email marketing efforts.
Doesn’t matter how you ask them, but you’ll have to take the first step.
Use Yelp, Google My Business & Facebook Reviews
Okay, these three platforms are the most accessible, biggest and baddest user-generated review platforms out there and you need to target just them to get the ball rolling.
You’ll have to claim listings for your dental practice first (and create a Facebook Business Page for Facebook Reviews) on these websites to allow users to submit their reviews.
With a monthly traffic of more than 160 million, Yelp is THE platform to focus on for dentists as 30% of the searches made on the platform is related to the healthcare industry. So, if you haven’t yet claimed your business on Yelp, now is the perfect time to do so!
And don’t forget Google My business, which can help your dental practice with localization (a topic we’ll be covering soon) as well.
Unlike popular belief, online reviews are an important part of your digital footprint, make sure you are giving them the attention they deserve and witness all your marketing efforts leave a mark.
On which platform do you receive the most patient reviews and feedback? Let us know in the comments.
Using Social Media To Create Hot Leads From Your Content Marketing
There is more to inbound marketing than creating compelling content. Even the best writing and visuals are no good if it doesn’t attract readers and entice people to visit your site. If you don’t feel like you have the skills to create or market your own content, you can always decide to use outsourced inbound marketing. Be sure to hire a reputable agency, though, because, since you can’t see or monitor them, you want to make sure they are honest and not acting in ways that reflect badly on your company. In what ways can you market your brand? You can and should use all the traditional methods of getting people to respond to your content and check out your product: forum posting and commenting on blogs are great ways to link back to your site. But there is one way to get noticed that trumps even that. Social Media. Social sites are one super way to build leads and get your brand out there and noticed. It is a terrific way to post content that will lead readers back to your website. Here are 4 popular social media outlets and how you can use them to market your product: Pinterest Pinterest is a photo-sharing site and is one of the most popular ways that people share content on the internet today. Users create ‘boards’ which are basically collections of ‘pins’-or images-related to particular topics. When someone likes your content, they can re-pin it to share it. The best way to get people to visit your boards is to use eye-catching images with your content. You can re-pin other content you find to fill up your boards with interesting materials and entice others to visit. YouTube YouTube videos tend to rank high in Google search results and can be a great way to boost your popularity. You can create and upload a video of anything related to your product; how-to, instructions, demonstrations, before and after, etc. Videos keep the reader engaged and can really show off your product’s benefits. Add a link at the end of each video to encourage people to visit your website. After all, every visit is a potential sale. Encourage members to visit your YouTube channel by commenting on other videos and interacting with the community. Google+ Google Plus content is highly favored on search results. Posting SEO-friendly articles will improve your chances of getting views and clicks. Google Plus has a couple of really unique features that come in handy. One is it’s ‘circles’ which allow you to group followers together into specific categories based on their interests. This allows you to target the proper audiences for your content. Another great feature is the Hangouts. Hangouts are video and audio recording that you create and share with your followers. Hangouts are automatically uploaded to YouTube and shared on your Google Plus page to attract even more viewers. Facebook It may seem like an easy way to promote your brand, especially if you have a lot of followers. However, what you need are followers who are interested in what you have to offer. Blog posts, images and videos tend to do very well on facebook. You can encourage visits by placing a link to your facebook page on your other social sites, so interested parties can click on it and follow you. Two great tools Facebook offers is their Pages Insights-a graph that shows how well your content is performing and Audience Highlights-which gives you the demographics of your visitors. This way you can see if you are reaching your target audience and adapt your content accordingly. All in all, social media is a marketing tool you don’t want to skip. You can grow by connecting accounts, getting shares and building followers. Engage with all the social media sites at first. Once you’ve established where most of your traffic is coming from, you can start to concentrate on utilizing those media platforms more. ...
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How To Get Your Existing Dental Patients Coming Back For More
In our previous blog , we talked about how maintaining an online presence is vital for a dental practitioner to grow his practice exponentially leveraging the power of the web. But what to do when your online marketing efforts bring a few patients in? How to keep them coming back for more? They are in your clinic because they got impressed with your brand online and found a value proposition in it, to keep them coming back for more, I think it goes without saying that you have to impress them with the way you run your actual practice as well. Apart from giving an exceptional dental treatment, there are many things you can do to woo them over and develop a healthy relationship with them. After all, its strong relationships in business that bring in repeat sales rather than anything else. So in this blog, we will be talking about some ways to provide a great in-clinic patient experience to keep them coming back for more - Make use of online appointments After finding your clinic online, a convinced potential patient will most probably give your clinic a call to set an appointment. Mind you, your front desk team can make or break your dental practice as they will always be your clinic’s first point of contact with your patients. So it becomes all the more important to make sure that they are proficient in whatever they do and to adequately train them if they are falling short. You can make use of some online dental marketing services that’ll help your front desk team better manage clinic appointments and stay at the top of their game. Use online appointment management services of Setmore or Appointy to keep a track of all your clinic appointments for a marginal cost. Remember, your front desk team’s attitude, professionalism and behavior can leave a lasting impression on patients - it’s your job to ascertain that it’s a good or bad one. Engage with them through emails Like you engaged with them online to bring them in, it’s important to engage with them in some way or the other when they actually come to your office to deliver a great customer experience. Your patients already know that you are great in your practice, that’s why they are there in the first place, all they are looking for is to form a relationship. Share a story, teach them about some common dental problems and how to avoid getting them, get a little personal and try to know a bit about their life. Small things like these can go a long way in forming forever lasting relationships with your patients that’ll bring in repeat sales and potentially can make your patients the advocates of your clinic, promoting word of mouth and in turn bringing in more patients, creating a circle that’ll never end. For that, you always have to be on top of the mind of your patients when they think about getting a dental treatment. A nice way to do that is by sending them gifts or exclusive offers, newsletters or by calling them in regular intervals to simply ask if they need an appointment. One of the best ways though to keep in touch with your patients is by sending emails. Start collecting email addresses of all your patients that walk through your door and run promotional email campaigns with the help of those collected emails to stay at the top of your game and in their mind. You can use an email marketing software such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact to run your marketing campaigns. Or if you can’t take the time out of your practice to send emails, we can help you out! Create an office culture Your office culture is essentially the way you run your office. It’s in your leadership style, your values, your behavior, your personality, your system, the way your employees communicate with each other and with your patients, your clinic decor, physical environment and basically everything that is linked to your clinic in some way or the other. The way you run your dental clinic actually holds the power to attract or repel patients, depends on how well organized and managed your dental practice is. Your unique way of doing things in the most optimized way and striking a perfect balance between all the elements mentioned above holds the power to boost productivity, attract quality staff, bring in patients and keep them coming back for more. Send greeting cards using online services Doing something extra for your patients will only bring a smile to their face and strengthen your relationship with them. Going up and beyond your regular practice to do something special for your patients will make them feel special and cared for, enhancing their customer experience marginally. Send thank you cards, get well cards, birthday cards, Happy New Year cards, bouquets on their birthday or marriage anniversary, gift baskets or anything you can think of to develop a special bond with them. Use an online service like Send Out Cards to send custom designed cards or some gifts to your patients, adding that personal touch which will make them feel special and cared for. Ask for feedback After you are done with the necessary treatments, doing something as simple as asking for an honest opinion about the quality of services provided to your patients can make them feel important and their opinions valued. While there are many ways to collect valuable feedback, the most convenient way to do it is through your dental website. Make a separate dedicated section in your website where your existing patients can do just that or you can go the traditional way and ask all the patients that come in your clinic to give feedback using a paper and pen. Doesn’t matter how you do it, the fact that you are giving your patients an opportunity to voice their opinions about your dental practice can go a long way in forming a healthy relationship with them. In today’s tough competitive environment, you can not possibly be a thousand times better than your competitors, but you can be better than them in a thousand small ways. Make your practice stand out by doing the above-mentioned things for your patients and watch them visit your clinic more often with a gleaming smile on their face! ...
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How to Find The Best Keywords With ‘Ahrefs’ and ‘SEMrush’
<!-- <img class="aligncenter wp-image-10769 size-large" src="/uploads/2018/05/joao-silas-74207-unsplash-1-1200x800.jpg" alt="Book With Pen" width="1140" height="760"> --> Who doesn’t like free traffic from Google? I do and I am pretty sure you fancy a lot of traffic coming to your website from Google as well. And a thorough keyword research is probably the best way to get it. Obviously, if all your website content is wrapped around keywords that boast a high search volume, you are bound to receive some extra traffic. Moreover, merging the power of digital marketing with your keyword optimized content will have you reaching new heights of exposure and traffic coming to your website, which is never a bad thing for your business, right? Think you don’t have the required knowledge or time to conduct a proper keyword research? You’re wrong! It could have been the case 10 years back but in this tech-savvy world of today, doing keyword research is a piece of cake. How? By using the best keyword research tools out there. As you would have guessed it from the title, we will be diving deep to research the best keywords in both Ahrefs and SEMrush - which are undoubtedly the best keyword research tools out there.. But first, we need some keywords before we begin with our actual research. How to find the right keywords? Finding the right keywords to rank is crucial as the ranking of your blog/webpage will be based on the keywords targeted through the content wrapped around it. Accordingly, there are many ways to ascertain the aptest. keywords for your business. Let’s look at some of them - 1. Know who you serve If you are doing keyword research for a client or doing it for your own product, knowing who and what a website serves to its visitors is a crucial step in finding some relevant seed keywords. You can have a look at the title tags and H1 tags of any webpage to get a gist of the keywords to be chosen. For example, if you are a digital marketing agency, digital marketing or online marketing or marketing should be the keyword your homepage must be built around on... 2. See through your user’s eyes It’s important to get into your user’s shoes and think about their intent when searching for your services online. Say, a searcher wants to buy ‘shoes’. His searches would be something like this - ‘nike shoes’, ‘casual shoes’, ‘best formal shoes’ or something similar. So, if you sell shoes, it makes sense to add these search strings to your keyword list. 3. Use a tool You might need around 30-40 apt keywords for your research. And using a tool like Keyword Planner can come in handy when searching for keywords with high search volumes. But using Keyword Planner requires a Google Adwords account which can be a trouble if you don’t have one. Don’t worry though, there are other tools that deliver this functionality as well. And probably the most used keyword finder, after Keyword Planner, is Keyword Tool This tool literally bombards you with all the relevant keywords there are in accordance with your query. Suppose, you want to write a blog post for currently the most trending keyword in the UK - GDPR. Let’s see what keywords the tool throws at us - The search resulted in 538 unique keywords for the query. You’ll need the paid version to get the metrics as well but we won’t be needing them as all the data will be exported to Ahrefs. Now, combining the keyword results from the above-mentioned methods, export them to an excel sheet and delete some that you deem irrelevant. Getting down to the research Copy and paste the keywords to Ahrefs or SEMrush to begin your quest of choosing the best keyword. Both of these tools are great. Both are quite similar in pricing as both the tools offer a basic subscription of $99 and provide almost the same level of functionality (limited in free accounts) but all the difference lies in how they present data to users and that can sometimes make all the difference. I personally like Ahrefs more because of the sheer simplicity of the platform when it comes to keyword research and they also present their data in a more intuitive way (which you’ll see through screenshots as you’ll further read this blog). Which is probably the reason why we use it for our SEO purposes as well. But the only downside of using Ahrefs is that they don’t provide a free account. In the remaining part of this blog, I will be telling you how to research keywords both on Ahrefs and SEMrush so it completely depends on you which tool you want to use and spend your precious marketing budget on. But before we begin, it’s important to know about some of the metrics that we will be basing our keyword research on to find the most profitable keywords, which are: Keyword difficulty Ranked from 0 to 100, it is an estimate of how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 of search results. Volume Denotes how often a target keyword is searched by users per month in a given country SERP Features This metric shows us the different SERP features present on the search results such as Ads, top stories, related questions, AMP carousels etc. Clicks This metric reflects the total number of clicks in a month on a particular keyword Cost per click It is an estimated cost-per-click value of a keyword. Clicks per search Shows how many search results people click on for a particular keyword. Return Rate Tells us how often search for a targeted keyword again. Now that you know all the metrics to look for in your perfect keyword, we will start off with Ahrefs first: Researching Keywords on Ahrefs Go to the ‘Keywords Explorer’ tab and paste your sheet containing all the remaining keywords on the search tab.You’ll be limited to a hundred keywords here. So, make sure you paste the best of the bunch. After all the keywords are processed, you’ll see a screen which looks something like this: This is the overview page. It gives an idea of the total search volume and clicks of your chosen keywords. But this is not where the gold is. To get a better idea of which keywords to choose, we will click on the metrics tab to get a better idea of how each of the keyword is performing on the SERPs. On the metrics tab, you get detailed information of all the searched keywords. Of all the metrics, you need to primarily focus on Keyword difficulty, volume, and clicks. The perfect keywords to capitalize on would be the ones which are easier to rank and receive a decent amount of search volume and clicks, I like to call them the ‘money keywords’, In this case, those money keywords will be ‘GDPR compliance checklist’, ‘GDPR checklist’ and ‘GDPR for dummies’.So, if you were to write a blog about GDPR, ranking for these 3 keywords would be enough to get to the first page of Google as there’s not much competition.But there will still be some publisher ranking on the top spot for all these keywords and having a look at what they have done to reach to the top can give you an idea of what you need to do better to outrank them. Ahrefs provides for this as well. When you’ll further click on a keyword, it will give you an overview of the keyword with all its metrics and it’s SERP overview.Say, we need to have a look at the competition on the SERP for the keyword ‘GDPR compliance checklist’, to do that, when you’ll click on the keyword, you’ll see something like this: Scroll down and you’ll see a fully detailed SERP overview for the keyword: Having an idea of what content already is out there gives you an opportunity to put on your creative hats and provide the kind of value to searchers that isn’t available yet, which I think can give you a certain edge.So, the best keywords we found on Ahrefs are - ‘GDPR compliance checklist’, ‘GDPR checklist’ and ‘GDPR for dummies’Let’s see what SEMrush brings to the table... Researching Keywords on SEMrush (free account) Ahrefs and SEMrush are on the same level when it comes to functionality but to unleash the full potential of SEMrush you’ll have to spend some bucks on its subscription (just like Ahrefs). But the good part is that SEMrush lets you play with their tool ‘a little’ to get a gist of how it functions. If you are unsure whether to spend your marketing budget on the platform or not, I seriously recommend you to test their platform before making the final decision. You’ll be limited to 10 searches per day in your free account which I think is just enough to get a feel for the software. Note: Both the platforms are different in how they search for keywords. While Ahrefs can search for multiple keywords (100 max) in one go, SEMrush can search for a single seed keyword at a time and kills the need to use the keyword tool we mentioned earlier.Just go to their website and search for a seed keyword you want to rank for. In our case, we will go with the term we chose for Ahrefs - GDPR. After you click ‘Start Now’, you’ll be redirected to it’s ‘Keyword Overview’ tab in ‘Keyword Analytics’. The ‘Overview’ tab in SEMrush is just like that of Ahrefs, displaying the total search volume, number of results and the search trend of the keyword overtime. But we searched for a seed keyword and not keywords which we will be actually wrapping our content around. For finding keywords that have some untapped potential, you’ll have to click on ‘Phrase Match’ and ‘Related Keywords’ tab to get more results.Here’s what came up when I clicked on ‘Phrase Match’... And on ‘Related Keywords’... You’ll be limited to 10 results while using a free account. You could’ve played with their filters and stumbled upon the most relevant of keywords for free but SEMrush now requires that you pay to add filters as well… sigh! So, you’ll have to choose the best keywords from those 10 results based on the same metrics we chose in Ahrefs. Go for the keywords that have high search volume and low keyword difficulty.With a free account, unfortunately, that’s all that you can do with SEMrush when it comes to keyword research.Now, we move on to the better things…. Researching Keywords on SEMrush (paid account) With a paid account, you’ll be able to see all the results there are in the searches we did above on the free account.Other than that, you’ll get access to it’s ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ (beta).... sounds interesting, doesn’t it? But what exactly is it? Simply put, it is a new feature that saves researchers using the platform a lot of time as it shows the best keyword results there are that go well with the seed keyword and lets them add them straight to a ‘Keyword Analyzer tool’ that evaluates and analyzes all the selected keywords, kind of like how Ahrefs does things in the first place, but SEMrush does it in a more personalized way. Let me show you…Just go to the ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ tab and search for the seed keyword you want to rank for. Which in our case is… yep, you guessed that right… GDPR. Once you search for your seed keyword, it will automatically create a list and show you all the keywords there are that relate to the seed keyword in any way. Bear with SEMrush for their blank metrics as this feature is still in beta.The next step that comes in our keyword research using this new feature is to select the best keywords and adding them to ‘Keyword Analyzer’. To do that, just click the green plus sign beside a keyword to add it to the Keyword Analyzer list for further research. Once you’ve selected the keywords you like, click on the green ‘Go To Keyword Analyzer’ button on the top right. And you’ll be redirected to the Keyword Analyzer tool which will place all the selected keywords together with all its metrics. You can further decide the final keywords to choose from here. In this case, I chose ‘GDPR Compliance’ and ‘GDPR Summary’ as the chosen keywords as they have a lower keyword difficulty than others so it will be easier to rank for these keywords. And with this, we are done with finding the perfect keywords in SEMrush as well. After using both the platforms, we have finally stumbled upon 5 keywords full of opportunities. If I was to select a title for my blog on GDPR, using all the keywords, it would look something like this - ‘GDPR for dummies: Your GDPR compliance checklist is here!’ and the blog would summarize the whole GDPR thing to make use of the ‘GDPR Summary’ keyword as well.Like I said before, with all these advanced tools at our disposal, keyword research is not what most of the business owners and marketers think of it.Doing keyword research with the help of Ahrefs or SEMrush will hardly take you 20 minutes and you’ll be on your way to creating highly keyword focused content that will bring in traffic for a lifetime.. a lot of it!Hopefully, with the help of this guide, you’ll find using these tools a lot, lot easier! ...
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