SEO can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Understanding the fundamentals can help you take your website growth to its next level.
Here are 5 principles to consider when doing SEO:
1. Avoid technical complications
Use a website builder, like SquareSpace and Shopify. That way, you can get a good-looking website launched quickly, then focus on growing your business.
Improving your website experience is important, but you want to avoid breaking it, taking too long to launch, and stressing over how to manage it.
<<Work-in-progress>>
2. Creating content leads to growth
You need to put something out in the world in order to get traction. When it comes to SEO, that is content.
Use your competitors to learn what commercial content they are making, and target the same by creating content that puts you on par with them or better.
Bolster your commercial content by considering your buyer’s journey, and creating supporting content that links to it.
SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can help. They also have a lot of great beginner guides, like this and this.
3. Lean on winning clusters and fish for new opportunities
Reviewing your analytics and competitive research is key. Set up Google Analytics. Start using SEO tools for research.
You’ll also want a keyword tracker with daily tracking to monitor the performance of your key pages, too.
If a group of pages is winning, find other keywords in the same group.
If you don’t know, you might need more pages in that group first.
If you have enough, dedicated resources to exploring other groups.
4. Link your content together
We call this interlinking, and it’s the easiest way to win.
From a user experience, it gives people useful ways to continue their research.
From an SEO perspective, it builds authority to the appropriate pages.
The home page of most websites is usually the strongest in authority. Leverage this by interlink to your most important commercial content.
The navigation menu is another place to put key commercial pages.
Don’t forget to interlink from every other page, too.
5. Promote your content
Getting backlinks from other websites is a necessity to SEO. It’s time consuming, but is a must so Google knows which website is popular.
Look up email outreach tools and pick one that not only schedule email follow ups, but also makes researching who to reach out to easier.
When it comes to lead gen, many dentists and dental practices find their new clients coming from referrals, or word-of-mouth. However, there comes a time when you realize that more needs to be done. You’ve heard of SEO, PPC, and other forms of marketing. Which one is best for you?
There are two major levels of marketing:
Outbound marketing, where you push your marketing message out to a large audience
Inbound marketing, where you attract your best prospects
Most people are familiar with outbound marketing. If you have ever ran campaigns in a local magazine or newsletter, sent direct mail or leaflets to your surrounding community, or advertised on radio, you have done outbound marketing.
On the other hand, inbound marketing would include email capture, generating leads search engine optimization, and social media campaigns (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Paid ads on Google also falls under this category as you can laser target keyword channels that have relevant traffic for your need.
Benefits of SEO for Dentists
There are a lot of benefits to SEO, which we will dive into in just a moment. However, the biggest drawback to SEO has to do with the time it takes to demonstrate results. The reason is that search engines need to prevent abuse, so slowing down the shifting around of search results is one of the many ways they prevent manipulation tactics from working before their algorithms notice. We wrote a blog post on how long SEO can take that might be of interest for further reading.
Aside from this drawback, search engine can yield a significant number of benefits. A large of it has to do with the comprehensive nature of SEO around growing your digital presence and the strength of your site.
1. Potential patients search for new dentists on Google
When someone needs a dentist and doesn’t have anyone to recommend one, their first step is to search online. Either by Google Organic Search or via Google Maps. The days of looking up a YellowPage catalogue for dentistry services is over. The immediacy of finding what they need at the tap of a few keystrokes on their smartphone gets them a list of top recommendations.
2. Skepticism for ads, trust in organic results
Although Google Ads will appear first, paid advertisements tend to bring a degree of cynicism to consumers. Some people enjoy buying, but no one likes to be sold. With SEO, your business and brand can come off as legitimate, proven by Google to be both relevant and clearly not trying to sell something. A degree of trust (and authority!) comes with appearing in the organic search results. You can learn more about SEO vs. PPC marketing (pay-per-click) at our blog post here.
3. Growing your digital presence in more ways than one
Part of SEO involves growing your digital presence by way of improving your site performance. Link building gets your site out to the world for others to find, while content production builds invaluable assets that will last for as long as they are up. The combination of the two can help acquire a variety of keyword channels along the different steps of the sales funnel that potential clients can look up.
4. Build a digital reputation across the web
Reputation is invaluable. Being visible online allows others learn more about your business while the additional content built for SEO demonstrates your authority in the space. For example, orthodontists do well to tackle topics such as braces, teeth alignment, and jaw health. As a result, they generate relevant traffic for people searching for more information, maybe compare different types of braces, prior to finding the best care in their area.
5. Think long-term and potentially support multiple locations
The long-term return on investment on SEO can be significant not so much at the level you need today, but when you begin expanding your practice to multiple locations. The “domain authority” that is built through SEO allows you to leverage the strength of your site to rank for visibility in other locations. This can generate immediate organic search leads for your new office locations.
Do SEO services work? Absolutely. One of the reasons to choose an agency is for many reasons. First, it’s cheaper than hiring a full-time marketing specialist. Second, they have the resources to take care of your marketing needs (writers, link builders, teams of SEO specialists, tools, platforms, etc.). Third, they have a great view of the SEO landscape with multiple clients. Fourth, they know how to focus their resources and work effectively to bring you results sooner than later. Lastly, they can act as your business partner to bounce marketing campaign ideas with you.
As for getting started with SEO, we understand not everyone has the means to do so. Our post on whether you need an SEO agency can guide you in your decision process. It also contains beginner resources so you can do SEO for your dental site on your own, if needed.
If you prefer to have someone who understands SEO and the nuances of it take over, we can help you get started with a free audit report. After which, we can walk you through the “what” and “how” to SEO, and maybe introduce you to a first month of service.
What better way to get free traffic than earning it through Google and search engine optimization (SEO). You can achieve great results through SEO with a highly-defined focus on a particular niche, and employing the basic principles of E-A-T. Here is how you can take advantage of Google’s favor for trusted and authoritative experts.
What is Google’s E-A-T?
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. These three are factors defined by Google on how much trust it would place in a brand or website. In order to give searchers the best experience possible, Google has defined for webmasters what they look for in a web page.
How is E-A-T measured?
Each of the factors have their unique criteria for evaluation.
Expertise
Expertise touches on the high level of knowledge or skill in a particular field. It is evaluated at the content-level, meaning Google rewards those who create content as a subject matter expert.
Though you don’t necessarily require formal qualifications to become the content creator, “everyday expertise” (Google’s words) can also be acceptable for earning traffic from the search engine.
Authoritativeness
Authority pertains to reputation, specifically how well or often you are mentioned by other experts and influencers in your space. The more others speak of you, the better Google views your authoritativeness.
Ratings, reviews, references, recommendations, and mentions from credible sources (other websites and individuals) can boaster your authoritativeness.
Trustworthiness
Trust deals with the legitimacy and accuracy of a website and its content. Google can determine a consensus on information across the website, supported by experts and known trusted websites.
Similar to authoritativeness, building a profile on websites such as BBB, TrustPilot, Homestar, RateMDS, or whatever major and popular business listing websites can be a starting point to build trust. Receiving backlinks and mentions from credible sources, with an overall sentiment of positive discussions can improve trustworthiness.
How to Boost Your SEO With Strong E-A-T
Knowing about E-A-T is not enough. Here are the 3 key ways to improve it, and boost your SEO.
1) Work to earn backlinks and mentions from other websites, especially from trusted sources.
Get published from news publication websites. Local, niche-specific, or from major outlets. This can help you begin building E-A-T for your website.
There are several strategies you can employ here. The best is to reach out to website authors, news publication reporters, and influencers in your space to begin a discussion.
Write valuable content that shed insights to what it is you do, what you specialize in, what problems you solve, or interesting facts about the work you do. That way, others can do their due diligence and can trust they can work with someone who knows their work.
2) Get good reviews, and get good at asking for reviews.
What people say or mention about your business matters. It ties to your reputation. Although the use of third-party rating sites wouldn’t directly account towards the SEO of your website, numerous negative reviews can be seen as negative reputation clues.
The reason we say it would be as clues because fake complaints exist, and Google understands this can manipulate rankings. Still, reputation management is important and you should work towards ensuring that your business can always be viewed positively online. The best way to do so is by asking for a review on Google and other websites.
Keep in mind Google does clearly state that business owners shouldn’t offer incentives to customers in exchange for reviews. However, it doesn’t mean you can’t remind customers to do so and respond to reviews so that customers may leave more reviews in the future.
3) Recognize that you as an author matters
Google isn’t just looking at your business brand or website mentions. They look towards individuals and how they are over the web. People also trust individuals as well, so it’s up to us to build reputations for ourselves and boost our authorship.
You can accomplish this by writing more, shooting more videos, responding to reviews, participating in relevant discussions elsewhere (forum threads, comments section of web pages, and social media). Doing what you can to showcase not only yourself, but also participating in your niche.
And when writing for yourself, focusing on content for your ideal readers can only benefit you from both Google’s eyes and your potential customers. Write with a purpose, showcase your expertise on the subject matter, and always work to provide valuable insights others can benefit from.
Concluding Thoughts
E-A-T guidelines make it clear what is important for not only Google, but for businesses. Customers love those who demonstrate their expertise, authoritativeness, and have trust to both their name and their business. Understanding how Google views E-A-T empowers us to focus on the right things that make a difference to your SEO.
The next steps now is to implement the right marketing strategies that employ E-A-T. You can do it yourself or start a discussion with an search marketing agency like us on what you can do to earn more traffic from Google today.
Patients are getting smart when they pick a new doctor. They look up their doctors to see what others have to say about them, before deciding. This means health clinics need to have a positive presence online. Carefully managing reputation and asking for reviews is essential. They can mean the difference in winning a new patient online, or having them head down the street to your competitors.
In this guide, we show you how you can grow your practice with the best processes for getting patients to leave great online reviews.
5 Considerations For Getting Patients To Leave Reviews
It is never as simple as asking for a review. Proper timing, a good read of your patient, and a bit of flattery can go a long way. Here are 5 points you should consider before asking for a patient to leave an online review for you.
1. Patient satisfaction first
Many healthcare clinics have grown their practices through referrals. This is achieved by offering quality customer care and addressing your patients’ concerns in an excellent fashion. Listening to your patients, understanding them, and treating them the way they want to be treated is essential. Proper social etiquette and great bedside manners are a must to improve above all else.
2. Frame the ‘ask’ well
Timing and reciprocity can frame your ‘ask’ in the best light possible. Your receptionist, as they process your patients’ insurance or payment, can inquire how satisfactory their treatment has been. This allow them to gauge and decide whether to ask for a review or not. They can also offer the right swag for their need. When you know a patient is happy with their appointment and has received a gift afterwards, they are more likely to be receptive to the ‘ask’ and reciprocate the help.
3. Give them a good reason to help you
Sometimes, patients want to do something to help your clinic. The best way to ensure that they are properly motivated is not to only offer swag, but a good reason to do so. We instruct our healthcare practices to keep it simple with their explanation: If the patient can leave an online review, it would help us grow by making it easier for others to find and choose your clinic.
4. Make it convenient and easy
Not everyone is technically savvy, nor do they have the greatest consideration to do you a favor. It is important to remove as much friction as possible in having a patient leave a review, and it begins with providing accessible and easy to follow guidelines for your patient to use. A step-by-step printout, a webpage that outlines and offers screenshots of what to look for, and direct access to review platforms can ensure the likelihood that a person can leave a review for you.
You can also share some ideas as to what they can write about. For example, you can share the ideas like:
What made you come to visit Dr. ABC in the first place
What was it like scheduling an appointment
The experience when arriving at the clinic
The patient care that the staff offered
How do you feel about the outcome of their treatment or procedure
5. Follow up is essential
Life catches up with a person really quickly, so priorities can change the moment a patient walks out the door. Even when you have checked all the boxes with the above considerations, your staff needs a process remind people to leave a review. There are several ways you can do so:
Have your receptionists ask via email or phone call (such as when confirming a new appointment with a patient that has agreed)
Send a link in automated emails and text messages to thank them for choosing you
Occasionally ask on social media and in newsletters that get sent out
Postcards to remind of upcoming appointments, with a webpage address or QR code they can access on their computer or smartphone
Have a hyperlink in your email signature as part of all correspondence with patients
Every opportunity you can connect with a patient is an opportunity you can have to ask them for a review.
10 Ways to Ask for Patient Reviews
1. Ask patients when they are in the office, after receiving swags
People tend to respond positively after receiving gifts. Equip your receptionist with the best swags possible, and give them away after every patient appointment. They can then ask how their appointment went to learn more. If the patient responds well, your receptionist can ask if they are willing to leave a review online so that other people can find your clinic. For example, dentists often give away bags of goodies like floss, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. You can then follow up with the following scenario:
Front desk: “How was your teeth cleaning?”
Patient: “Good! Everything feels nice and clean now.”
Front desk: “That’s wonderful to hear, dear. We’d love for you to share your positive experience about your appointment on Review Platform ABC, so others in need of our healthcare services can find us, too.”
2. Send a personalized email or set up email marketing sequences
After a well-received appointment, an automated follow-up email sequence can be sent as a reminder for your patients to leave a review. An email sequence is a series of emails that follow up with your patients. The key point is to automate this process. You want to make this process as easy and simple as possible. For extra control, if your customer management system (CMS) allows for it, you can also enable an email sequence after approving it.
“We’re glad you came in! Could you leave us a quick review about your positive experience at our healthcare clinic, so others in need of oral care can find us?”
In addition, you can set up email marketing campaigns that run automatically for any new patient that register. You can get clever with how you set up sequences, depending on what type of emails your contact engages on. The gist, however, is that every so often, you can ask how they find your emails. If they respond positively, then a follow-up email can be sent asking for a review!
3. Print out the links for customers to take home
For those who may not use emails, you can offer a print-out that contains instructions on how someone can leave an email.
When you create an account on review sites, you may have set your business profile page URLs. Here are how those sharable links may look like:
Other platforms will have different ones. However, this can be intimidating and require your patients to have an account or access to these platforms. If they do not, Google My Business listing would be the most essential.
4. Ask for reviews on social media
For those who engage with your business on social media, you can ask if they can share their experience on Facebook or Instagram! For example, on Facebook, you can send invitations to friends or colleagues for them to follow your page. You can also send invitations to follow for anyone who engages with a post on your Facebook page.
You can ask patients who come into the office if it is okay to share their story on social media, whether using their (first) name and photo of their smile while you’re at it, too!
5. Send a postcard or direct mail to them
To the patients who do not respond to emails, print-out instructions, or social media, a postcard can do the trick. The caveat with this tactic is to consider whether they have written a review already. A simple message such as:
“We appreciate you, and look forward to you sharing your positive experience of your time at ABC.”
6. Make use of your website!
Instead of having a print-out of instructions for your patients, you can also send a link to a webpage that instructions patients on how to leave a review. That way, you can also track visits to your website and send them a convenient link to access.
7. Ask for it on appointment cards
Business cards with space to write a patient’s next appointment can also be used to ask for reviews. Though this requires a bit of graphic design work, you can include your webpage URL that has all your sharable links or to the one link that matters (such as your Google My Business listing).
Any printed set of instructions can be an opportunity to ask. You can include your review profiles and sharable links at the bottom of the page. As you walk your patients through the take-home instructions, you can conveniently make your ask right there and then as well.
9. Include in SMS messages
After an appointment is completed, an SMS can be sent in the evening to ask if they could leave a review to help other patients understand and find your clinic’s services. A proper healthcare practice management software can have an add-on feature for SMS follow-ups. This not only helps improve patient engagement but also allows you to give them a nudge for upcoming appoints and (of course) reviews.
10. Ask when you send a thank you email
Like SMS messages, an email can be sent to patients to build rapport and offer an opportunity for them to leave a review. The same also applies when you send a follow-up email with the next appointment date and time on it for your patient to have.
When you had your patients take-home instructions, this is an opportunity to ask for their email so you can send a digital copy for their safe keeping!
11. Include it on your invoice & receipt
When a patient pays their bill, you can print an invoice for services rendered and include it in the footer of your receipts. Invoices would be a simple tweak of the document template. However, the card terminals might require some coding. Contact your payment processor to ask how a custom message can be added.
12. Include it in all your emails (signature)
Why not make use of the email signatures at the end of all emails sent to patients? Besides having your clinic’s contact information and social media links, you can include instructions on how to leave a review.
Example of an email signature with instructions on how to leave a review.
What Your Patients Can Include in Reviews
Not all patients are sure about what to write about. You can suggest the following ideas for them:
On the friendliness and professionalism of your staff
The overall experience at the clinic
Cleanliness or appearance of your clinic
Quality of patient care or services (ask them to mention the specific service!)
Quality of communication
What wait times were experienced
How effective treatment has been (before, after photos!)
About the technology and equipment used!
Concluding Thoughts
Reviews won’t write themselves! Reviews not only establishes confidence and trust for future patients to see, they are signals to search engines like Google and Bing on how well your business best serves searchers in need of your services. Taking every opportunity to remind or ask your patients for reviews can help grow your business in more ways than one.
What’s the next step? Start implementing these ideas. Emails are the easiest way to start. Then work backwards from other communication channels such as SMS or printed instructions. You can also ask your staff on how to ask for reviews. Maybe send them this post for further reading. 🙂
Need help implementing the best strategy marketing for clinics? Our clients have always referred to us as partners, discussing new ideas and on how to implement them. Contact us today for a free consultation.
It could be an SEO agency. It could also be an SEO expert/freelancer. My biggest takeaway from my experience in doing SEO both for client sites and my own is that SEO is easy. As long as you don’t make critical errors.
There are numerous guides out there on the web that you can research. Tons of YouTube SEO resources available at our fingers. And as long as you have the time, life can be kept as simple as using a WordPress site, producing content with target keywords in mind, and building backlinks.
One of the major reasons clients from my previous jobs and the past choose an SEO agency is because they do not have the time or capacity to conduct their SEO campaigns. When you are growing quick, working on multiple fronts (building sales, developing products/services, managing operations), it’s a lot easier to hand the reigns of generating business for you to an agency with the skills and experience to do so.
As a sole business owner with limited resources, I would never recommend going the SEO agency route. Generally speaking, I’ve always known it to be best to focus on sales yourself and overdelivering yourself as you grow. It’s only when you reached a point in your day-to-day where you begin feeling overwhelmed do you consider an SEO agency.
Quick sidenote: For those who want to do things on their own, here are 3 resources I recommend studying to do your own SEO.
In an ideal world, you want an SEO agency or expert by your side as early as possible. Like before you build a site (i.e., launching a new dental practice) or begin a site migration of some kind (i.e., consolidating multiple dealerships under one corporate site).
The reason is when you build with an improper foundation, you might end up walking down a path with no results for months on end. Worst yet is ending up tens of thousands of dollars in the red for migrating a site only to find out the way it was done wrong, tanking your organic search visibility into no man’s land.
What makes an SEO agency suitable to step in to help you is that they have the technical understanding and resources to effectively improve your online presence. They have the expertise and know-hows on:
Site structure and architecture (physical vs. virtual silos)
How to do proper redirect and repair faulty ones
Identify, then resolve broken pages and links
Understanding of hosting solutions and CMS
Conducting comprehensive keyword research
Content development and content optimization for SEO
Build backlinks efficiently and effectively
Educate you in SEO; and
(For the really good ones) Expertise and insights to specific markets and geographic locations
If you have the resources and look forward to scaling or growing your business, that is the best time to begin searching for an SEO agency or expert. Otherwise, I highly recommend to start your SEO journey by studying the resources I’ve listed above!
Patients are getting smart when they pick a new doctor. They look up their doctors to see what others have to say about them, before deciding. This means health clinics need to have a positive presence online. Carefully managing reputation and asking for reviews is essential. They can mean the difference in winning a new patient online, or having them head down the street to your competitors.
In this guide, we show you how you can grow your practice with the best processes for getting patients to leave great online reviews.
5 Considerations For Getting Patients To Leave Reviews
It is never as simple as asking for a review. Proper timing, a good read of your patient, and a bit of flattery can go a long way. Here are 5 points you should consider before asking for a patient to leave an online review for you.
1. Patient satisfaction first
Many healthcare clinics have grown their practices through referrals. This is achieved by offering quality customer care and addressing your patients’ concerns in an excellent fashion. Listening to your patients, understanding them, and treating them the way they want to be treated is essential. Proper social etiquette and great bedside manners are a must to improve above all else.
2. Frame the ‘ask’ well
Timing and reciprocity can frame your ‘ask’ in the best light possible. Your receptionist, as they process your patients’ insurance or payment, can inquire how satisfactory their treatment has been. This allow them to gauge and decide whether to ask for a review or not. They can also offer the right swag for their need. When you know a patient is happy with their appointment and has received a gift afterwards, they are more likely to be receptive to the ‘ask’ and reciprocate the help.
3. Give them a good reason to help you
Sometimes, patients want to do something to help your clinic. The best way to ensure that they are properly motivated is not to only offer swag, but a good reason to do so. We instruct our healthcare practices to keep it simple with their explanation: If the patient can leave an online review, it would help us grow by making it easier for others to find and choose your clinic.
4. Make it convenient and easy
Not everyone is technically savvy, nor do they have the greatest consideration to do you a favor. It is important to remove as much friction as possible in having a patient leave a review, and it begins with providing accessible and easy to follow guidelines for your patient to use. A step-by-step printout, a webpage that outlines and offers screenshots of what to look for, and direct access to review platforms can ensure the likelihood that a person can leave a review for you.
You can also share some ideas as to what they can write about. For example, you can share the ideas like:
What made you come to visit Dr. ABC in the first place
What was it like scheduling an appointment
The experience when arriving at the clinic
The patient care that the staff offered
How do you feel about the outcome of their treatment or procedure
5. Follow up is essential
Life catches up with a person really quickly, so priorities can change the moment a patient walks out the door. Even when you have checked all the boxes with the above considerations, your staff needs a process remind people to leave a review. There are several ways you can do so:
Have your receptionists ask via email or phone call (such as when confirming a new appointment with a patient that has agreed)
Send a link in automated emails and text messages to thank them for choosing you
Occasionally ask on social media and in newsletters that get sent out
Postcards to remind of upcoming appointments, with a webpage address or QR code they can access on their computer or smartphone
Have a hyperlink in your email signature as part of all correspondence with patients
Every opportunity you can connect with a patient is an opportunity you can have to ask them for a review.
10 Ways to Ask for Patient Reviews
1. Ask patients when they are in the office, after receiving swags
People tend to respond positively after receiving gifts. Equip your receptionist with the best swags possible, and give them away after every patient appointment. They can then ask how their appointment went to learn more. If the patient responds well, your receptionist can ask if they are willing to leave a review online so that other people can find your clinic. For example, dentists often give away bags of goodies like floss, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. You can then follow up with the following scenario:
Front desk: “How was your teeth cleaning?”
Patient: “Good! Everything feels nice and clean now.”
Front desk: “That’s wonderful to hear, dear. We’d love for you to share your positive experience about your appointment on Review Platform ABC, so others in need of our healthcare services can find us, too.”
2. Send a personalized email or set up email marketing sequences
After a well-received appointment, an automated follow-up email sequence can be sent as a reminder for your patients to leave a review. An email sequence is a series of emails that follow up with your patients. The key point is to automate this process. You want to make this process as easy and simple as possible. For extra control, if your customer management system (CMS) allows for it, you can also enable an email sequence after approving it.
“We’re glad you came in! Could you leave us a quick review about your positive experience at our healthcare clinic, so others in need of oral care can find us?”
In addition, you can set up email marketing campaigns that run automatically for any new patient that register. You can get clever with how you set up sequences, depending on what type of emails your contact engages on. The gist, however, is that every so often, you can ask how they find your emails. If they respond positively, then a follow-up email can be sent asking for a review!
3. Print out the links for customers to take home
For those who may not use emails, you can offer a print-out that contains instructions on how someone can leave an email.
When you create an account on review sites, you may have set your business profile page URLs. Here are how those sharable links may look like:
Other platforms will have different ones. However, this can be intimidating and require your patients to have an account or access to these platforms. If they do not, Google My Business listing would be the most essential.
4. Ask for reviews on social media
For those who engage with your business on social media, you can ask if they can share their experience on Facebook or Instagram! For example, on Facebook, you can send invitations to friends or colleagues for them to follow your page. You can also send invitations to follow for anyone who engages with a post on your Facebook page.
You can ask patients who come into the office if it is okay to share their story on social media, whether using their (first) name and photo of their smile while you’re at it, too!
5. Send a postcard or direct mail to them
To the patients who do not respond to emails, print-out instructions, or social media, a postcard can do the trick. The caveat with this tactic is to consider whether they have written a review already. A simple message such as:
“We appreciate you, and look forward to you sharing your positive experience of your time at ABC.”
6. Make use of your website!
Instead of having a print-out of instructions for your patients, you can also send a link to a webpage that instructions patients on how to leave a review. That way, you can also track visits to your website and send them a convenient link to access.
7. Ask for it on appointment cards
Business cards with space to write a patient’s next appointment can also be used to ask for reviews. Though this requires a bit of graphic design work, you can include your webpage URL that has all your sharable links or to the one link that matters (such as your Google My Business listing).
Any printed set of instructions can be an opportunity to ask. You can include your review profiles and sharable links at the bottom of the page. As you walk your patients through the take-home instructions, you can conveniently make your ask right there and then as well.
9. Include in SMS messages
After an appointment is completed, an SMS can be sent in the evening to ask if they could leave a review to help other patients understand and find your clinic’s services. A proper healthcare practice management software can have an add-on feature for SMS follow-ups. This not only helps improve patient engagement but also allows you to give them a nudge for upcoming appoints and (of course) reviews.
10. Ask when you send a thank you email
Like SMS messages, an email can be sent to patients to build rapport and offer an opportunity for them to leave a review. The same also applies when you send a follow-up email with the next appointment date and time on it for your patient to have.
When you had your patients take-home instructions, this is an opportunity to ask for their email so you can send a digital copy for their safe keeping!
11. Include it on your invoice & receipt
When a patient pays their bill, you can print an invoice for services rendered and include it in the footer of your receipts. Invoices would be a simple tweak of the document template. However, the card terminals might require some coding. Contact your payment processor to ask how a custom message can be added.
12. Include it in all your emails (signature)
Why not make use of the email signatures at the end of all emails sent to patients? Besides having your clinic’s contact information and social media links, you can include instructions on how to leave a review.
Example of an email signature with instructions on how to leave a review.
What Your Patients Can Include in Reviews
Not all patients are sure about what to write about. You can suggest the following ideas for them:
On the friendliness and professionalism of your staff
The overall experience at the clinic
Cleanliness or appearance of your clinic
Quality of patient care or services (ask them to mention the specific service!)
Quality of communication
What wait times were experienced
How effective treatment has been (before, after photos!)
About the technology and equipment used!
Concluding Thoughts
Reviews won’t write themselves! Reviews not only establishes confidence and trust for future patients to see, they are signals to search engines like Google and Bing on how well your business best serves searchers in need of your services. Taking every opportunity to remind or ask your patients for reviews can help grow your business in more ways than one.
What’s the next step? Start implementing these ideas. Emails are the easiest way to start. Then work backwards from other communication channels such as SMS or printed instructions. You can also ask your staff on how to ask for reviews. Maybe send them this post for further reading. 🙂
Need help implementing the best strategy marketing for clinics? Our clients have always referred to us as partners, discussing new ideas and on how to implement them. Contact us today for a free consultation.
What better way to get free traffic than earning it through Google and search engine optimization (SEO). You can achieve great results through SEO with a highly-defined focus on a particular niche, and employing the basic principles of E-A-T. Here is how you can take advantage of Google’s favor for trusted and authoritative experts.
What is Google’s E-A-T?
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. These three are factors defined by Google on how much trust it would place in a brand or website. In order to give searchers the best experience possible, Google has defined for webmasters what they look for in a web page.
How is E-A-T measured?
Each of the factors have their unique criteria for evaluation.
Expertise
Expertise touches on the high level of knowledge or skill in a particular field. It is evaluated at the content-level, meaning Google rewards those who create content as a subject matter expert.
Though you don’t necessarily require formal qualifications to become the content creator, “everyday expertise” (Google’s words) can also be acceptable for earning traffic from the search engine.
Authoritativeness
Authority pertains to reputation, specifically how well or often you are mentioned by other experts and influencers in your space. The more others speak of you, the better Google views your authoritativeness.
Ratings, reviews, references, recommendations, and mentions from credible sources (other websites and individuals) can boaster your authoritativeness.
Trustworthiness
Trust deals with the legitimacy and accuracy of a website and its content. Google can determine a consensus on information across the website, supported by experts and known trusted websites.
Similar to authoritativeness, building a profile on websites such as BBB, TrustPilot, Homestar, RateMDS, or whatever major and popular business listing websites can be a starting point to build trust. Receiving backlinks and mentions from credible sources, with an overall sentiment of positive discussions can improve trustworthiness.
How to Boost Your SEO With Strong E-A-T
Knowing about E-A-T is not enough. Here are the 3 key ways to improve it, and boost your SEO.
1) Work to earn backlinks and mentions from other websites, especially from trusted sources.
Get published from news publication websites. Local, niche-specific, or from major outlets. This can help you begin building E-A-T for your website.
There are several strategies you can employ here. The best is to reach out to website authors, news publication reporters, and influencers in your space to begin a discussion.
Write valuable content that shed insights to what it is you do, what you specialize in, what problems you solve, or interesting facts about the work you do. That way, others can do their due diligence and can trust they can work with someone who knows their work.
2) Get good reviews, and get good at asking for reviews.
What people say or mention about your business matters. It ties to your reputation. Although the use of third-party rating sites wouldn’t directly account towards the SEO of your website, numerous negative reviews can be seen as negative reputation clues.
The reason we say it would be as clues because fake complaints exist, and Google understands this can manipulate rankings. Still, reputation management is important and you should work towards ensuring that your business can always be viewed positively online. The best way to do so is by asking for a review on Google and other websites.
Keep in mind Google does clearly state that business owners shouldn’t offer incentives to customers in exchange for reviews. However, it doesn’t mean you can’t remind customers to do so and respond to reviews so that customers may leave more reviews in the future.
3) Recognize that you as an author matters
Google isn’t just looking at your business brand or website mentions. They look towards individuals and how they are over the web. People also trust individuals as well, so it’s up to us to build reputations for ourselves and boost our authorship.
You can accomplish this by writing more, shooting more videos, responding to reviews, participating in relevant discussions elsewhere (forum threads, comments section of web pages, and social media). Doing what you can to showcase not only yourself, but also participating in your niche.
And when writing for yourself, focusing on content for your ideal readers can only benefit you from both Google’s eyes and your potential customers. Write with a purpose, showcase your expertise on the subject matter, and always work to provide valuable insights others can benefit from.
Concluding Thoughts
E-A-T guidelines make it clear what is important for not only Google, but for businesses. Customers love those who demonstrate their expertise, authoritativeness, and have trust to both their name and their business. Understanding how Google views E-A-T empowers us to focus on the right things that make a difference to your SEO.
The next steps now is to implement the right marketing strategies that employ E-A-T. You can do it yourself or start a discussion with an search marketing agency like us on what you can do to earn more traffic from Google today.
Internal serves many essential functions. Doing so correctly not only gives your site the topical relevancy and authority it needs to rank, but can also provide a fluent flow of link equity from one page to the next. This is particularly useful for pages that are alone (orphaned).
So what makes internal linking such a great SEO technique? From a high-level perspective, there are three specific reasons.
First, it can improve user experience by providing them opportunities to check out other related and relevant content from other pages. Second, it’s a highway for Google bots to crawl through your entire site so every page can get indexed appropriately. Lastly, it enables you to strategically share link equity across your entire site content so everything else can rank, too.
So let’s learn how we can capitalize on these points by following several guiding principles.
There are several guiding principals to keep in mind when conducting an internal linking campaign:
Leave no orphan page behind. Everything deserves a link. This ensures link equity passes through all pages, and bots can crawl to index everything.
Use relevant links and link naturally for the reader. Don’t force things in the body of the content. Relevancy for your readership is still important. Be mindful of this.
Use a reasonable number of contextual links. It goes without saying that you should not fill a page with blue links for the sake of getting the links in. It’s not sexy and makes you look terrible. (Unless it’s a resource/”start here” page!)
Have lots of content. Internal linking only works when your site has content. Cover a variety of topics pertaining to the categories of interest, and you’re on your way to building proper silos.
Think about how you want to build your content silos. This means having a particular category of content internally linked to each other. This helps with relevancy and provides topical relevancy that can translate to expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T).
Link deep into your site. Smaller and more targeted content can bring in a lot of long-tail keyword channel traffic. Home pages and cornerstone guides tend to receive the most internal links. Don’t forget to share internal link love to content deeper into your site.
Reevaluate your internal links every few months. Or whenever you hit a new milestone. Find out which pages are the best performers. You will want to reevaluate how you distribute and structure internal links to and from these pages.
Install or run a text counting script. If you have a tool like Yoast Plugin for sites using WordPress, you can check how many inlinks and outlinks each page receives. This lets you ensure all pages have at least 1 inlink.
Prioritize top performing pages. Here are 3 questions to help identify these top pages:
What are the high-traffic pages? (To link out naturally from)
What pages have high unique referring domain count? (To pass out link equity from)
What pages have exceptional rankings? (To share authority from)
Apply a tactical approach. Here are 3 more tactical considerations to keep in mind:
Include a “related post” section in your content
Add navigational links from the home page or the top navigation to your cornerstone content
Don’t forget to link to taxonomy pages (categories and tags)!
There is no clearcut way on structuring your internal links. There are several principals you can follow to ensure all the pages work effectively and can be found. Either to be enjoyed by readers, detected by bots, and ranked by Google.
When it comes to lead gen, many dentists and dental practices find their new clients coming from referrals, or word-of-mouth. However, there comes a time when you realize that more needs to be done. You’ve heard of SEO, PPC, and other forms of marketing. Which one is best for you?
There are two major levels of marketing:
Outbound marketing, where you push your marketing message out to a large audience
Inbound marketing, where you attract your best prospects
Most people are familiar with outbound marketing. If you have ever ran campaigns in a local magazine or newsletter, sent direct mail or leaflets to your surrounding community, or advertised on radio, you have done outbound marketing.
On the other hand, inbound marketing would include email capture, generating leads search engine optimization, and social media campaigns (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Paid ads on Google also falls under this category as you can laser target keyword channels that have relevant traffic for your need.
Benefits of SEO for Dentists
There are a lot of benefits to SEO, which we will dive into in just a moment. However, the biggest drawback to SEO has to do with the time it takes to demonstrate results. The reason is that search engines need to prevent abuse, so slowing down the shifting around of search results is one of the many ways they prevent manipulation tactics from working before their algorithms notice. We wrote a blog post on how long SEO can take that might be of interest for further reading.
Aside from this drawback, search engine can yield a significant number of benefits. A large of it has to do with the comprehensive nature of SEO around growing your digital presence and the strength of your site.
1. Potential patients search for new dentists on Google
When someone needs a dentist and doesn’t have anyone to recommend one, their first step is to search online. Either by Google Organic Search or via Google Maps. The days of looking up a YellowPage catalogue for dentistry services is over. The immediacy of finding what they need at the tap of a few keystrokes on their smartphone gets them a list of top recommendations.
2. Skepticism for ads, trust in organic results
Although Google Ads will appear first, paid advertisements tend to bring a degree of cynicism to consumers. Some people enjoy buying, but no one likes to be sold. With SEO, your business and brand can come off as legitimate, proven by Google to be both relevant and clearly not trying to sell something. A degree of trust (and authority!) comes with appearing in the organic search results. You can learn more about SEO vs. PPC marketing (pay-per-click) at our blog post here.
3. Growing your digital presence in more ways than one
Part of SEO involves growing your digital presence by way of improving your site performance. Link building gets your site out to the world for others to find, while content production builds invaluable assets that will last for as long as they are up. The combination of the two can help acquire a variety of keyword channels along the different steps of the sales funnel that potential clients can look up.
4. Build a digital reputation across the web
Reputation is invaluable. Being visible online allows others learn more about your business while the additional content built for SEO demonstrates your authority in the space. For example, orthodontists do well to tackle topics such as braces, teeth alignment, and jaw health. As a result, they generate relevant traffic for people searching for more information, maybe compare different types of braces, prior to finding the best care in their area.
5. Think long-term and potentially support multiple locations
The long-term return on investment on SEO can be significant not so much at the level you need today, but when you begin expanding your practice to multiple locations. The “domain authority” that is built through SEO allows you to leverage the strength of your site to rank for visibility in other locations. This can generate immediate organic search leads for your new office locations.
Do SEO services work? Absolutely. One of the reasons to choose an agency is for many reasons. First, it’s cheaper than hiring a full-time marketing specialist. Second, they have the resources to take care of your marketing needs (writers, link builders, teams of SEO specialists, tools, platforms, etc.). Third, they have a great view of the SEO landscape with multiple clients. Fourth, they know how to focus their resources and work effectively to bring you results sooner than later. Lastly, they can act as your business partner to bounce marketing campaign ideas with you.
As for getting started with SEO, we understand not everyone has the means to do so. Our post on whether you need an SEO agency can guide you in your decision process. It also contains beginner resources so you can do SEO for your dental site on your own, if needed.
If you prefer to have someone who understands SEO and the nuances of it take over, we can help you get started with a free audit report. After which, we can walk you through the “what” and “how” to SEO, and maybe introduce you to a first month of service.
There are many traffic channels for digital marketing to capitalize. The most frequently asked question is whether SEO or PPC is better for me. Let’s get to know the two, and see which is best for you.
Uplist to follow when deciding on the best investment right for you:
What do you want from your marketing campaign? What are your marketing goals?
Are you in a rush to get the phone to ring or want to build your business for the long-haul? (time frame)
First off, let’s take a look at what makes the two traffic channels we can campaign on different from each other.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Short for search engine optimization, the goal of SEO is to earn organic search traffic and increase visibility on search engines (showing up for more search queries). Benefits of SEO include:
Success building on itself over time
A more permanent solution (with less upkeep than PPC)
Fantastic for brand building and increasing brand awareness
Highest return on investment (ROI)
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing
Short for pay per click marketing, the goal of PPC is to advertise by buy traffic and generate attention to your business immediately. Benefits of PPC include:
Instantaneous results with phones ringing today
Ad spend budget control
Actionable data and experimentation with marketing angles
Laser-targeted visibility with the audience of your choice
Both have their pros and cons. Time-wise, SEO may take anywhere between 3 to 9 months to see results whereas PPC is within 2 to 4 weeks. With upfront costs, SEO’s labor-intensive work costs significantly higher than PPC campaign setup. However, SEO is the long-term growth with minimal upkeep and potential for expotential results whereas PPC requires consistent ad spend to generate conversions.
How to Decide?
Now that we have a better understanding of the two forms of marketing, deciding on your marketing goal is the next important step. It can help you lean on one channel over another. The ultimate goal is to increase revenue, of course. How we do so is the critical question. Here are 3 example business goals:
Grow brand awareness
Generate more leads
Increasing sales
For newer businesses or businesses that are in need of revenue, PPC can be the way to go for acquiring new leads and increasing sales. You can get your phone ringing immediately with potential leads and sales by advertising on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. For businesses that are looking to expand and capture new market shares, SEO tends to be the way to go. The expotential growth with SEO can be capitalized on with businesses looking to open new stores, expand to new regions, and even new countries and continent.
The funny thing is, SEO and PPC can do both. Cutthroat competitors can run PPC ads on their competitor search queries or audience group to generate brand awareness. They can also target traffic channels that SEO otherwise may take time to build towards. A good example would be advertising dental care, servicing both adults and children. SEO is also used to generate more leads and increase sales, with the advent of local SEO to capitalize on local search results of regions, cities, and high-traffic/converting neighborhoods. Since SEO and PPC can do everything, the next consideration is time.
If your sales team is in need of leads and prospects, PPC can help get the phones ringing immediately. Setting up a campaign targeting a radius area of interest can help you serve your ads with laser precision to people who would come to you. It can also allow you to begin experimenting with different keyword channels and marketing angles to see which can convert the best. This is all done within weeks. On the other hand, SEO can take months as content production is done to create digital assets that work for you day and night, and backlinks building campaigns to generate popularity votes so that search engines know you are the most relevant and top choice for searchers. As months go by, your website authority grows and your business visibility increases in the search results of multiple search engines.
Taking Advantage of Both Channels
Both digital marketing channels are plausible choices. At The Search Architects, we pride ourselves on SEO because it allows businesses to create assets that will work for them 24/7 in a scalable way. One of the positive impacts of SEO is that it can increase the value and networth of your business, if you ever choose to sell it. If you’re looking to scale, SEO builds authority with search engines in a way that allow you to enter new markets and new regions without paying a significantly higher cost per customer acquisition.
In an ideal world, both SEO and PPC can work hand in hand as they both provide new avenues for acquiring leads and generating sales. When it comes to the long-term growth of your business, SEO has always been and will be the way to go!
