Category: Insights

There are many ways you can promote your dental practice. With the help of several tools and some time, you can create attractive offers that catches potentially new patient clients. The remaining challenge, then, is to get yourself in front of this audience!

Tools to help

• Canva is an amazing free tool for creating graphics on the go. Create a template or two that you can reuse over and over again, and you’re all set. Just like how we use the same featured image for all our blog posts at Updriven!
• Meet Edgar is an excellent tool for scheduling social media posts. The great thing about this tool is that once you add an item into the queue, it will repeatedly post it again within time frames that you set. Great to share dental hygiene blog posts on social media and scheduling holiday promos!
• ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform that also has SMS (texting) features. You can use this tool to automatically send reminders to your clientele for scheduling a cleaning examine. If you have promotional emails you would like to send out on a monthly basis (because we don’t want to spam people each week about their oral health!), this tool will help make it easier with template newsletters!
• Bitable is a video creation platform that simplifies video production to several clicks. Great for building videos for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and more. What makes this tool awesome has to do with the numerous templates available for you to choose from. All you need to do is take photos and videos with your smartphone, then upload it to their platform for use!
• Vistaprint offers many different printing products and services. Whether you need business cards, pamphlets, post cards, or any marketing materials, their competitive pricing and customer service can take care of you. Be sure to ask them to send you a free brochure with samples!

Marketing angle ideas

1. Using dental benefits before end of year.

Catch people’s attention about their dental benefits, especially during the holidays.

2. Free teeth whitening for a lifetime

Why not offer free teeth whitening for a LIFE TIME?

4. Direct mail ad to nearby homes

Maybe a direct mail ad is what you need to send to nearby neighborhoods!

5. Offering and promoting the latest dental solutions

Focusing on specific products that are trending can help

6. Targeting pain points in your marketing messages

Addressing pain points can be important to invoke emotions

7. Speak to the children’s parents with pediatric dental services

Adults aren’t the only ones who need professional oral care!

8. Implant-supported dentures for seniors

Seniors could use the help as well, and the implants that can last a lifetime.

9. Creative dental marketing angles

Get a little creative with your marketing message and imagery!

10. Include scarcity to entice action

Don’t forget to include scarcity to encourage potentially new patients to act fast!

11. E-book on how to choose a dentist

Try an e-book that potential new patients might want to learn more about!

12. Social proof in marketing messages

Don’t forget to use social proofs (testimonies!) in your marketing. Having other patients speak on your behalf can be compelling.

13. Live chat for those who can’t wait

And when someone reaches out, be sure to message back in a timely manner!

16. Make use of your site

You can promote offers on your home page, create a promotional page on your site, and also offer promotional deals on individual service pages that can distinguish you from your competitors. Don’t forget to include testimonials, videos, and great photos!

17. Run a Facebook/Google paid ads campaign

Paid ads (also known as pay-per-click, or PPC) can be a great way to test new traffic channels on the two largest digital ads platforms. Do some interest and keyword research, target locally, and always split-test different images and marketing messages. Don’t forget to test YouTube videos, Google Maps ads, Instagram, and all the different Facebook Ad formats!

18. Brand awareness campaigns and multiple services in ads

You can also test carousel ads and build aware that your practice is offering multiple services.

19. Invest in your website SEO equity

Improve your organic search visibility so that you get in front of people when they are looking for a dental practice such as your own. Conduct proper keyword research, analyze what keyword channels competitors are targeting, and produce content and build links accordingly. Be sure to resolve any SEO technical issues and optimize your website on-page signals! Learn more about why SEO is better for dentists.

20. Don’t forget your existing clientele

Aside from new patients, you can increase the lifetime value of your existing clients. Send follow-up emails, post cards, and call them from time to time. Train your front line staff in exceptional customer care. Be sure to ask to be referred, and offer an incentive for it, too. Maybe a Google My Business, Facebook, or video testimonial review while you’re at it!

21. Connect with other organizations

Contact the event host, moderators, speakers, and other organizations. You can sponsor events, non-profit charities, and figure out a way to partner up with other businesses (now or in the near future). Offer exclusive promotions to the attendees only. See if you can collect emails while you’re at it, Facebook/Instagram likes and shares, or hand out awesome branded swag. Make them feel special!

 

 

SEO itself requires the knowledge and understanding of several digital marketing, web development aspects, and business understanding. In tandem, they can make up SEO services as a whole.

Here are the list of services SEO companies can include:

• Website optimization audit
• Website development (only if it is absolutely necessary)
• Domain, site, and consolidation migration
• Technical optimization
• On-page optimization
• Keyword research
• Competition research
• Conversion rate optimization
• Content scheduling and production
• Blog optimization
• Link building campaigning
• Citations management
• Brand reputation management
• Page keyword content audit
• Backlinks profile analysis

We can see from this comprehensive list that an all-in-one SEO company can have teams of:

• Web developers
• Content writers
• SEO specialists
  • SEO analysts (technical)
  • SEO strategists (non-technical)

In addition to work done, SEO services can include reporting aspects such as:

• Call, lead, and revenue tracking
• Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager management
• Keyword rankings tracking

We can see that SEO services can include a variety of sub-services. A variety of skills is required for SEO work, such as programming languages, writing skills, and a knack for research and reporting.

One of the most overlooked service is an SEO company or freelancer’s involvement during migration processes. From past experiences, SEO specialists are involved too late during any type of migration, which can lead to disaster requiring backtracking of work. If you are constructing a new site, SEO specialists should be involve from the very beginning to help you plan your new site architecture, page code formatting, and technical plans. For examples, if redirects are not set correctly, this can result in the loss of rankings and organic search visibility.

Backlinks profile analysis is another technical aspect of SEO that may be underrated. A strong understanding of off-page SEO aspects (activities external to your website) is necessary to help rank your site. An SEO service can include analyzing the strength of your backlinks profile, anchor text diversity and ratios analysis, identifying spammy backlinks and recommending disavow action, and identifying backlink opportunities to go after.

More often than not, especially at a local SEO level, website optimization is the key. This involves a comprehensive audit to evaluate the overall health of your site and what work needs to be done to improve on its contextual signals. This eventually leads into: technical/on-page optimization, content scheduling and production, blog optimization, conversion rate optimization, and more.

We hope this helps you better understand what do SEO services include. It’s always worth asking your SEO company or freelancer what they specialize in and what work they can do. That way, you have a better understanding of what can be done for your business and how to work more effectively with your SEO specialist.

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.

• Ahrefs blog and their YouTube channel
• Matthew Barby’s mega SEO tips resource
• Google’s very own SEO starter guide

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!

One of the greatest challenges to SEO is to see results as soon as possible. We all know SEO campaigns can span months at a time. Why does it take so long in the first place?

To answer this question correctly, we need to know that SEO is not done in a vacuum. There are competitors constantly pushing their SEO campaign, and SEO results are dependent on what the campaign goals are.

Different businesses have different circumstances with different marketing campaign goals. For example:

• E-commerce goes after transnational intent product keywords vs. a general dentist looking for organic search visibility in their city or area
• A teeth whitening product company is looking to increase their organic search traffic year-over-year vs. a dental practice with multiple locations looking to rank specifically for cosmetic dentistry services

Depending on what your goals are, estimations will be highly dependent on the scale, amount of work, and SERP competition.

Although giving you an exact answer may do you injustice, within 3 to 6 months, progress can be seen. In order to speed things up, skilled SEO specialists will prioritize after “quick wins” optimization opportunities to improve keyword rankings.

By knocking them out immediately, we can see a lot of great progress in terms of organic search visibility (total keywords) and ranking improvements. Although improvements to organic search traffic is great, identifying high-intent, low-volume keywords is what will generate a high quality lead that businesses need to grow.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is another aspect that SEO agencies understand. You can rank impressively on a high volume keyword (though this shouldn’t be the primary, senseless goal), but if your site isn’t set up to close potential leads, then it won’t help at all.

Content production and improving the topical authority of your site is another key aspect that SEO specialists focus on. Creating a few content pieces right away or over time can help indicate to Google that the target topic is what you are all about. With improved relevancy, you can rank sites without any backlinks building whatsoever.

Another factor to consider in SEO time to see results is how new your business domain is. Your domain is the address that people visit to find you. In Updriven’s case, it would be Updriven.ca. New sites need to wait for search engines to index them. They will also have to wait for a while to get out of what is known as the Sandbox. This is a theory that new sites are held back and rank poorly for some time. The idea is that search engines want to avoid abuse and manipulation from SEO specialists. It’s also the reason why SEO takes a long time: the slow timespan is a preventative measure against serious manipulation and abuse of the search results.

Paying more for SEO may not necessarily speed it up. Additional resources by upgrading your SEO services can help increase the performance in multiple keyword clusters.

Keyword clusters can be geo-based (say, Toronto and Mississauga) or product/service-specific (say, orthodontist service and dental veneers). Single-location practices can focus on the smallest package, and upgrade at a later date if they have multiple locations or are interested in ranking for multiple services. Multi-location practices can test smaller packages, but will ultimately want to ramp up further resources towards their marketing campaign goals because they cannot afford to wait.

In short, backlinks are hyperlinks linking one site to another. For SEO, backlinks are one of the foundations to improving organic search visibility. It tells search engines that your site, with more authoritative and numerous backlinks, is better than the other sites. With the right backlinks, your site can rank better than your SERP competitors.

Backlinks can be understood as votes in the search results. All else remaining the same, a site with more backlinks will theoretically perform better than those that don’t have any. However, not all votes are weighed the same. A “vote” from a super popular, national publication will have a greater impact on rankings than a “vote” from John Doe. In other words, a quality backlink can mean much more than hundreds, maybe even thousands of low-quality, spammy backlinks.

Quick sidenote: Google has done an excellent job cracking down on low-quality spammy sites. Buying a Fiverr package for 10,000+ backlinks from “high DA” sites is better spent on an awesome ice cap.

Backlinks come in two main qualifiers: dofollow and nofollow.

Dofollow backlinks pass link equity, counting the backlink as a “vote” for your site. By default, most backlinks created from different CMS (such as WordPress) will be dofollow. No tags or additional codes need to be added to create a dofollow link.

Nofollow backlinks do not pass link equity, and does not count for a “vote” in any way. Webmasters use nofollow qualifier when they do not want to be associated with the site that they are linking to. Producing dofollow links for too many topically irrelevant sites can lead to the devaluing of your site authority (you come off as spammy), thus cause your site to lose organic search visibility . Some reasons webmasters use nofollow links include:

• Doing so on user-generated content (comments on blog posts, forum posts, etc.), removing incentives for users to spam your site
• Sponsored or paid links, as Google made it clear on numerous occasions that such “link scheme” involving buying and selling links is unacceptable
• For any links that you do not want to endorse or fully support

When it comes to your SEO campaign, dofollow links are the way to go. Nofollow links have their own benefit in that it can help improve your backlinks profile anchor text ratio. Sites also naturally receive some percentage of nofollows from their backlinks, so ensuring you have enough to “blend in” with your SERP competitors is important. However, this is an advanced SEO architectural discussion for another time.

There are several types of backlinks that SEO experts can agree on:

• Editorial backlink, when an author from another site naturally links out to you and cites your business
• Guest blogging backlink, similar to an editorial backlink, except you reach out to other webmasters and submit a guest post to their website
• Business profile backlink, better known as a citation in the SEO world, comes from business listings, directories, catalogues, and review sites (think: Google My Business, Yellow Pages, Yelp, and Homestars)
• Resource backlinks, where a backlink is garnered for pages listing multiple resources for its readers
• Image/infographic backlinks, where a backlink is achieved when an image is hyperlinked from another site to you
• Social media backlink, which is when you or someone else posts a link to your site from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
• Q&A backlinks, short for question and answer backlinks, coming from sites such as Quora, Stack Exchange, Yahoo! Answers
• Forum backlinks, coming from niche-specific forums where users discuss relevant topics of interest (think: Reddit)
• Blog comment backlinks, where backlinks from the comment sections of other sites
• PR backlinks, short for press release backlinks, come from content sent to a network of media outlet sites (online syndication)

There are many more forms of backlinks out there. However, these 10 make up the foundation of the different types of links out there.

We mentioned that not all “votes” are weighted the same. Dofollow links inform search engines to pass link equity to the linked site. Many blog comments, forums, and Q&A sites tend to have backlinks automatically set to nofollow. Social media backlinks are also nofollowed (although the traffic generated from such sites can be a positive indicator to search engines of how much relevancy and love your site receives, i.e., shares, likes, retweets, etc.).

When it comes to building backlinks, focusing on editorial, guest posting, business profiles, resources, and image/infographic backlinks can make the greatest impact on your site SEO. Other types of backlinks can help diversify your backlinks profile, but that is often used only when doing some advance SEO work (such as fighting off search engine penalties and over-optimizations).

There are a lot of different strategies to approach your backlinks building campaign. I’ll touch on this in the future. For now, I hope this helps you better understand the different types of backlinks and what a backlink in SEO can mean to you!

Starting a business blog can be difficult. There are many ways to approach blogging, but the biggest question I get is how to do so in the most effective way possible. In other words, how can we blog to increase revenue for my business?

Uplist to follow on starting your business blog:

• Identify the major service or product you want to increase revenue for
• Identify the main commercial/transactional keywords you want to rank for
• Research and identify long-tail commercial and informational keywords to target
• Ensure informational keywords are as close to the bottom of the sales funnel as possible (more on this later)
• Create a content template and schedule to follow
• Produce the content (either yourself, hire a freelance writer, or use a service provider)
• Publish as much as you can, as soon as you can

The Uplist above is the process that I follow. You start with identifying what service or product you want to focus on first. If you are a new business, it is whatever your bread and butter might be. You might also be interested in “low hanging fruits” with low-competition, high-yield services. If you are a growing business, it would be whatever business is the easiest to scale or has the largest potential or highest profit margins. Whatever it may be, it becomes the foundation of your business blogging campaign. Choosing one that complements your business is important.

After that, the next steps to follow pertain to keyword research: finding out what opportunities are available for us to focus on. You can start with a list of 10 or a list of 100. The goal is to eventually build a roadmap that can be followed to the end. Picking and choosing keywords is as simple as using tools to identifying main keywords that will be your keyword clusters, then researching further for longer tail keywords. As a goal, we want to aim for keywords at the lowest parts of the sales funnel. This means that we want to pull traffic from keyword channels where searchers are as close to converting as possible. Here are two examples:

• Orthodontics: how much are braces, orthodontist vs. dentist, can orthodontics fix TMJ
• Cosmetic dentistry: veneers vs crowns, benefits of porcelain veneers, cosmetic surgeon near me

The characteristics of such informative keywords is that though they don’t guarantee visitors will convert, they do generate invaluable traffic that can be sold to. If you pick the right keywords closest to the time when searcher intent is ready to decide on a service or product, then you can generate sales for as long as you rank on that keyword.

One thing overlooked by business blogging is that ranking on information keywords isn’t simply about generating traffic. Improved rankings also provide topical authority for the main commercial and transactional keywords we want to rank for. By performing well on such keywords, providing value to readers, and having positive behavioral page metrics, search engines can better understand that your website is the trusted authority in the space.

One more tidbit: When in doubt and unsure, follow your competitors! By follow, I mean leverage their existing organic search visibility by checking what keywords they are ranking for. That way, you can analyze what keyword channels they are weak at and what keyword channels you can capitalize on.

As long as you produce content that capitalizes on keyword channels, then you can always rest assured that you are in the right direction. Even if you suddenly change plans halfway, it’s never out of the picture that you have contributed to your digital asset (your website domain) both from a sales perspective (an informative partner to readers) and from a lead/sales generation standpoint (capturing multiple keyword channels).

Keep blogging, and always plan ahead. This will ensure your website can work hard for you far into the future!