3 Important SSL SEO Benefits For Your Site The internet is specifically designed to facilitate the easy and instantaneous sharing of information across all corners of the globe. The world has never been more connected, making it easy for local businesses to connect with potential customers and clients from anywhere at any time. With mountains of information being shared at any given moment, the security and privacy of data has become an increasing point of focus for users and businesses alike. In an attempt to protect the security of their users, webmasters and search engines have started to place emphasis on ensuring sites have SSL certificates, indicated by a URL starting with “https” as opposed to the traditional “http.” These SSL certificates protect the user’s data as they navigate the internet. As a dental professional trying to secure potential patients through organic search traffic to your website, it’s important to [...]

Internet Dental Marketing Strategies - Part 1 Creating A Plan To Promote Your Practice Online Introduction The key to a successful practice is a steady stream of new patients. In times past marketing for a dentist consisted of placing a listing in the yellow pages and taking out an ad in the local newspaper. But we live in the digital era now, and old school practice marketing techniques are no longer effective. When you consider that many young professionals and parents get their news online and most millennials have never even used a telephone book, it is obvious that relying on outdated forms of advertising is a losing proposition. This is why dental internet marketing is crucial for your practice. But for many dentists - even those that regularly use the Internet - how to tap into that growing pool of potential new patients online remains a mystery. They spend [...]

Improving Your Google My Business Ranking One of the questions we are frequently asked is "How do I get my practice to show up in the maps?" When a dentist asks that they are talking about the 3-pack of map results on a Google search results page. The map pack typically appears near the top of the page on Google, below the 3 or 4 AdWords listings at the top of the page, and above the start of the organic results. The assumption is that dental practices that show up in those 3 spots receive a lot of clicks to their website. And that is not a bad assumption to make. The Value Of Ranking well The number of people using Google every day is staggering. They currently process 40,000 search queries per second, and over 3.5 billion searches per day. While there is some talk that their market share [...]

Google Changes Ad Display On Search Results Search Engine Land recently posted an article detailing a major change in how Google is now displaying AdWords ads in the search results. From the article: Google is rolling out a dramatic change that removes ads from the right side of its desktop search results, and places ads only at the top and/or bottom of the page. At the same time, the company says it may show an additional ad — four, not three — above the search results for what it calls “highly commercial queries.” In our very non-scientific and limited testing (meaning I just tried a bunch of searches in different cities we have clients), larger cities - say around 100,000 or so - tend to have 4 ads at the top of the page for searches like "dentist CityName", while smaller ones typically only have 3. What isn't discussed in [...]

Prepping For The Mobile Apocalypse How to tell if your site is ready for the Google mobile algorithm update, and estimate the impact if you are not. People have been predicting The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI in prepper-speak) for as long as history has been recorded. Of course, many of doomsayers have been vague about their predictions, using phrases like "The end is near!" and "Judgment is at hand!" without actually giving a date for the big event. But unlike the non-specific warnings of impending world-wide doom, the date for the mobile SEO day of reckoning has been pegged on the calendar: April 21, 2015. Google made the announcement on their Webmaster Central Blog that starting on April 21st they will roll out an algorithm update that includes a website's Mobile Friendliness as a ranking factor. And for the last month since that post went [...]

Optimize Your First Impression How to make sure the first exposure potential patients have to your practice - before they visit your website - puts your best foot forward. Attracting new patients to your dental practice is like speed dating. Studies show that 91% of all Google searches don't go past the first page of results. That means the majority of prospective clients will look at your practice and nine others in the same neutral environment, and make an initial decision based upon the same 3 elements for all of you. Most dentists spend a lot of time and money crafting their practice's online appearance. Logo design, color scheme, image selection, and copy writing all play a part in building a killer website. But in many cases that investment is wasted, because it almost completely focuses on the second impression a prospective patient has of the practice. In most cases, [...]