Author: Shepherd Yaw Morttey

If you want to get more clients at your dental office, you need to embrace marketing. In as much as you provide quality services and your price is competitive, you need to attract new patients by marketing your dental office locally and far away.

Here are tips that can help you to market your dental office locally.

1. Perform a SWOT analysis

By analyzing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and competitors around your dental office, you will find your target market which will thus help you create effective dental marketing to reach potential clients. For instance, if one of your strengths is having modern dental equipment that can do processes that other dentists cannot do, you can leverage this point in your marketing campaign.

2. Referrals

Your dental office can benefit from referrals from your existing clients. You need to encourage your existing patients to refer others to your dental office. For instance, you can have a referral bonus program where the referrer gets a reward such as a dental product or a discount when they refer someone who ends up visiting your dental office.

This way, you will not only get new patients, but you will keep your old patients engage.

Remember to include your employees in the referral program and also motivate them using incentives so that they can provide the best service.

3. Local events

By taking part in local community events, you can create awareness of your dental services to the locals since most of your clients are likely to come from the neighbourhood. You can take part in neighbourhood celebrations, charity runs, and volunteer activities. This will give you an opportunity to network with the locals, who are potential patients.

Also, taking part in community activities gives you a positive image in the neighbourhood which in turn translates to more patients.

4. Market online

It is crucial for your dental office to have an online presence since most patients will look you up online, whether they are referrals or otherwise.

Your dental office should have a website. Make sure that the website has up to date information, have friendly images, be easy to navigate and portrays the kind of service you provide.

Ensure your website ranks high on local search results by using SEO. You can do this by using keywords that are likely to be used to search your dental office locally and post informative content. If it is a handful for you to do the SEO on your website, you can use dentist SEO marketing services so you can have more time to attend to your patients.

Backlinks with local websites can also be helpful in improving your ranking on search results.

Also, use online reviews to your advantage. People trust online reviews the same way they trust referrals from friends. Therefore, encourage your patients to leave reviews online, whether positive or negative. Your aim should be to get five-star reviews. Ensure you respond, especially to the negative reviews so that you can build confidence in your business.

Be on social media and use it to connect with your patients and to also inform them of your services.

5. Place Ads

Ads such as Facebook ads can help you to create local awareness of your dental practice. You can customize your ads to reach the local audience. For instance, you can use the map card to share information about your business such as its address, hours it operates, a directions link, and distance.

Here you can feature such as click to call on ads such as AdWords and Facebook ads where the call is made by clicking on the ad instead of picking the phone and calling.

You can use demographic targeting with your ads. For instance, research has it that 90% of buying decisions in dental services are made by women. So you can target women in your dental office ads.

Back when I started blogging, I always employed the best means to get people to read my posts. I wasn’t after big numbers then, just a mere 100 views per day would have been okay for me.

But hey, I never got those numbers.

This frustration of not getting enough views on my articles got me to search for possible means to get traffic to my blog. At the time, I experimented mainly with Facebook Adverts. However, it didn’t take me long to realise that it was not very sustainable.

The thing with paid traffic is that when you stop paying, traffic ceases to come in and that’s especially very bad if you are not using your traffic to sell goods or services as in the case of ecommerce.

Someway somehow, I came across SEO. I don’t really remember my first contact with SEO, but I do know that I continuously heard the phrase: “Content is King”. I will like to believe that Bill Gates’ essay titled “Content is King” is the one use that made the phrase popular.

You can read the full essay here.

Currently, on Mfidie.com, we enjoy more than 50% of our traffic from Google by just optimising our content for search engines.

Content is King

In SEO, there are a lot of things that you need to take care of, but the most important, as I have come to realise is the content.

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” – Bill Gates, 1996

Again on the Bill Gates essay, he mentioned that: “One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create.” Although Bill Gate’s article did not limit content to just blog posts and articles, I would focus on that for this article.

Content is King in SEO simply means if your articles are relevant, engaging and useful for your audience (usually targeted), they are most likely to consume it better, share and take actions based on it and all of this will, in turn, send positive signals to search engines to rank your article higher.

So for your content to reign, it needs to satisfy the user primarily, before search engines.

However, how much of your content should satisfy the user and how much of it should satisfy search engines’ bots? It’s very important to maintain a balance in all of this.

Content that satisfies users

The only way to satisfy someone is to look out for what they want and give it to them.

Usually, you should write a post that addresses a challenge, solves a problem or explains a complicated issue.

For starters, each blog post you write you need to determine the goals of the article which audience you are targeting it at. If you don’t know how to begin with this, surf through your analytics, select specific posts and look at the demographics for them.

Know your audience and set post goals

Usually, it is easy to draw a pattern via your analytics reports. You would notice posts that bring you new users, posts that returning users are attracted to and posts that are not performing at all.

These can help you determine what posts to write to get new readers, and those that will increase loyalty among your existing readers.

Some other post goals you may opt for are:

• Selling a product or service
• Getting users to sign up for your newsletter
• Getting in the top 10 for a specific keyword, Eg: “Plumbing Services in Accra”
• Getting 2,000 unique page views on the article for a month

You would realise that once you have your goal set, the audience becomes a bit more defined and the way you write the article overall changes.

One important rule though if you are using external writers or hiring other people to write for you, make sure that the content is original and not plagiarised. For this, I take advantage of a very simple Plagiarism Checker by searchenginereports.net which even allows me to upload the original documents and check them against content existing online.

Remember, you are satisfying the reader and your article should be able to answer their questions. It is therefore important to revise your articles from time to time so they can continue to meet your goals.

Choose a good heading

Oh yeah, do I need to stress how much important this is?

The first thing someone sees on your post is the heading, and most often than not, it is the heading and metadata that “compels” someone to click on your article’s link.

Here are some things you should consider when writing your blog title/heading:

• It should be between 6 to 12 words
• It should have a “Call to Action” if possible
• Use attractive adjectives and adverbs to make your blog post curious and interesting for the reader
• Use 55 or fewer characters when possible

Take these two examples:

1. Wrist Watches in Ghana and Where to buy them from
2. 5 Top Shops to buy quality Wrist Watches in Ghana

The second one is a much better heading because it is compelling and gives a number. People will more likely read a “listed post”.

Make your posts readable

Your posts should be simple to read and easy for people to skim and scan through.

It is important to break your content down into shorter meaningful paragraphs so that users can read properly. Also, add relevant images with captions to your articles.

Use subheadings where appropriate and learn the correct use of the H1 and H2 tags. Your main title is Usually the H1 tag of your article. You should, therefore, employ the use of H2 – H4 tags in your articles.

Lastly, make sure your first two paragraphs are able to inform the user of what he/she is to expect in the article. This would make readers stay longer and bring down your bounce rate.

If readers to your site bounce immediately, your site’s rankings are likely to go down also.

Ultimately, making your readers happy will keep you high on search engine rankings, but there are some pieces of stuff you need to do, just for the search engines, for better ranking.

Content and signals that satisfy search engines

When we talk about Search Engines, we usually refer largely to Google, and that’s fine. After all, Google has more than 95% of the world’s search traffic.

There are some elements to incorporate into your articles and posts to make them nicer and sweeter for Google.

Let’s look at some of them.

Keywords

Keywords are those terms that people search for on Google. If you want people to come to your blog posts, they need to rank, and to rank, these keywords need to be in your article, but they need to make meaning.

You should understand that keywords are phrases or words you think people will use in search engines to find information related to your blog or article.

Every post you write should target a keyword or keyword phrase that is most relevant to your post. You can use a service like SEMRush to help you in your keyword find.

You should, however, note that you don’t need to overuse the keywords in your article as Google would know you are practising keyword stuffing and would penalise you. Your keyword should generally take up just about 2% of the whole article.

If you use WordPress, the Yoast plugin can help with the measurement.

Internal Linking and External Linking

It’s very important to write related content and link to each other on your website.

When search engines crawl your site, they are also looking at other links within posts. These posts and the links to the other pages on your site tell Google exactly what context your posts are in.

Also, add external links to other well known and high authority sites so that Google can again “respect” your content and know it is relevant. External links also help to build a relationship with other sites.

When looking for external links, always link to non-competitive authority sources within the scope of whatever article you are writing.

Drive Engagement

Google likes to see that users are happy on your site.

By driving engagements like getting people to share your articles, leaving comments or even leaving a rating, positive signals are sent to search engine bots and this can help your site rank high.

Even when users click through to another web page (both internal or external), search engines pick these as a good signal.

This is why your internal and external links need to be relevant, always.

Conclusion

It’s obvious we all want to rank high on Google since it is not a very “expensive” source of traffic while delivering long-term benefits.

If you want to write content that will rank high and possibly be on page one of Google’s search engine results page, here are a recap of the things to keep in mind:

• Your articles need to be relevant, engaging and useful for your audience
• Set post goals and make sure they are properly targeted to a particular audience
• Study your analytics and let it inform your decisions
• Your posts should be easily readable and should deliver what they promise; avoid click baiting
• Target relevant keywords and use them in your article properly
• Utilise internal and external links natural links in your posts
• Drive engagements by offering users an array of actions on your posts

Also, don’t expect instant results once you’ve followed the instructions. Just continue and get a few more posts that meet the criteria and you will start to see the results.

It is also important for you to know which stuff works for you and which ones don’t. If you tinker and experiment, you will finally find your own winning formulae.

If you ever need help with SEO for your business or blog, send an email to [email protected] and let’s talk.

The practice of SEO is always in flux. What may be regarded as some of the best tactics and approaches fall out of favour within no time. Also, some new methods are always emerging and end up being key trends that site owners use to improve their SEO performance.

For you to keep up, you need to be on the lookout for contemporary trends. Here are some of the most critical 5 SEO trends to watch in 2018. By mastering and responding to them appropriately, you can dramatically improve your Serpbook ranking over the course of time.

The growing importance of mobile

Google says that an average of 60% of all searches that are conducted today are based on mobile phones. This observation means that 6 out of 10 people who carry out organic searches rely on their mobile devices to do the work.

It follows that people will not do searches on their mobile phones and then switch back to their desktop devices. It is natural for people to use their mobile phones to visit websites, read content and do many other things that they intend to do when they are online.

Therefore, for you to be relevant in 2018 and beyond, you must optimize your site and content for mobile viewing. In the recent past, it was optional for you to make your website mobile-friendly. However, going forward, it will be necessary to make the site accessible using a mobile phone more than anything else.

Many search engines now require that all sites be optimized for mobile viewing as well as standard desktop viewing. In fact, mobile display is poised to be regarded as the primary way by which viewers access to content.

The growing importance of voice search

Statistics show that currently, 20% of all searches are done using voice queries. Voice search, unlike typing, is based on the user speaking a few words to get the desired results. While the use of voice search may not necessarily change the entire SEO practice, it has various implications on your SEO ranking that you need to consider.

For example, it is evident that when people use voice search, they construct sentences that reflect their regular conversations. The sentence structures that are used in daily conversations are different from that are used when one is typing.

Therefore, for you to adapt to this change, you must change your approach to keywords and focus on using words and phrases that match the way people speak rather than type.

User Experience will continue to reign

The idea that people find your site friendly and easy to use will continue to be one of the most crucial factors in determining your SEO performance.

The concept of UX incorporates various things such as the speed at which the content on your site loads, the kind of graphics that you use on your site and the overall arrangement of material and pages on the website.

Users tend to like places that have all these things appropriately addressed. If your website takes long to load, then users may not wait for the process.

Also, if the layout of your site does not appeal to visitors, then you may have high bounce rates. Therefore, to maintain or improve your SEO performance, you must address all these issues going forward.

The importance of content

Content will continue to be another crucial factor that determines the performance of websites in 2018. Primarily, sites that have the best content concerning relevance and usefulness tend to perform better than those who carry mediocre content.

You can rely on the quality of your content to market your site as a useful source of information for your visitors. Therefore, for you to do this, it is necessary to invest in the process of creating fresh content for your visitors. You may consider getting a professional content creator to develop the most relevant content for your site.

The use of long-tail keyword

Long-tail keywords differ from generic ones because they are less competitive than the short ones. Everyone competes for short and hot generic keywords in any given niche. For you to break from the competition, you may consider using long-tail keywords.

Interestingly, many SEO practitioners now realize how useful using long-tail keywords can be as an SEO strategy. Apart from the fact that not very many sites compete for any set of long-tail keywords, it is easy to incorporate them into high-quality content.

Therefore, in 2018 and beyond, many site owners and SEO practitioners will embrace the use of long-tail keywords as the basis of the content that they publish on their websites.

In summary, these are the critical SEO trends to watch in 2018. They are essential because they have a direct impact on your SEO performance going forward.

It may be prudent to watch what other leading SEO practitioners do before developing the right approach to use regarding long-tail keywords, optimizing content for mobile, voice search, optimizing sites for mobile viewing and increasing the level of UX.