As a dentist, the competitive nature of your industry means that you’re no doubt only too aware of the importance of a constant stream of new patients. One way to attract them is to increase web traffic through your dental website.
But while you’re more than capable of dealing with the often complex oral health needs of your existing dental patients, landing new ones may be somewhat out of your remit.
After all, if you want to survive in an extremely competitive market, not all dental patients can be referrals. This is why having a dental website complete with an efficient marketing strategy is so important and is where a proven dental marketing company can help.
The importance of increased web traffic
While increased visitors and your increasing popularity are always nice, website traffic (or rather, the number of visitors to your dental website) is vital.
In reality, it represents the number of opportunities that you have to
- Share your brand
- Give a good impression and above all,
- Build trust.
In essence, the more traffic you have, the greater the opportunities to generate leads and ultimately, turn those leads into new dental practice patients.
As a general rule of thumb, the more traffic that goes through your site – the better. However – and here’s a very important point – It isn’t all about the numbers…
…instead it’s about the quality!
But while it sounds easy on paper, there are a number of strategies that need to be put into place to enable this to happen. This is where an experienced dental marketing agency can help
What exactly is dental marketing?
To clear something up, dental marketing isn’t the same thing as dental advertising. Dental marketing looks at every aspect of your dental practice with regards to patient interactions. These include
- The way your team answer the phone
- How they handle new patient enquiries and
- The way that your dental website appeals (or not) to the general public.
Also included in the area of dental marketing is;
- Looking into how well your dental website is performing
- Checking out how it is currently set up for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Investigating the amount or value of your current dental content contained within and
- Monitoring what you do with it.
Collectively, this makes up dental marketing.
How a dental marketing agency will look to increase web traffic?
There are in fact a whole host of actionable ways that web traffic can be increased with the end goal of getting new patients into your dental practice. Let’s take a look at some of them…
Make your dental website a quality experience
While most people are pretty familiar with the internet, many people (including dentists) probably don’t realise that it when properly optimised, it can become a 24-hour marketing machine. Therefore a good dental marketing company will ensure that your dental website is:
- Easy to navigate – There’s nothing worse than complex websites. Easy navigation directs your traffic to where you need them to be, using just one or two clicks.
- Clear and concise – Keeping it simple is the way to go with pages that are uncluttered and easily readable.
- Quality content ready – To sort out the action-takers from the browsers, it pays to deliver high-quality informative content. This is a big tick in Google’s box too!
Altogether, this makes for a quality experience for any reader when they land on your dental site.
Ensure it is fully optimised
A sure-fire way to increase web traffic is to ensure that your site is fully optimised. Dental marketers will utilise tools such as Google Webmaster or Google Trends to gauge which keywords get the most targeted hits in your area.
For example ‘dentist in Brisbane’ may generate tons of traffic, but it might not be as targeted as say, ‘dentist in Spring Hill Brisbane’. Therefore optimising your content so that it relates to a localised keyword means that more quality traffic will find your site when they look for a specific search term.
Keep content fresh
Blogging is the perfect way to ensure that your dental website remains fresh. Google rewards websites that continually update their content and having an up-to-date blog is a great way of doing just that.
A good dental marketing company will keep your posts regular and current, in addition to optimising them for keywords – remember each blog written is another page on your site – or rather, another chance for people to find you.
Spread the word
Another key aspect to increase web traffic is through content distribution. When time (and money) is invested in a quality blog or article, you want as many people reading it as possible. These are people that could potentially be looking for a new dental practice just like yours.
For this reason, distributing it across your social media platforms and inviting questions makes you and your brand more engaging. Engagement builds trust and trust is what new patients really look for!
Tracking results
After doing all of the above, you may see an increase in web traffic, but how do you know whether this has resulted in new dental patients. In other words, how do you know if your increase in dental patients is due to qualified leads via your website or through dental practice referrals?
An experienced dental marketing agency has the technology to track leads via your dental website using cutting-edge analytics. This way you will know through the agency what tactics and techniques work and which have been less successful.
Once they have a handle on this, it’s just a case of honing in on those strategies and repeating the process.
As you can see, an increase in web traffic can lead to an increase in dental practice patients, but it involves a culmination of strategies, techniques and industry know-how that all needs to come together. Because of this, the marketing agency you choose should understand your industry and your client base.
Mediboost are a Sydney-based dental and medical marketing company, highly experienced in helping dental practices generate new patient calls. Call us on 1300 163 058 today to book a consultation to see how we can increase web traffic for you, resulting in targeted quality leads.
