 | The Best ROI in Marketing |
In my opinion, it’s a dynamic website with custom SEO (that’s “search engine optimization”, or the act of making your site “findable” on the web).
A well written and attractively designed website, complemented by custom search engine optimization, can make the difference between your practice making money and losing money. How? Web visitors are all over the internet looking for a dentist. If they can find your site and like what they see when they get there, you’re golden. If you’re invisible, or have a dated, difficult to use site, they’ll just skip back to Google to look for some other dentist’s site. You might as well put a banner on your website that says “Looking for a new dentist? Call Dr. Hawkins next door – 555-3456”
So how do you get that “perfect site”? It’s not as simple as having your nephew, who dabbles in website design, create a site for you and throw it up on the Internet. Let’s explore what’s involved.
The First Step – Website Development
It starts with web development from a qualified web design company. Why? What you may not realize is there’s more to a website design than meets the eye. Sure, an engaging, beautiful site is lovely to look at. A simple, clean site is easy to navigate. But that’s assuming that people can find the site.Websites have to be built to be found.
What do I mean by that? The structure of the site is designed specifically for search engine optimization. That means, when a person types in a specific keyword, the site shows up as a result. This is called an organic (free) search result. How do you position your site for organic search results? A good way to start is by making a list of the top 15 - 25 keywords that a patient might use to find you. Think about the most popular and profitable services. Then make sure you have a page related to each keyword and use those keywords as page titles and headlines in your site.
A well-optimized web site can achieve a high rank for the chosen keywords in the organic search engine results and this can bring your site many visitors, for no cost.
Yes, you can pay for visitors using PPC [pay per click] advertising programs, like Google or Yahoo, but you have to pay for each visitor. When budgets are tight, organic SEO is a much more cost-effective method.
Next: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The rest is up to Search Engine Optimization. There are many companies offering SEO services, so proceed with caution.As professionals in the marketing field with significant experience in website development and SEO, we have found it amusing, and more than a little frightening, to hear what different SEO companies are telling people. From promising overnight results to guaranteed placements on results pages, we’ve heard it all. We thought it might be a good time to debunk some of the more prevalent SEO myths you may have heard.
Overnight Results
In a word, impossible. No company can guarantee good organic search results in 24 hours. Notice we say “good.” The major search engines: Google, MSN and Yahoo, take their time indexing sites. In fact, when a client is launching a brand new site, we recommend they don’t even expect results for at least 6 months.Google subscribes to the philosophy of “wait your turn”, and while it may be hard to be patient, you can’t really jump the system. It really does take months of building quality links and frequent, loyal readership to build a site’s full potential. Any SEO company promising 24-hour results is probably using spam or other unsavory techniques for quick, yet meaningless and worthless results. Worse, these techniques could harm your long-term success.
Guaranteed Placement
More than likely, it’s the same company promising overnight results that guarantees placement. When you think of all the competition on the search engine indexes, you realize that there never is really any guarantee of placement on the first page of results. Good organic traffic starts slowly and grows with the site. Six months after your new or revised site has gone live, review your Google Analytics results to see what keywords have generated the most traffic or interest. Then, add new content to your site, build back links (for example: by placing articles on other sites with a link back to yours) and work with a respected SEO company for a long-term web marketing strategy. THAT is what will move your placement up on the lists.The Goal is to be Number One or on Page One.
Not true. Your goal is to optimize your return on investment in SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing, which is a combination of SEO and PPC). You’ll miss the big picture if you focus myopically on obtaining page-one ranking for a few words that you think best describe your products or services. The goal of SEO and SEM is to engineer a diversified portfolio of hundreds or even thousands of targeted phrase combinations of words that, together, achieve maximum ROI. Depending on the frequency of searches relevant to your offerings, a few targeted phrases could earn you enormous ROI. Or, conversely, you may need scores of synonymous phrases or single words to rank on page one in order to achieve maximum ROI.
Number of Visits is Important.
It is NOT just about clicks, it is about conversions…in other words traffic is traffic, but traffic that leads to sales is far different that just visits to the site.Buy Numerous Domain Names.
Don’t waste your money. There’s no need to buy numerous domain names to capture the search keywords. The right site, written and constructed correctly, will yield you the results you want. Frankly, Google will pick just one of your domains and send all search traffic though that one, and then ignore the others.As the economy improves, you’ll want to round out your presence with other internal and external marketing strategies, but if you have limited marketing dollars and are looking for the strongest possible strategy with the highest possible ROI, a website is your best bet.
Xaña Winans is the owner and president of Golden Proportions Marketing (GPM), a thriving company that specializes in comprehensive, custom marketing and advertising strategies for the dental and medical fields. The GPM website can be found at www.goldenproportions.com and Xaña can be reached at 866-590-4476 or xana@goldenproportions.com.