What does a successful dental practice truly need? It requires a steady flow of new patients and high retention of old patients. Life circumstances constantly change so it's impossible to have your previous patients be with you forever. So let's focus on getting new patients through the door and growing your practice steadily and predictably.
Where can we find this steady flow of new patients? Most consumers today start their search for any kind of service online. This is where we can find them and connect with them. Thus, getting more patients online involves making your practice easily visible online, looking credible and maximizing the percentage of site visitors that convert into patients.
1. Search engine optimization (SEO) for dentists
Most people searching for dental services start their journey on Google. This is where we can reach the biggest amount of people who are in real need of your services. If you want to reach them, you need to show up in the results for searches like “dentist in [your city].”
There are two ways to make this happen. The first one is with search engine optimization, or SEO. The second one is Google Ads and we'll talk about it later. SEO involves researching the words and phrases your potential patients use when searching for dental services, then using them on your site.
This process helps search engines understand the content on your website and display it in results for relevant searches.
SEO also involves building links from other reputable sites, which shows search engines that you’re a credible source of information. The more authority your site gains online, the higher you’ll be able to rank for searches related to your industry.
2. Google Ads.
The second way to show up in the results for dentist searches is Google Ads. One of the biggest advantages of Google Ads is that your website could be shown as a first or second search result upon your potential patient's search. This could be truly effective because 70% of people tend to click the first search result which is usually an ad if you are searching for any type of product or service. The other 20% of people tend to click the second search result. This way Google Ads are responsible for 90% of initial clicks in the search results.
It comes as no surprise that this is a very effective way to get more patients to your dental practice. With proper management of these Ads and a good strategy this approach can have truly remarkable results. We strongly advise you to give your Google Ads campaign management to qualified professionals.
3. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) for dentists
Getting visitors to your website is just a first step, an important one, but it's just the beginning. For your website visitors to become your patients you need a proper way to convert them.
There are a lot of recommendations online on how to do it. Collecting email addresses and starting an email newsletter are the popular ones. I personally think that as a dentist this is not the best way to approach converting website visitors into patients. This way you start a very long cycle of converting a website visitor into a patient when most of the time they are actually searching for a dentist right now. So the better way to do it is creating a very straightforward call to action and a very easy way to contact you.
This is why we regularly perform tests and all the necessary steps to optimize conversion rate. Conversion Rate Optimization involves testing multiple versions of different elements on your site (like buttons, forms, and calls to action) to determine which is the most effective in converting your visitors. Then, you can implement the best version – and move on to testing another element.
If you found this article useful and want to start getting more patients online without having to go in circles having to figure all of these things out yourself, don't hesitate to contact us through the contact form below to request a free consultation and start getting more patients online.