Dental Marketing Maintenance: 2 Simple Tasks to Boost Your Online Presence

Good dental marketing isn’t just about getting peoples’ attention. It’s also about making the choice to give your business a chance as easy as possible. That means removing as many obstacles as possible for the potential patient by making it easy to find your practice, easy for patients to schedule, and easy to ask any questions they might have. Let’s take a look at three areas where a little bit of maintenance can make remove obstacles and make your marketing more effective. 

Update Your Business Listing

One of the most common ways for people to find your practice is with a simple search: “dental offices near me.” If you haven’t looked at the search results for that query in your area (and you really should), here’s what the results look like: 

(These are desktop results, but mobile looks nearly identical, except the “website” and “directions” icons are replaced by a “call” icon.) 

You want to make sure that the information that shows up in these results is exactly what you want a potential patient to see. If your address, phone number, or hours are incorrect, fix that immediately. If you’re unsure how to do that, you can click on this link and follow the directions. 

Optimize Your Website

Your website doesn’t need to be flashy or showcase any sort of high-end web design to be an effective marketing tool. It does need to be informative and easy to navigate.

Informative means that people should feel that your website answers their basic questions about your practice. Those basic questions should include:

• Typical scheduling availability (do you usually have same-day openings, or is there a two-week wait-list?)
• Phone number, address, hours
• Services offered
• PPOs accepted

Easy to navigate means that anyone, including your most technically challenged patients, should be able to find what they’re looking for. Don’t bury important information under a series of complicated menus and subpages. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should just dump all your information on your homepage, just that it shouldn’t be difficult to find. 

If you’re not sure how your website stacks up, test it. Ask a friend or family member with the appropriate level of tech-savviness to find a specific piece of information on your site and report back to you. Even better, watch them navigate your site and take notes.

Interested in more dental marketing tips? Try this post on how your phone is one of your most important marketing tools.