As an inbound marketing company, we understand the tactics that ultimately earn you new patients. We’ve touched on social media before—it’s true that an active presence on these sites is very important—but there are some other important things you can do to really leverage the power of the Internet.
Local Visibility
Did you know that there are local listings in various search engines and business directories, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, WhitePages, and more? By listing your practice with all these sources, you increase the odds that people looking online for dentists or orthodontists will come across yours.
Because your practice is tied to a physical location, you have a limited pool of potential patients to attract in your area, which is why these directories are so important. Without local visibility, your practice is like a ghost that your potential patients won’t even see. Fix that by prioritizing local visibility.
Website Optimization
You’ve probably heard plenty of talk about search engine optimization for written content like blogs, but did you know there’s stuff behind the scenes of your website that can help too? Things like meta descriptions, alt text, headers, sitemaps, and more can help search engine crawlers rank your website higher in the results.
In addition to optimizing your website for search engines, you want it to be coded efficiently in order to cut down on load times. People with broadband Internet connections are no longer accustomed to waiting for a page to load, so if it’s taking them more than a second or two, they might just click away. Unless you moonlight as a web developer, you probably don’t know how to do all this, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore good website optimization.
Analytics
There are plenty of free or inexpensive ways to track your business’s online presence and performance. One of the biggest is Google Analytics, which is plugged into the largest search engine and informs you about searches and where your visitors are coming from. There are also analytics available for Facebook, Twitter, and a number of others.
Crucially, it’s not enough simply to collect all this data—you need someone who can interpret it properly. Hiring people with marketing expertise will help you make sense of all this information and come up with actionable steps to increase your exposure and capitalize on it, gaining new patients and receiving more business from current patients.
For more information about online marketing and leveraging the power of the Internet, you can always turn to us at Inbound Systems for advice and results!
Relax. More customers are on the way.
