Guest blog from Deploy Dental

Choosing the right domain name is vital in establishing your online presence. Here are six helpful tips to consider before purchasing a domain name for your dental practice.

1.         Keyword Brainstorm

Write down the top 5 or so keywords related to your business.  Start adding simple prefixes and suffixes to your keywords.  For example, if you are a dentist who specializes in implant dentistry procedures, your keywords could be something like this: dentist, implant dentist, tooth replacement, and implants.  You then need to consider incorporating your geographic location into your keyword choices, as this is one of the major ways potential patients search for dentists online.  (Editor’s Note from Dr. Emmott. I agree with the suggestions here on sample keywords and domains, however I strongly suggest you get your actual name and obvious variations whenever possible as a domain name as well. You are not limited to a single domain but should have several that all point to your web page.) For example, if you are located in New York City, your domain choices should look something like this: NewYorkCityDentist.us, NYCDentist.com, ImplantsNYC.com, and so on.  Just play with different combinations until you find an available domain name. (This step may be harder than you think, as many of the prime domain names have already been bought, especially in larger markets)

2.         Make It Unique

Failing to perform basic market research before choosing a domain name can result in unintended consequences.  For instance, if an existing dental practice uses the domain name NewYorkDentalCare.com, the available domain name of DentalCareNewYork.com would not be the best choice.  That is because, when considering people’s search habits, if you tell a patient your site’s address they will often enter that term into a search engine instead of typing in the direct URL.  In many cases, the search results will bring back your competition’s website ahead of yours.  So make sure to research your competitive market before settling on a domain name.

3.      Only Purchase a Dot-Com if Available

There are numerous gTLD’s (generic top level domain) to choose from.  The most common of which are .com, .net, .org, and .us.  However, generally speaking, the Dot-Com is always your best bet as it is most widely recognized by almost everyone.  Google, Yahoo, and Bing usually do not weight your domain selection as long as it is a gTLD, but the advantage to selecting a Dot-Com is that almost every person will generally assume that your website ends in “.com”.  If you’re website’s address isn’t the Dot-Com, you could be very well be sending valuable traffic to your competition.  When in doubt, it is advisable to purchase more than one domain name, as they are usually less than $10 per year.

4.      Make it Memorable

Both word of mouth and dominance marketing rely on the ease of remembering your domain name and capitalizing on keywords in your URL.  Successful strategies for this include making it rhyme, using alliterations (SeattleSmiles.com, BrentwoodBraces.com), having a play-on-words (RespectYourMouth.com, VineyardDentalUrgentCare.com), and just KIS (Keep it Simple).  Keep in mind that this is your online identity and will be used in your print collateral and on practice signage as well.

5.      Set Yourself Apart With Your Brand

You can use a unique nickname or alias for your website like WebMD.com or FreeCreditReport.com.  They accomplish the goal of letting your audience know what it is you do with out them ever having to visit your website.  Industry examples would be “TampaTeethWhitening.com’”, “DenverDentalImplants.com” or “CelebrityDentist.com”. Those are great domain names since they let your audience know exactly what procedures and service areas you provide.

6.    Tools & Research

Here are a few tools to help speed up the process of checking the availability of domain names.

• http://www.whois.net
• http://www.domjax.com
• http://ajaxwhois.com

A dental domain name is a valuable asset and a marketing tool for a practice, and choosing the right one is maybe the most important first step to establishing your online presence.

One of my favorite online companies is Sesame Communications. One reason for that is that Sesame does actual research to determine if their communication tools are working. Here are some recent numbers that they have discovered.

First the question, does online marketing actually work?

This can be measured in several ways. You can just measure web site visits or Facebook mentions. That is nice but the real measure that we care most about is actual human beings, that is patients, who call the office.

Here is the interesting stat. Dentists using multiple online communication tools:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get office high on the organic Google listings.
• Social Media engagement with Facebook pages and postings.
• Pay Per Click (PCC) Ads on Google.

Received on average of eighty-seven calls each month. Of those twenty-one identified themselves as new patients.

Groupon was the topic of a 60 minutes segment which included reference to how doctors are using it to attract patients. The segment mostly featured the CEO Andrew Mason and speculated on the long term viability of the company. As to doctors and dentists using Groupon there are some nagging legal issues. Does a Groupon discount constitute an illegal kick back? Does it violate insurance rules regarding fees billed vs fees submitted?

HT DoctorBase

The following is a guest blog from Deploy Dental a dental social media servcie

Social Media marketing is one of the most recent forms of Internet marketing to emerge in the last few years. Staying on top of the rising tidal-wave of new technology and mountain of new information is not easy. Now-a-days every dental office will need to establish some sort of social presence if they want to connect with the younger demographic along with adding an immense amount of value to your practice. We have come up with 6 ways for dentists to leverage social media by connecting with their fans and followers.

1. Social discount sites

Now-a-days there are websites like Groupon and Living Social that allow your dental practice to sell one-time promotions where you offer a popular dental service at a remarkably low price (50% off +) expecting to sell very large quantities. Your deal gets distributed to all of these social discount sites’ subscribers, generally tens-of-thousands in your local area who are given a time and quantity window in which they are to purchase the discount. (ie. your teeth whitening offer might go for 3 days or until 500 units have sold). The way that these websites handle the monetary end is unique too. They act as the payment processor and as part of the deal with them they will take their cut (30% – 50%) of the sales and send you a check for the rest. These kinds of deals need to be thought out. If a nearby competitor has just sent out a deal for teeth whitening, either hold off for a while or run the deal on a different service, deals can be exhausted if the users are presented the same deal too frequently.

2. Time-sensitive promotions

Different times of the year call for different dental promotions. For instance, when children get out of school for the summer and are on winter break it would be a good time to run a wisdom teeth extraction campaign. Towards the end of October is the time where you want to start reminding your current patients that they should schedule a visit before the end of the year so they don’t waste any of their dental benefits that expire at the end of the year on December 31.

3. Pictures

Make sure to post photos of your office along with any practice videos that you might have. Everybody knows the first thing someone does when they arrive onto your Facebook Fan Page is look at your pictures. Make sure to only upload photos that are clear and appropriate for the workplace. Your patients and potential patients want to see what goes on in their dental office. Think of it as your own slice of reality television, more appropriately reality social media.

4. Videos

To take advantage of websites like YouTube and Vimeo users are encouraged to upload videos of their own. In a dental office this can sometimes be quite a task of creating a video that you would feel proud broadcasting to the world. Just because you don’t have any videos of your own doesn’t mean you still can take advantage of these sites, we encourage all of our clients to post comments, favorite, share and add friends using these social video sharing websites. If you want to start shooting video in your dental office we recommend starting off with the Flip Video, $79.99 Digital Video Camera.

5. Patient education

It is important to not forget about the reason why people come to the dental office, to get dental procedures taken care of. A dental social media must is to have procedural descriptions on your website/blog so when people have a question about a specific procedure they can reference your services page alleviating the need for the visitor to call your practice and use valuable front-office time.

6. Patient retention

Maintaining your current patient-base isn’t always easy. One way to make sure you are taking full advantage of social media is by leveraging different technologies that allow your to communicate with your current patients and answer any questions that they might have. A practice newsletter is one of the ways of accomplishing this. Send out a quarterly newsletter to your patients letting them know about any new things going on in the office, events coming up, or even new staff members/technology.

From an article Too Much Buzz from the economist.

Two billion people are already online. E-commerce sales are $8 trillion a year. So, the argument goes, this more “social” element to the internet is the next great revolution. Over-caffeinated cyber-champions talk of “empowerment” and “transparency”. But is all this as wonderful as it sounds? Or is it a new bubble in the making?

via Schumpeter: Too much buzz | The Economist.

A good analysis that looks at both extreme ends of the social media debate. On one end it is a fundamental societal revolution that will alter our very existence. On the other it is an ever so trendy waste of time that will pop into nothingness.

Of course, as is usually the case, the truth is somewhere in between. I am in awe of Facebook. 800 million users. On the other hand, as the article points out, using social media effectively is neither easy nor inexpensive.

For now I believe dentists need to be aware of Facebook and the other social media platforms. If you are nerdish, setting up an office Facebook or twitter account is not a bad idea. Or you can pay someone to do it for you. However I do not believe it is urgent or if you do not use Facebook immediately you will be left out or miss out on amazing new profits.

I would not be surprised if social media as we know it now is in fact a bubble that will pop.

I recently received an Amazon Local e-mail ad (similar to Groupon) for dental services. When I followed up here is what I found.

Notice on the right hand side. It says only 44 people bought the special. Is this good enough? I have heard of dental offices offering similar online Groupon specials having hundreds of responses. However this is the first I have personally investigated.

As much as I appreciate the potential power of social media as a marketing tool for dentists I am still waiting to see some actual case study results.

Here is a very nice example of an online video from Dr. Marc Wallach. The example is professional but not too “Hollywood”. By that I mean it demonstrates that the Dr. is competent but it is not over the top glitzy. A patient watching this video should feel re-assured that Dr. Wallach is up to date and will take very good care of them.

The video is not restricted to the dentist’s web site but is available on YouTube. YouTube is “Social Media”. This increases his web presence and enhances search engine findability.

What I am reading right now.

Businesses that continue to do what they have always done get trapped in fierce competition with others in the same business. Blue Ocean is a metaphor for open markets with less competition. The book defines these and shows readers how to find and implement blue ocean opportunities.

I have commented many times in the last few years on how powerful online reviews are becoming. It seems the industry is taking notice. There were at least nine different vendors at the Greater New York show offering some sort of system to monitor and or place online user reviews on various sites. Just in time for this.

By now I am sure you have seen a QR code or two. They are those funny looking squares of dots like the one shown here that can direct a properly equipped smart phone to a specific web site. You most often find them on business cards. I am intrigued by QR codes. They seem to have great potential however I have not yet seen anyone using them extremely well.

However I was impressed with how dental social media expert Jason Lipscombe has used them. Rather than put them on a business card Dr. Lipscombe has put them up as great big poster sized images in the windows of his office. The idea is that interested passersby will notice them and if inclined scan them to learn about the office on their smart phone.