If you’re considering having your website rebuilt — or you purchased a practice and need to create a brand and website for a complete marketing plan — be smart before you start.

The most important factors for smart dental website shopping are:

  • Service – Does someone answer the phone? Do they provide you with the answers you need? Do you feel better when the call is over, or do you feel worse?
  • Quality – What does their portfolio look like? Do their websites come up in search results? Can they show you reports that prove their sites rank high in search?
  • Value – Perhaps the most important factor is value. A marketing tool with value has a good return on investment. This means, you’re going to make a lot more revenue from the website than what you spend on it. To determine value, you must do research prior to building a site.

Know the Competition

One of the most important things you can do BEFORE shopping for a website is to know your competition. Much like a football coach watches game films of competing teams to learn their plays and tactics, I can show you what you competitors are doing so that we can develop a game plan that will give you leverage in the very competitive world of Google Search.

Finding all the relative information about competitors’ websites takes time and energy, as well as certain skills and software. If you have a current website, we also need to evaluate your site with the same measuring tools. When a dentist contacts me about higher Google rankings for his or her website, I usually pull up to three reports. Even with the research tools I have invested in, it takes about 6 hours to fully assess and evaluate a website and competing sites. I look at various factors in three kinds of reports:

  • Keyword Research – to determine which keyword phrases your target patients are searching for when shopping for the services you offer
  • Keyword Ranking – to see how your website ranks in Google Search for the top keywords in real time
  • Competitive Analysis – to learn what tactics the top 10 sites in Google Search results have implemented, so we can determine what you need to do to compete with them

From these reports, I can determine exactly where the holes are in a dentist’s online marketing, with the end-goal of building an evidence-based strategy.

Factors Under Analysis

Every SEO company has different ways of evaluating websites. Few will take the time to do a complete analysis of not only a potential client’s site (your site), but also their competitors’ sites. I’m willing to put in the time because I sincerely believe it’s in the best interest of my clients. I’ve seen so many dentists being treated poorly – over-billed and under-served by SEO companies. I will not do this. It’s unethical.

Not all factors that contribute to SEO and Google Search ranking are what we call on-page, which means on the website. Some factors are off-page. These are some of the factors we look at in our competitive analysis.

Some On-page Factors

  • Original copywriting
  • Meta descriptions
  • Title tags
  • Headings & tags
  • Alt-image tags
  • Keyword integration
  • Internal links (to pages within the website)
  • Quantity and quality of original text on each page
  • Number of pages on website
  • Clean coding
  • Fast load speed
  • Secure server
  • Age of domain (with dental content on it)
  • Traffic and click-thru rates

Some Off-page Factors

  • Quality incoming backlinks
  • Bad incoming backlinks (negative impact – must be disavowed)
  • Testimonials on Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.
  • Social media activity
  • Name, address, phone consistency (NAP)
  • Citations – quality and quantity

Value-Based SEO Requires Monthly Reporting, Review, and Revision

Most dental website companies provide monthly reporting. However, from my own experience and the experience of many frazzled dentists I’ve helped, we know that those reports are not reviewed.

Let me ask you, what good is a bank ledger if you never look at the balance? Likewise, what good are website reports if you never look at the results?

Once a website is built and live on the internet, the job of SEO has just begun. I’ve heard salespeople say this many times. Rarely have I seen evidence to back-up the claim that SEO work is done each month, even though clients are certainly charged, sometimes charged quite a lot.

Identiwrite Creative clients receive one or two reports each month, plus an editorial calendar, depending upon their monthly package.

WebCare – shows us back-end maintenance information, such as page load speed, traffic data, and security issues

SEO Ranking Report – shows us how a site ranks for a predetermined set of keyword phrases, so we can track progress month to month

Editorial Calendar – this is the blog schedule, designed with topics that incorporate low-ranking keyword phrases, and updated monthly after evaluation of the SEO Ranking Report

Also depending upon what a dentist’s monthly package includes, we may also evaluate:

  • Social activity
  • Backlink activity
  • Testimonials/reputation management activity

Dental Website Shopping. Start Here.

Do you want to know what your competitors are doing online? Are you eager to rank higher than a particular dentist in your area? Do you just want to fill your schedule? Call me, Shauna Duty, today at 940-395-5115 or email me at 940-395-5115, and let’s talk about the smart approach to dental website shopping. To learn more about my philosophy and practices regarding SEO for dentists, watch the Dentistry Uncensored video on my homepage, at www.identiwrite.com. I look forward to serving you.

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