The above question is a straightforward one, and I want to offer a straightforward response: No. Almost every dental practice at this point has some sort of online presence. Some of those online presences are managed by insurance companies offering the location details and contact information about the dentist. Most of the time, the online presence is simply a website about the dental practice.
In order to understand the value of having your own web site, you need to understand how search engines rank different Internet sites. That is critical because your website ranking produces results similar to the prominence of a Yellow Page advertisement For example, if you create one of the best dental web sites in your community but it cannot be found , it is like having your dental practice advertisement in the automotive section of the Yellow Pages. Any time you create a web site, the goal is for that web site to show up very high when people are online looking for the dental services you provide.
When a consumer begins searching on the Internet for a dentist, they keep in mind the things that they want in a dental practice. Keywords and key phrases are utilized in this way because a person may search looking for services such as teeth cleaning, gentle dentistry, or children’s dentistry. It is very important that the website is rich in text describing the significant services offered at the dental practice, because these are the keywords matched by Internet searches when they direct consumers to the site. It is also important that a website is regularly recharged with changing and current information; if a website is not charged it will just sit and stagnate, and that is not optimum for successful marketing for a dental practice. Unfortunately, adding new content to keep a website fresh requires a lot of time.
The best way to get all of these things done so your website doesn’t merely stagnate in the face of competing practices is to create a site specifically for the purpose of gathering reviews from your patients. There are several benefits to creating a review site, and the biggest reward is having control over what information is published about your practice. Having your own review site will give you the control to select and then push your reviews into search engines, or to keep the reviews to use internally for the purpose of improving your patients‘ experience while they are at your practice.
Another good thing about choosing to market your dental practice using a review site is the low cost. You will not need to hire an expensive marketing company to do it. Ask your patients to write a review and make your review site easily accessible to them. You need the highest number of reviews you can get because according to original dental marketing research, just about half the reviews will contain good, relevant feedback that you will want to circulate on the Internet.
Going with a third-party site to publish your reviews is not as beneficial as having a review site for a dental practice. In order to have good results from online marketing, a practice needs as much good feedback as possible circulating to potential dental patients. A third-party site will publish negative feedback, which could harm the practice’s reputation. Using a review site lets the dentist use the negative feedback to improve the services offered to his patients while at the same time he can select the good feedback to use for marketing on the review site. Having this kind of control over a dentist’s reviews is detrimental to successful online marketing for a dental practice.
An important key to getting a practice’s main website to rank high with search engines is to make sure that the review site contains an inbound link that points to the main website. Since there will be several reviews on the review site, each review will have an inbound link to the main website, not just the one from the review site itself. The reviews should contain the location and name of the practice and the name of the dentist, because this information will act as keywords that will link Internet searches to the practice’s main website. This way, each review acts as a separate link to the main website, and will direct many more Internet searches to the practice.
You will be in control of your dental practice?s Internet reputation, save valuable time and save money when you market online using this plan. A review site is the optimum way to generate traffic to your main dental website by capturing your patient’s good feedback and circulating it in a cost-effective way that will drive searches straight to your web site, and in the end help new patients drive straight to your office door.