You’ve done it-you’ve created a truly brilliant website that contains all the pertinent information about the dental services you offer along with contact information so new patients know where to find your practice. You’ve even added a convenient map that will allow people to drive straight to your office with ease. So why aren’t new patients flowing in to your office at a good enough rate to ensure that your days are full of appointments? Simply answered, it’s because people who are using the Internet to search for the services you offer never see your information. Merely having a great website does not generate traffic. You have to have a good marketing tool or else your website just won’t show up easily on Internet searches.

Your website may give you a new patient here or there but this is not getting the most out of your site. If you fail to choose a good marketing plan, your website will end up being only a way for existing patients to get your phone number or address. You have a well-designed website. Why not maximize the number of times it will be seen? If you do not, it will stagnate on the Internet and be overlooked by prospective patients who, instead see another competitively marketed dental website.

My time investigating dental marketing online has shown me the marketing plans dentists have used with great success, some with moderate success and a huge advertizing bill, and some that just do not work to optimize a dental website. I would like to share my findings about these marketing strategies; both the good and the ineffective, so that when you choose a marketing plan for your dental practice you can avoid the tools that will not be successful to your marketing campaign.

Some marketing tools, Yahoo! Answers for example, are good ways to generate a flow of traffic to your website. On the other hand, maintaining this type of advertizing takes a monstrous amount of your time, which is time taken away from your practice and your family. To implement this type of marketing, you will need to sign up to use the forum, which in this case is a place where people can go and post questions about dental services. You will also need to sign up to get an email alert when one of these questions is asked. This answer will need to be given fairly quickly. After that, the person whose question you have then answered might come into your practice for their dental needs. This marketing tool is not the most time saving way to advertize online because you will have to wait for a question to come in, take the time to answer it thoughtfully and then hope you’ve earned a new patient.

Another moderately successful tactic some dentists are using is to keep up a dental blog. This is no time saver, because you will need to post new entries constantly to keep new information turning up on the Internet all the time. It takes large amounts of time to write about the dental services you’ve provided and these will need to be posted anonymously, as well. The blogs will need to be continuously written for a long time to achieve positive effects of this type of marketing. To get away from these time commitments, some may elect to purchase advertizing with a site like Google Adwords, where all that needs done is picking keywords to drive searches your way. This way of advertizing works; although, it is extremely costly.

Something you want to accomplish in any Internet marketing program for your dental practice is something that’s low cost. If something winds up costing you $200.00 to $500.00 every month, that adds up to more than $2,000.00 to $5,000.00 a year. The other drawback with using click-through advertising is that you can have competitors click on your ads and wind up costing you significant amounts of money. Also, when people come and click on your ads, there’s no guarantee they’re going to wind up in your office. The actual conversion rate for click-through ads for many different services is less than one to two percent. Can you imagine paying $5.00 for a click-through, and then of those people that are clicking the actual cost of someone who walks through your door is more than $200.00? You barely break even on it.

There is a better time- and cost-effective way for a dental practice to advertize online. Some dentists have started asking the patients that are happy with their experiences to go to a third-party site like Yelp to post a review of their practice. This is extremely effective in getting good information in circulation on the Internet because when someone searches for a dentist they find favorable reviews about the dentist’s practice. This works well to bring in new patients. Although these dentists are getting good reviews posted from their patients, there is the problem that not every patient is pleased with their experience with the dentist even though the dentist thinks they are. This patient then will go to the site and post a questionable, or a negative review that is damaging to the dentist’s online reputation and does exactly the opposite of what the advertizing was supposed to do. Instead of finding purely favorable reviews during a search, a potential new patient could find something negative, and this is clearly not the goal.

Even though 80 percent of prospective dental patients start their search on something like Google, reviews at any kind of web site are indexed by the search engines, and when they’re indexed, they’re picked up and patients are attracted to practices that have favorable reviews. The major drawback by sending your patients to a third-party review site is you have absolutely no control over what is said about your practice, even though you may think the patient’s going to have something favorable to say. The other major drawback is that it limits your ability to collect favorable reviews. You clearly don’t want to have somebody who just may have something moderately good to say, and you’re not sure if it’s going to be moderately good or somewhat negative to go to a review site and write something that doesn’t put your dental practice in a favorable light.

There is now a way for dentists to have control over all their reviews and effectively market a practice online without breaking their advertizing budgets. Creating your own site for your patients to post their reviews will put you in control. Your review site will be complete with your contact information, your logo and large amounts of positive feedback written by your happy patients. This cuts out all the time it takes to write your own Web content, and it has a low cost compared to the other Internet advertizing tools I’ve discussed. Your patients will be happy knowing that you have created a place just for them to write their reviews of their experiences so you will have plenty of information to work with-both good and bad. You are bound to have at least a few unfavorable reviews and these can be used to make changes to create a better experience for your patients while at your office. The good review can easily be pushed out onto the Internet to be indexed by search engines, which will drive new patients to your practice. Planning a review site is clearly a great way to utilize your patients review to generate positive feedback for your practice on the Internet, something that translates into new patients easily finding nothing but good things about you when they look for a dentist in your community.