“Medical Search engine optimisation is the process of improving a practice’s website’s ability to be found on Google organically (without adverts), to connect with web users and turn those users into paying patients.”
Benedict.
However, this is not how dentists and medical professionals often experience working with many marketing agencies in the UK.
In This Section
Marketing Dental Practice Online
Prospective patients in your area who are ready to book will be using some of the following keywords. See search intent
- Dentists near me or Dental clinic near me
- Dentist + location or Dentist in location
- Cosmetic treatment finance or Cost of dental treatment
- Book dental appointment
- Local dental clinics or affordable dentists
- Emergency dentists
So, how do you rank #1 in Google for the above?
When buying such services for your practice or clinic,c there is a range of different prices and service levels you can choose from. All claim to work and all claim to be experts? Prices range from £200 – £4000, and all promise #1 on Google.
Define Dentist Experience of Google Optmisation Experts
What do dentists receive?
If you buy Low-cost, low-budget Optimisation and Content writing services
Sub £500 per month retainer
Originally, optimisation was going into the website's code and optimising that code so that search engines would be more inclined to rank the website higher in its index. It was primarily technical tweaks techniques that ignored content.
Any package at sub £500 is basically the same service sold 15 years ago. You would be better off buying lottery tickets.
If you buy Mid-Cost Services
Sub £995 per month retainer
As Google enhanced its algorithm's complexity, companies that work with doctors and clinics to get them to the top of Google in the UK would typically try 4 things, and if they did not work, they would give up.
- Go into a website and optimise a meta title and description of the webpage. (As the little bit like naming a word document.)
- Then, work on completing a technical tick list was achieved, things like sitemaps being submitted to Google or robot text files being correct, Google analytics added and site speed.
- They would then do some keyword or competitor research and make some suggestions.
- They would optimise the home page and a few other pages for 10 keywords.
When this did not work they would then ask for more money.
But as they know that they have a churn of customers, none of whom last longer than 6 months and that there are over 14500 dentists in the UK, frankly, why would they care?
The amount or depth of the work is never specified, nor are the qualifications or experience of the person doing the work explained.
- Vanilla Circus has a combined experience of 100+ years working on earning Google's trust and high rankings. The amount of work in terms of hours, pages, blogs and other tasks are all spelt out within your contract and monthly in advance.
What are they actually getting for their money?
Current Search Packages Dentists are Buying
Keyword Research, Page Experience, Content Gap Analysis...
All bundled Google Marketing contain a shopping list of creative services that are important to do once.
The image on the left (or above) is a competitor's price package. We won't tell you. We have added the notes in red!
A number of tasks do need doing one or at most once a quarter, but you can clearly see that for £2400 in month 2, you only receive an undefined 'Local SEO' and a report.
There is also NO CONTENT. So how is this package going to help your clinic grow?
What else who they try?
On page optimisation
In practice, this means going through the content of a page and ensuring that the header is an H1, the second header is an H2, and the third header is an H3. (H stands for a header in HTML.)
It might include ensuring that the keyword is mentioned in the metadata, the H1 title at the top of the paragraph, the bottom paragraph and as a bullet point in bold and italics. That is it.
Additional Content
The most popular packages that more Principals buy in our experience is approximately £600-3500 which initially completes some of the above tasks and then settles into a routine of creating 2-4 new blog posts per month.
Most Doctors will be very old men by the time this strategy works.
The choice of topic for the blog posts is invariably around how to brush your teeth and advice on when to see the dentist if your teeth hurt.
Strategy
None.
A better service
Be demanding, your patients are
An SEO strategy is the foundation of your digital marketing.
Your Ad spend, and social media are part of dental marketing; they are not a substitute.
If we ask a practice manager what dental search engine optimisation is I know that 8/10 would define it as something we tried and it didn't work, a waste of time.
And if you buy any of the services above and implement them in that way, then you are right; they are a complete waste of time.
Did you know that most companies offering the above low-level, poor-quality traffic services are web design companies.
Web designers saw a quick and easy way to make additional money based on a small monthly retainer at the end of your web project.
The web designer would ask the client would like some to be found on Google the client replied yes.
The web designer then agrees to some site optimisation, blogs, and web hosting for £2500 pm. Neither knows what they are talking about.
Using this example, you can see why such services to the vast majority of clinics are seen as far less effective and far less constructive in generating leads than, for example, Google ads or advertising with Facebook.
Yesterday, we asked a surgeon if you spend £1500 on Facebook Invisalign ads what you receive is about six free consultations, of which three become new patients worth £7500.
We then asked the dentist what £1500 worth of Search Engine marketing looks like.
She just laughed and said, 'a headache.'
Stop paying Mark Zuckerberg
SEO is now an umbrella term
SEO is now an umbrella term for digital marketing that relies on Google’s organic i.e. unpaid traffic.
It is a mixture and find balance of optimisation far advanced to the examples above and professionally written content by experienced dental writers that no how to educate interest and sell to.
The search engine optimisation side of the equation is both content and word based harness to correct technical explanation that shows Google exactly what the website is about what this page of treatment is about and how the combination of website webpages words images video and code result in a high Google page position that gains traffic.
The end result is a patient who has had chance to examine your dental practices brand has had an opportunity to look at your team and your dentists and make an educated assessment that you are the right medical provider for them.
An SEO generated lead has a far higher chance of becoming a patient and remaining with the dental practice post-treatment than any lead generated by an advert.
Every dentist who advertises online knows that pay-per-click charges only go upwards. Google’s cost and Facebook’s cost per click is expensive.
What SEO means to a dental practice is not a replacement of advertising but a reduction in not only the current spend but also a replacement stream of more qualified leads to the practice that also has the additional advantage of improving the value of the overall business as the website grows is noticed and is improved. What is SEO for a dentist?
When selling a practice, one of the questions will be 'What is the traffic to the website from unpaid sources?'
Anyone can throw money at Mark Zuckerberg not everyone has the opportunity to work with one of the best SEO companies in the UK.
- Our Dental has a clear strategy aligning with the overall practice message, goals, and targets.
- Our dental marketing focuses on generating qualified local leads for new patients to buy high-end cosmetic dentistry treatments and remain paying customers for at least 5 years.
- We speak to dentists every day. We have had over 150 meetings with dental practices on Zoom.
- Our sales team speaks to new clients daily, so we know the current state of play in the UK dental market and whos doing what.
- We have also signed up to 1200 dentists to ensure we receive emails with their new offers.
- Our dental content writers have a proven track record. Search for all on 4, turkey teeth or cost of Invisalign, and at least one website on the first page will have a link to Vanilla Circus at the bottom. That means we wrote the page.
Call 01483 921741. You be the judge if we know our All on 4s from our overbites.
