Answer: Your overall marketing strategy should be based on best practices and on a pattern of success of other similar dental practices. It should not be based on trial-and-error, and waste of your hard earned money. This is why PatientGain has created many services to benefit healthcare providers. 4 step process used by top dental practices is outlined here. Traditional advertising is helpful, however most of the new patient acquisition happens due to digital strategies.

Answer: Yes! by far the best investment you can make is in high quality marketing and advertising platform for dental practices. However, it is not “one” thing you need to do. These days it is very competitive. You must use a complete and comprehensive HIPAA compliant platform for your dental practice. See more about GOLD service $799/mon for dental practices. If you are in a competitive area, you will need SEO and online advertising.

Answer: There are 2 main areas 1) Digital dental marketing 2) Digital dental advertising. Both are important, and there is an overlap. Learn more. Ultimately dental digital strategy should 1) increase number of new patients per month 2) improve retention of existing patients 3) make your dental practice more profitable.

Answer: There are endless places on the internet and traditional ways to advertise. Here are the top areas based on results and ROI (Return on investment). There are specific techniques used by dental advertising companies like PetentGain. It is highly recommended to work with a HIPAA compliant dental marketing company.

Top sources of new patients: (Online)

a. Google PPC ads (immediate results – costs money and is complex)
b. Google Organic SEO (takes time to establish – costs money and time and is complex, but produces the best ROI for your marketing dollars)
c. Google Local SEO (depends on your presence on directories like 1. Google Business Page 2. Facebook Business Page 3. Yelp Business Page. 4. Other)
d. Facebook ads (immediate results – costs money)
e. Instagram ads (immediate results – costs money)
f. Online ads on related sites (for example dental specific sites)
g. Traditional dental marketing – Traditional marketing for dentists includes radio ads, direct mail, billboards, local television commercials.

Answer: Yes – You should not overlook traditional, offline marketing.

Top sources of new patients: (Offline)

1. Simple Human Touch. Simply speak with patients. Listen to them. Build relationships
2. Referral Marketing (slow results – costs time and effort and constant relationship building)
3. Networking (slow results – costs time and effort and constant relationship building)

Traditional Marketing
How can direct mail marketing help a dental practice get new patients and promote brand awareness?
Unlike many other forms of traditional marketing, direct mail marketing has a degree of targeting. If using Radio or TV advertising broadcasts to a large area, a dental practice is spending money to promote their practice to someone who may be too far away to drive to it for services. This is only advantageous if a dental practice is in the middle of a highly urbanized area or has a chain of practices over a broadcast area. However, a dental practice can determine where their advertising will be sent to in a direct mail marketing campaign. They can target communities and neighborhoods with relative ease.
Mail volume today is 50% less than it was 20 years ago, according to the United States Post Office. A dental practice has to compete with far less in a mailbox than it did two decades ago. Even with that to consider, a mailer needs to be designed to stand out among the other bills and mail someone receives. Many birthday cards are sent out in color envelopes that are different shapes from a standard envelope for that very reason! A dental practice should experiment with different brand colors, shapes, and even the paper texture they use when sending out their marketing mailers. The goal is to have a household pin up the mailer onto a fridge or corkboard to advertise to them every day.
The United States Postal Service also has some tools that make it easy for a dental practice to advertise in a community if a certain amount of volume is being mailed. They have tools that allow a dental practice to map out where exactly they would like to mail to arrive. If marketing mail is sorted and prepackaged by the prescribed methods, a dental practice may qualify for cheaper, presorted mail rates. To ensure a mailer is as effective as possible, it needs to have:
Name of a dental practice
Address, including any suite or office numbers
Website URL
Hours of operations
Phone number
Call to action
Can a newspaper be an effective way to advertising a dental practice?
Overall, national and regional newspapers will not be very cost-effective to advertise a dental practice, much like it is for advertising on the radio or TV. Again, this may be more appealing if there is a regional chain of practices, but it may not be cost-effective even then. However, a dental practice should keep its eyes open for local, community, or neighborhood publications. These very small publications generally cover local community events, news, and concerns. While their footprint and readership are very small, it can be a very cost-effective way to promote a brand if a dental practice serves the same community. A dental practice will not be advertising to households that live too far away from the facility. Many of these smaller publications have a subscription to which the paper gets mailed, or stacks are left at local businesses. These papers generally publish a weekly or monthly edition of their paper.
Advertising in one of these papers that can appear in several ways. A popular method is to buy traditional ad space to promote the dental practice and service. Depending on the amount of space purchased, a dental practice will need to be creative in promoting themselves. An ad should including a phone number, and a URL so a potential patient can learn more about the available services. Another way is to pay to have an in-depth interview with a dentist or a provider to appear in the paper as an article. It may be possible to get this for free if you send them a press release and pitch a story to them, but if that does not work, you may be able to purchase some space for an article.
While not true at every small publication, there is sometimes a digital version of the paper. Be sure to have these publications include a link to the site for additional SEO value. A dental practice can also send a link of the article over social media channels and even as part of an email marketing message.

Answer: Typical range is $750 to $10,000 per month, depending on size and number of patients desired.

Dental practices – General dentists

The typical range is $750 to 2800 per month, spend on average spend $1830 per month per location.

Dental practices – General dentists with cosmetic focus (implants, Invisalign)

These dental practices treat general dentistry patients, like cleaning, and yearly preventive exams, however their focus is big ticket items. This typically includes dental implants, Invisalign, and other similar services. The typical range is $2550 to 5800 per month, spend on average spend $3300 per month per location.

Dental practices – Specialist dentists

The typical range is $1300 to 3210 per month, spend on average spend $2240 per month per location. These type of practices include Endodontists, TMJ disorders, sleep apnea, oral appliances etc.

Dental practices – Celebrity & cosmetic focus

The typical range is $8300 to $18850 per month, spend on average spend $9600 per month per location. These type of practices include dentists who do not accept insurance, and accept limited amount of patients, but each patient is treated as a “celebrity” with extreme focus on customer service, and results for each patient. Services include invisalign, porcelain veneers, whitening, bonding, laminates, implants, and orthodontics.

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is the process of updating your website’s content so that a search engine better understands the context of the content of your website. Improving the quality and quantity of a dental website will make it more relevant to search results for potential patients. SEO is vital to increase the ranking of a website in organic rankings, which does not cost anything for a dental practice unlike pay per click ads.

A crucial part of Dental SEO is identifying what keywords and phrases your patients will use when they are looking for services you provide. Many of your new patients are not going to know your dental practice exists, but they will know what services they want. By infusing your content with the keywords, phrases, and questions potential patients use while looking for a healthcare solution, your site will look more relevant to a search engine, increasing its organic rank. Be careful, do not jam as many keywords as possible into every sentence, paragraph, or webpage, as that could lead to your website being penalized. It is better to sprinkle these words into your content than to have your content marinate in it.

Dental SEO as a whole can be broken down into three smaller general areas: Technical SEO, Off-Page SEO, and On-Page SEO.

Example of a Dental SEO of Google search.

Technical SEO helps a dental website by optimizing a site’s “behind the scenes” technical aspects. A website that has undergone technical SEO improvements will likely look visually indisputable from a site that does not improve its technical SEO. However, someone who begins to explore a website with this improvement will see some differences and have a better user experience. Technical SEO will help to:

• Eliminate dead links
• Make a website mobile-friendly
• Eliminates duplicate content
• Implement structured data
• Add an XML map
• Make a site more crawlable by search engines
• Improve overall URL structure to make it more user-friendly.

Many dental practice owners may not be fully aware of how impactful off-page SEO is to their overall organic ranking. Some do not put a lot of effort into it because much of it is hard to control. Off-Page SEO refers to backlinks to your dental website from other websites. A backlink is exactly what it sounds like: it is a link back to your website from another website. These can be very valuable if they are from noted, authoritative, and reliable websites. While almost any backlink to your dental website has some value, the most valuable ones come from .gov, .edu, or .org websites. These are often very authoritative websites that have a lot of relevancy.

One backlink you do not want is one from a link farm or a website with many links on them and no content. While you can not control who links to your website, you can disavow any links to your website. Search engines generally penalize websites associated with link farms, but if you disavow that link, they will know to ignore it and not count it against your organic ranking.

On-Page SEO for dental websites is more than just improving the content of service pages. Your dental website likely has visuals in the form of pictures, graphs, videos, and other visuals. All of this media needs to be optimized for a website. First, any visuals on a website need to be optimized for speed. Unlike traditional print media, the highest quality and highest resolution pictures are not required for websites. While you certainly want a picture to be detailed and crisp, it needs to load quickly. Any videos should also be embedded into a site and hosted offsite to improve overall load speed. Second, visuals need to have an alt-tag associated with them. While improving, search engines can not “read” pictures effectively, only text. Assigning an “Alt-Text” to a picture tells a search engine what that picture is about. While a website visitor will not see the Alt-Text, a search engine will. Finally, both the content and the visuals need to be arranged in a way, so that it is visually appealing to a user. The use of H1, H2, and H3 headers will help organize your content for your visitors and the search engines crawling your site. If it is hard to navigate, a website visitor will soon leave and look at other results. This will hurt your overall rankings.

On-Page Dental SEO often works hand in hand with another dental marketing area discussed below: Content Marketing.

Content marketing is an ongoing process that will significantly help your website’s overall organic ranking and often works jointly with various other SEO work. If you need only to remember one thing about content marketing, it is that “Content is King.” The more content you have, generally, the better your website will do in search engines. This does not mean you should load up your site with content fluff to reach a magic word count. Your content needs to be unique, engaging, authoritative, and relevant to the page’s topic. A well-written 1,000-word page is going to perform better than a poorly organized and written 3,000-word page.

Content length matters because it impacts how long a website visitor will spend on your website. Someone will spend less time on a page with 200 words of engaging content than they would on a page with 1000 words of engaging content. Time spent on a website tells a search engine that the content is relevant and informative and that a website is an excellent choice for those search terms. If a website user quickly goes back to search results and explores other dental websites, it indicates to a search engine that your site is not a suitable choice.

Essentially, content marketing is improving, refining, updating, or adding content to your website. This should not be done all at the same time once a year. You would be essentially replacing your entire website in the eyes of a search engine, which will throw your organic rankings into disarray. A dental website should be updated bit by bit over time throughout the year. This shows a search engine that a site is constantly being kept up to date and is as relevant as possible. Pages should be evaluated throughout the year and updated as needed. If no improvements or additions can be made, consider starting a blog and adding entries to it at least once a month about important dental health topics.

Well-written award-winning content about a dental practice and the services they offer will not do much if no one ever has a chance to read it. A website must be user-friendly and easy to navigate by any website user, both a regular patient and a first-time visitor. Your website’s most essential and popular pages should be only a click away from your home page. The fewer clicks a website visitor has to make to find the information they are looking for or accomplish the task they set out to do, the more likely they are to convert into a patient. Fortunately, using the best SEO practices will help make your website easier to navigate for both the potential patient and search engines. Periodically review the organization of your website and see what improvements can be made. Pages that are popular today may not be popular next year, or more likely, you may find yourself rotating certain pages throughout the year as the seasons change.

“I feel the need—the need for speed!” is not only a line Maverick says in “Top Gun,” but it also a good motto for your website. The quicker your website loads on a desktop computer, mobile device, or tablet, the better. For better or worse, today’s society wants things right away. Every second it takes for a dental website to load, more potential patients are clicking on the back button and looking at other possible dental practices. As a result, search engines consider the loading speed of a website when producing organic results. It is not a good user experience for someone to wait forever for a website to load, which means a slow-loading website will see its organic rank fall.

Site speed must constantly be monitored. Just because a site loads quickly today does not mean it will load as quickly next month or next year. Technical faults, updates in code, or changes in the platform a website is hosted on can silently gum up the works for site speed without an owner noticing. By constantly monitoring it, you ensure that any problems are caught quickly before they significantly impact your organic rankings. The most common culprits to slow loading times for a website are pictures, videos, and code that have not been optimized for speed. Another common issue is site speed improvements being made only for desktop computers and little if not attention being paid to how it impacts the mobile experience. Both are vitally important to overall search rankings.

Determining the SEO keywords that highlight the dental services at a dental practice is crucial. Your website already has the word “Dentist,” “Dental Practice,” and “Dentistry” throughout its content. So if someone were to search for “Dentist near me,” you have that SEO keywords covered. However, not everyone will use such broad search terms when looking for a dentist. Some potential patients will use words for specific services they need in their search. For example, instead of searching for “Dentist near me,” someone looking for a particular service may search with:

• Root canal dentist near me
• Teeth whitening services near me
• Braces near me
• Oral examinations near me
• Tooth pulling dentist near me

As you can see, each of those services above requires a dentist but not each of those searches has their word dentist in them. Checking to make sure you have the word “Dentist” on every page is not going to be enough. For every service you offer, a dental practice needs to develop keywords for each of them. Some of these keywords may appear on the home page, but each service should have a site page, and those keywords should be used on that page. Be careful not to mix keywords across pages, so root canal keywords and braces keywords remain unique to their pages.

Developing your SEO keyword list can be daunting. The best guideline to follow is to find keywords and phrases that describe the services you offer and will be the words typed into a search engine. If your content has the exact words, phrases, or even question someone is typing into a search engine, you increase the likelihood of your site ranking high on organic results. These keywords are high value and are likely to have the highest website visitor conversions. Your keywords should attempt to highlight on your content pages should be:

• Dental services offered at your dental practice
• Location of the dental practice
• Credentials of the dentists and other providers working there
• Reviews and testimonials from past patients
• Current and active promotions

For a dental practice to be successful, it needs to engage in a robust digital dental marketing plan. Relying on word of mouth and hoping to be the only dentist in town will only work in very rural parts of the country. Chances are you not only have other dental competitors, but they are also engaging in digital advertising. According to ADA (American Dental Association) Annual income of $204K for general dentists and $343K for specialists, However this can be much higher if you employ dental marketing and advertising techniques. If you plan to grow your dental practice, digital dental advertising can not be ignored (see examples & learn more).

Yes, this is extremely important. over 80% of dental patients pay attention to reviews. Specifically Google reviews. 72% Of the patients who are unhappy and who post negative feedback on Google and Yelp are not doing so because of the patient-physician experience; they are unhappy due to billing issues, incorrect deductible payment, rude front desk person, lack of perceived patient focus, improper handling of the paper-work, long wait time or impolite response from a clinic staff member ( non-physician ). 28% of the time it is patient-physician related. Read more about reputation management for dentists and how it impacts your practice.

Example below illustrates that reputation and reviews of your dental practice are extremely important for not only to attract new patients, but to keep existing patient base keeps on coming back for great dental services you provide.

To have a successful dental practice, there needs to be an effective dental website. A website will be something practically all current and potential patients will visit during their healthcare journey. Just because a dental practice has an attractive or expansive website does not necessarily mean it is an effective website. Learn about 9 characteristics of a dental website design effectiveness.

Both of these mediums are very effective. Let’s review how these advertising mediums work. Short answer, Google ads perform better than social media ads for dental practices. Read on below.

1. Search ads on Google are based on a user’s intent, meaning that the user who would typically go to google search page and look for “dental implants near me” is looking for a dental practice who can help the patient with a dental implant. Google ads are more complex to setup properly and manage. It requires years of experience in Google PPC ads to be really effective.

2. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok ads are an example of “interest based advertising”, this type of advertising is also known as “display advertising” . Display advertising has been around for a long time. It has been refined and is very intelligent. It can take into account over 100 signals used by Facebook, Instagram and TikTok’s AI engine to display targeted ads to a potential patient who may be interested in “dental implants near me”. Facebook, Instagram ads are much easier to setup, and monitor.

So the key difference between search ads (Google PPC Ads for dental practices) and Facebook and Instagram ads is that they target a potential dental patient differently. They both deliver good results. However we have found that there can be differences in the quality of leads and ultimately number of actual patients who pay for your dental services.

There are hundreds of ways to advertise your dental practice. There are 2 main ways to advertise 1) Traditional offline advertising 2) Modern digital advertising. They are both effective. However digital advertising has much higher return on investment (ROI) . You also have more control over your advertising budgets.

Example of a Facebook ad for a dental practice:

As a dental practice manager or a provider owner, you always have to think about how to get new patients in the door this month, this week, and this day. However, you are also worried about constant growth of your dental practice also. In short, 1) For short term patient acquisition use digital advertising (Google PPC Ads, Facebook Ads) to attract new patients 2) For long term success, use dental SEO strategies. Both are expensive and time consuming.