At DSG, we’ve always taken pride in our eclectic client roster. While some agencies find great success in focusing on specific niches, our clients span a wide range of verticals including home services, financial services, healthcare, retail, B2B and many more.
This certainly makes sense as our core offering of Digital Business Information Management (DBI) is important for companies of all types. Recently, through our growing partnership with Gargle, we have had the opportunity to work with numerous dental practices of varying sizes and across different geographies.
This deep dive into the dental vertical has revealed trends and offered insights into how to best activate DBI for Dentists. We thought it would be useful to share some of our findings. Never one to pass on a good pun, we like to call it DBI Best Practices for Dentists.
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)
GBP – is a high traffic, foundational platform that when activated can improve patient engagement as well as attract new patients.
Best Practices Tip #1 – When building your practice’s GBP, make sure you explicitly list all specialties (TMJ), procedures offered (whitening), and products sold (ex: invisalign). Adding this information to your profile increases your chances of appearing in search results that include these terms. Many practice managers overlook this step, but it can be a highly effective tactic for enhancing offsite SEO and findability.
Healthcare Directories/Sites
In addition to the profile pages your practice has across the ecosystem of search engines, online directories, review sites, social media sites & mapping/nav apps, there are also profile pages on numerous healthcare specific search, review and informational platforms.
Deploying a listing management technology to syndicate correct and consistent information across the web is a crucial component of local SEO.
Best Practices Tip #2 – Expand your practice’s online listings strategy to include claiming and activating the healthcare related platforms. For example, Yext offers a bundle of additional healthcare directories that push your accurate, practice verified information to a suite of healthcare sites such as WebMd, Vitals and Doctor.com. Activating these profiles captures an expanded audience at a reasonable price. Specifically, an audience who may be researching reviews and specialties.
Yelp
Many people still primarily associate Yelp with restaurants and food. However, over the past 5 years, Yelp’s healthcare practice traffic has increased exponentially. Claiming and activating this profile for your practice will enhance visibility into this highly motivated, ready to buy audience.
Best Practices Tip #3 – Many dental practices overlook Yelp. Yet done right, Yelp can be a powerful vehicle for driving new patients and lifting the image of your practice. Beyond the claimed profile page, Yelp offers multiple features that can amplify the online presence of your practice. These include featured messages, photo portfolios, and professional licenses. Spending a little bit of time building out your Yelp profile can yield significant returns in increased traffic and new patients.
If you would like more information on how to leverage Yelp for lead generation, check out our recent webinar.
Doctor Listings
Create online listings for your doctors too! Every DBI tip we have listed above for your practice can be applied to your individual doctors. Creating profiles for both will increase your digital real estate and chance for exposure.
Best Practices Tip #4 – Start with claiming or creating GBP profiles for each doctor in the practice. A quick search for the name of the physician will reveal if they have an existing profile, if one needs to be created, it can be easily created upon request to Google or a third party.
Next, align the DBI on the doctor profiles to include similar information to that found on your practice profile. Once again, this will capture incremental users who may be searching for a doctor by name rather than the practice.
Summary
Dental practices are extremely busy and often don’t have sufficient time or resources to dedicate to marketing. Fortunately, marketing doesn’t always require monumental investments of money and time. By following these simple to execute tips, your practice should see improved online traffic and engagement that converts to new patient growth.
In the future blogs, we will be highlighting additional best practices for dentists as well as other verticals. If you have any questions or need any help with managing your Digital Business Information, please contact us here.