Paid Search for Your Dental Office

Have you ever wondered why there are specific websites recommended on the top and side of the Google and Bing searches?

The answer is that those businesses pay to be shown when you make a specific search. Every time a person clicks on one of these recommended links, the advertiser pays a fee for that traffic.

Dental offices can use Google (AdWords) and Bing paid search to make sure that their office websites are being seen whenever someone types in a specific set of search terms. You can pay for very specific searches. For example if your office was in the city of Anaheim, California the you could pay for the specific search terms such as: Anaheim Dentist, Dentist Anaheim, dental office Anaheim, etc… Your website would only be recommended when those specific terms were entered into the Google search box and you only pay when someone clicks on your specific ad – this is highly target advertising – you are only getting viewers for people looking for your office.

You want your search terms to be very specific. If you were just to ask Google to send you traffic for the search term Dentist then you might get 100,000 viewers to your website but 99.9% would be from over 100 miles away from your office and not legitimate potential customers. You would also have to pay for 100,000 clicks on your ad to Google which would be a ton of money. You must be specific – you want to pay for targeted viewers.

Setting up your Google and Bing advertising is very simple but learning how to use the marketing features takes some time. You shouldn’t just set your marketing up once and never return. You should go back on a very regular basis and adjust your bids and make other adjustments to your online paid marketing campaigns.

You might be best off to pay your website designer to help you set up your marketing if they also offer that service. It will cut down on your learning curve.

Dr. Corey Gold
President – Advanced Continuing Education Systems
www.aces4ce.com

Look for New Patients - Door to Door

When I first started my own private practice, I was short on two important things: cash & patients. I knew I had to do networking to help develop relationships in the community but that was going to be a long-term project. In the short-term I needed to do some form of advertising to get patients in the door.

Short on money, I used the one resource I had plenty of – time. I decided to print a free check-up and X-ray coupon and walk door to door in the area near my office. My marketing plan was not to just leave the flyer on the door but rather to knock on the door and personally deliver each flyer to the occupant.

Every day after work I would walk for about an hour and knock on doors. I would tell the people that I was a new dentist in the community and if they did not currently have a dentist that I would be happy to give them a free exam and X-rays for their entire family.

I figured I could knock on lots of doors each day but I found that I wound up talking to a lot of the people and only got a couple of dozen out each day. I had moms & dads ask me all kinds of questions and about dentistry for their kids. I had seniors ask about dentures and implants. I got all kind of questions. I started to hand out tooth brushes (with my name and office number on them) at the houses I visited.

The door-to-door marketing was working great and I was getting a lot of new patients. I even had a few dentists call me and ask me to stop soliciting their patients. I politely told them what I was saying as I went to each door and that I was truly not trying to take patients away from other dentists rather reach the 50% of people who did not have dentists. I also pointed out that other dentist flyers and other advertising went to my patient’s homes and that they did not seem to be bothered by that. I was marketing my practice – they were free to walk the streets too.

Although no other marketing project ever brought me more solid, long-standing patients than my walking campaign, I only did it that one year. Although many years have passed since my street-walking marketing campaign – the marketing would still work today. People WANT TO KNOW their dentist and people love to ask questions. If you are short on patients you might want to consider going door-to-door looking for them.

Dr. Corey Gold

President – Advanced Continuing Education Systems
www.aces4ce.com