The dental patient journey has four steps. We will discuss these steps and we will show you how PHARMED targets dental patients in each step of their journey with dental ads and other marketing efforts specific to dental practices.

 

 

Step 1: Dental Symptom Awareness

 

Early in their journey, dental patients experience symptoms and are looking online for contextualization, reassurance, and diagnosis. Clearly the early dental symptoms for patients include pain or oral discomfort, i.e. foul breath, bad taste and others.

Patient problem: ​Find the right information about their symptoms.​

Your solution: Dental symptom awareness, and through it, your own brand awareness.

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At this stage, dental patients may not be acquainted with your dental practice name or dental brand name. Help them become familiar by offering tangible value: Appropriate, balanced, scientific information relevant to their symptoms.

We can do this together with: 

• Content Generation for Dental Symptom Awareness

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM, Google Ads)

• Social Media Marketing (SMM, Facebook Ads)

 

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Content Generation for Symptom Awareness

Unless your digital properties such as your dental practice website have appropriate content, patients will be shifted to other practices. Content should use keywords relevant to your dental services and the symptomatology of the diseases that you treat.

We can do this together with:

1. Disease Awareness Presentations

2. Medical Brochure Design

3. Keeping up to date a dental blog on your website.

 

 

Dental Awareness Presentations

 

Why disease awareness presentations?

Over 90% of patients use Google to search for symptoms and diagnosis before they start searching for a doctor.

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You, as a dentist, have the responsibility to educate your patients and protect them from misinformation that crowds the internet. But there are significant benefits for you as well:

• Show that you are an authority in your field

• Show to patients that you care about their wellbeing and oral hygiene.

• Boost your dental website organic traffic

• Ultimately increase your reputation and get more patient appointments.

 

What are the PHARMED disease state presentations?

PHARMED doctors and medical writers will create from scratch a disease state presentation of about 40 slides with content, graphs, images, peer reviewed journal references and will do this in a manner that will adapt to your target audience. Sample contents of a disease state presentation are:

• Overview of dental disease

• Epidemiology and burden of dental disease

• Pathophysiology

• Etiology

• Symptoms & signs of dental disease

• Diagnosis

• Prognosis

• Management

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Medical Brochure Design

 

Why do I need brochures for my dental practice?

A professional illustrated brochure crafted by PHARMED medical doctors working closely with our designers is a powerful way to:

• Showcase your services and staff to colleagues and establish a referral pathway for new patients.

• Showcase your expertise and dental branding.

• Explain dental treatments & services to patients.

• Use call to action to get more dental appointments.

• Make promotional offers and bring existing and new patients to your practice.

 

 

Dental Blog Content

Dental Website content is the foundation of dental practice online visibility. The best way to increase your website content without negatively impacting the website’s navigational structure is blogging.

PHARMED’s signature dental website comes with an active dental blog module that you can use to blog yourself or retain our doctors to blog on your behalf.

 

Why do I need others to blog on my behalf?

Subscribing to the PHARMED dental blogging package will have a medical doctor or healthcare professional creating blog articles for your dental website on your behalf. Here are the benefits:

• Dental Practice Referrals: Strong blog content will lead to other medical websites and blogs linking back to you and direct patients to your website.

• High Quality: Content will be created on the topics of your interest by a medical professional, it will be referenced, concise, balanced, and appropriate for your patient audience.

• Consistency: Blogging will be according to schedule constantly without interruptions. Websites that are stagnant through time get penalized by search engines.

• SEO: Blogging when it is done by doctors and SEO experts, it involves expert keyword research and leads to better ranking on search engines.

• Show that you are online: An active blog shows to the patient an active, vibrant dental practice.

• Stand out as authority in your field: Provide useful information that will engage and retain patients.

 

 

Search Engine Optimization for Dental Practices (SEO)

 

What is SEO?

SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve your dental practice’s online rankings, drive website traffic, and increase awareness in search engines.

In other words, SEO is the process of getting traffic from the ‘free,’ ‘organic,’ ‘editorial’ or ‘natural’ search results on search engines.

 

Why is Dental SEO different than any other type of SEO?

Dental SEO, similarly, to any medical SEO, has a dual purpose: The content must be friendly to the search engine crawlers, so your website ranks well in results. However, it must also be understandable and not misleading to the patients who will read it. Ambiguous or misleading medical or dental content is not only bad practice but may also lead to lawsuits. Therefore, we feel that only healthcare marketing professionals with a degree in life sciences should be involved in medical SEO and dental SEO.

 

Why is SEO important?

• Discoverability: Organic search is most often the primary source of website traffic.

• SEO Builds Trust & Credibility: The goal of any experienced SEO professional is to establish a strong foundation for a beautiful website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search, thanks to the trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties.

• It is actually do or die: If your dental practice is not on page 1, you’re not winning the click. It’s no secret in the world of SEO that if you’re not on page 1, you’re likely not reaching many prospective dental patients through the organic search. A recent study shows that the first three organic search ranking positions result in nearly 40 percent of all click-throughs, while up to 30 percent of all results on pages 1 and 2 don’t get clicked at all.

 

Why is SEO such a complex process?

SEO has to do with the technical (non-visible) part of your website as much as with the visible content. It also has to do with the authority of your website among other relevant websites: Usually referred as off-site SEO, this is the number of "backlinks", aka links on other websites pointing to yours. It's like the citations for a journal article.

 

SEO leads to free website traffic and can contribute up to 50% or more visitors to your pages. For this reason, it compliments and often rivals paid dental advertising methods, but is also a time consuming and long term, ongoing process.

 

 

On-Site Search Engine Optimization

 

What is On-Site SEO and why is it important?

On-site SEO, also sometimes referred to as on-page SEO, refers to processes that will optimize features and content on your dental website. This includes tweaking components of your website such that visitors can easily understand what is presented to them on each page, and quickly decide whether it answers the question posed in their original search. For example, optimizing onsite-SEO includes publishing relevant content, enhancing titles, HTML tags, and images used.

 

Having good on-site SEO allows search engines to interpret your website’s content in the same way a human viewer would and increases the chances of your dental website appearing in search results when a prospective patient makes a relevant query.

 

Improving your on-site SEO will increase traffic to your website via search engine searches and bring your website up in the search engine rankings.

 

Will keywords help improve my On-Site SEO?

Although keywords still matter, they are no longer the most crucial aspect of on-site SEO. Modern day search engines are capable of more sophisticated techniques. Rather than simply determining whether a web page contains the same words included in a search, search engines can deduce the overall meaning of a web page using keyword synonyms, as well as consider the context in which the word appears. For this reason, it is crucial to consider the relevance of your page’s content and how helpful it will be with regards to the search queries you hope will lead patients to your website.

 

Content should be written with both the search engine and viewers in mind. The information on your website is being produced for prospective patients and should therefore be high quality and meaningful, while at the same time being made in a way that search engines can understand it.

 

How do I ensure that my website meets the requirements for sufficient On-Site SEO?

To best ensure that your website is reaching its full potential with regards to on-site SEO it should comprise content that is:

 

• In-depth: For search engines to adequately analyze and comprehend a website’s content, it must be detailed and thorough. If content is lacking in depth, it will not stand as good a chance in the rankings.

• User-friendly: Content should be easy to understand, and aesthetically organized on the website such that it is easy to navigate and read. Ads and external links should be kept to a minimum or should be organized out of the way of core content.

• Distinguishing: Including content on your website that is not original or unique will significantly decrease its chances of ranking high on search engines

• Reliable: All information included on your practice’s website should be assumed to be a trustworthy source of information on the given subject area. Remember E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.

 

 

Off-site Search Engine Optimization

 

What is Off-Site SEO?

Off-page SEO essentially refers to any search engine optimization that occurs outside of your actual website’s page. Brand building, content marketing, social media management, and online reviews all play major roles in your website’s off-page SEO.

 

Why do I need Off-Site SEO for my website?

In short, inadequate off-site SEO will cause great difficulty for your practice’s website to rank in the competitive search engine rankings.

 

What are some things that can help improve my websites Off-Site SEO?

• Link Building: Link building is one of the most important tactics in building your website’s off-site SEO. Link building refers to getting other websites to include links to your website’s page. Ensuring these external websites hold high authority will help to further increase your website’s rankings.

• Brand Building: Building up your practice’s brand will help search engines better understand the credibility of your website and the content which it includes. Strong branding will also bring with it a natural increase in links and mentions across the web.

• Content Marketing: Marketing of content outside of your own website’s page is crucial. For example, publishing an infographic that gets mentioned and shared across social media, publishing blog posts, or conducting surveys online.

• Events: Online events like webinars are significant as they are not only a way to gain recognition for your practice online, but they also are a great way to help build your brand, and therefore increase off-site SEO.

• Reviews: Online reviews are vital in forming your practice’s online reputation. A medical practice that receives positive reviews on third-party platforms not only demonstrates a strong brand, but also gains authority and trust in prospective patients’ minds.

 

 

Search Engine Marketing (SEM, Google Ads)

 

What is SEM and how is it relevant to dental marketing trends in 2021?

Search engine marketing involves practices to market your practice and the services offered within it. SEM is also sometimes referred to as paid search or pay per click (PPC). This includes paid advertising that will show up in search engine results. SEM is crucial as it offers a great opportunity to place advertisements for your practice right in front of prospective patients who are urgently trying to find dental services.

 

SEM differs from SEO in that it refers specifically to marketing that is paid for and placed on the web, whereas SEO refers to websites ranking high in search results due to the inclusion of relevant content for a specific search query.

 

How does SEM work and why is it important?

SEM is important because it reaches consumers at the perfect time: when they are actively searching for new information. Capturing the patient during the moment when they show intent is the most effective way to get patients to your practice. When patients are in the process of making online searches for a new dental practice is the exact moment you would want an ad for your practice to come up and draw them in to visiting your website.

 

SEM works by allowing these sponsored ads to appear at the top and side of search engine results, on the basis that the ads have keyword in common with the search query.

 

The best way to design an SEM strategy for your practice is to:

• Research keywords and compile a list of the ones that are most relevant to your website, practice, and services offered.

• Decide on the region of the search results page where you would like the ad to be shown

• Design a text-based advertisement for your practice, this will be what is later displayed on the search results page

 

 

Social Media Marketing (SMM, Facebook Ads)

 

What is Social Media Marketing for dental practices?

SMM takes advantage of social media platforms to engage with potential patients, build your brand, and increase website traffic. SMM involves publishing original content on social media profiles for your practice, while at the same time interacting with your followers. The most important platforms to consider are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

 

How does SMM work?

There are several things that must be considered with SMM. Some important things to know before you begin your SMM strategy are:

 

• The goals you wish to achieve regarding your practice with social media. This may be that you wish to increase awareness for your practice to gain more patients who can benefit from your services, or perhaps, to increase direct engagement with patients- both prospective and current.

 

• The type of content your practice aims to put out. Deciding what sort of content will be most attractive to your target audience is an important step in SMM. This content may be photos, videos, or even as simple as sharing links to relevant websites or articles. Creating a marketing persona can help immensely in making these decisions.

 

• Which Social Media platforms make the most sense for your practice. It is important to think about which of the many platforms out there will be the most useful in terms of reaching your target audience. This also may depend on the type of content you decide to publish. For example, if you aim to share informative images or infographics, Instagram may be more appropriate for this than Facebook.

 

Once you decide on these factors and begin publishing content it is important to maintain engagement with your followers. As your practice gains a following on social media, people may begin to comment on your posts, and have more conversations online regarding your practice. Ensuring this engagement is continuous and sufficient on part of your practice is vital, as it can spread the word about your practice, as well as demonstrate high-quality doctor-patient interactions to those considering booking an appointment online.