BRINGO Blog

Most analysts say that more than 80% of internet searchers click on the “organic” search results as opposed to the paid advertisements on Google or the other search engines.  We agree.  So while we do manage some paid advertising campaigns for our clients, we have focused on developing our in-house expertise on Search Engine Optimization.  We have gotten good enough with healthcare SEO that we are signing up local provider clients to our product (BRINGO Top Rank) you can click here to learn more about it:  http://www.bringodentist.com/top-rank.html

This is a service where we can get YOUR website to the top of google so that prospective clients see your site the moment they are looking for a “dentist in (your area).”  Sometimes clients want to appear at the top of cosmetic dentist in their area, or chiropractor, etc….you get the idea.  Our clients tell us what services/products they want to sell more of…and we tell them how we can help them use Google to get there.

But of course, the proof is in the pudding…so allow me to show off a bit…without revealing the secrets of our clients, I will focus on some of our own properties and a few partners.

Go to google.  Type in “dental marketing” and you will see www.bringodentist.com in the top 5.  Try dental websites, and you’ll see the same thing.  Not convinced?  Try chiropractor marketing.  Or chiropractor websites.

If you want to see what we do for clients, try typing in “electronic claims” and you will see www.ansdirect.com at the top of the search results.  Every day, our client ANS is getting phone calls from prospective new clients because of our optimization.

Of course, search engine optimization takes a little time.  We just began a project to optimize a site focused on offering dentists the best online continuing education courses with access to over 150 CERP accredited courses.  The project is www.bringopro.com and over the coming weeks and months…we will also make this visible in the search results for “dental ce or dental continuing education.”  (now we are in the third page of google….the process has just begun).

Thanks,

Mark Grazman

The USA Today recently published a good article summarizing the phenomenon of online reviews. As we’ve highlighted before, traffic to local business maps and reviews sites is growing at an incredible rate, and most local search properties now offer the ability for users to rate and review local businesses, including dental, chiropractic, podiatric and other medical practices. The number of reviews online is also growing fast, with some sites claiming hundreds of thousands of reviews.

Thus, managing and soliciting reviews is a critical part of the online marketing mix that also includes creating an effective practice website, driving traffic to your website, measuring and tracking results, and managing online listings. Studies have shown that a majority of searchers for local businesses will read reviews about a business before making a decision, and many consumers’ decisions on providers are affected by reviews. We’ve also seen evidence that having many reviews from a large variety of sources can also help a practice website or practice directory listing rank highly in search engines’ local category searches, which increases visibility of the practice and helps to drive traffic and ultimately patients.

Actively managing your review profile should include actively soliciting good customers to write reviews of your practice online, paying attention to reviews that are written about your practice on the various directories, and responding to both positive and negative reviews that are out there. Doing this properly can take some time, but in the end it can have big payoffs in terms of a positive online reputation for your practice, greater visibility on the web, and ultimately more traffic to your website and patients in your office. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, this is a service that we offer to our dental, chiropractic, and other medical practice customers

Great article in the Dallas News about advances in dental technology, practices and amenities that can really differentiate a dental practice. Now more than ever, it’s not one size fits all in terms of dental practices — practices are increasingly investing in new amenities that make them stand out vs. other offices.

One thing that we often encounter in our online dental marketing service, are dental practices that have invested a thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in office equipment, training, practice improvements, but fail to effectively make these differentiating features about their practices known to prospective patients. These features are often the things that make the practice stand out from others, and should be at a minimum featured prominently on your dental website.

In addition, often consumers will search explicitly for these types of features — they will type the name of those features into a search engine when looking to choose a dentist. So, patients may type in keywords such as “Spanish speaking dentist in LA”, or “Chicago titanium implants” — so any online marketing campaign (whether search engine marketing, or search engine optimization) should look for these unique features and target these keywords in search engines. The overall traffic may not be large overall, but the traffic that does come will be highly targeted — these are potential patients that have identified a specific need — so they will be much more likely to call, and schedule an appointment.

Lots of chatter these days about how the Yellow Pages are dead — stocks are down 80-90% from a year ago for most of the major YP companies:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120399101723692463.html

UPDATE 3-6:  This MSNBC video also harps on the death of the yellow pages theme

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=676088789

I think that it’s still a bit premature to say that traditional yellow pages advertising is completely dead — I think they are still relevant in some markets. Overall YP references are down about 2-3% year upon year, but clearly the movement to online is accelerating, according to the Kelsey Group:

http://www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr080110.asp

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=74131

While the YP companies are finally starting to move aggressively online, they’re just one of many effective media that patients use to find new dentists or healthcare providers (and fairly far back in terms of importance, after the search engines, local directories, and vertical directories).

How effective is your website in bringing you prospective patients?  Do you know?

According to a survey in 2006 by Advanstar, dentists are getting on board with building websites (over 65% had websites or were planning on building one within the next year).   Given what we’ve seen with prospective patient behavior (the Internet is the #1 resource patients use to search for dentists and other healthcare providers, surpassing yellow pages and other offline resources), this is a good sign.

However, it is clearly the early stages for many providers, as the same survey found that 35% of dentists with websites either did not know whether their website had brought them new patients, or said their site had brought them no patients.

This is consistent with what we’ve seen among our client base — which is why all our patient generation programs have measurement of the effectiveness of our campaigns built into the package.  We track everything from the visitors that comes to the website, where they are coming from (down to the campaign and even keyword advertising level), what they do while on the website, and, importantly, how many of those visitors actually pick up a phone (or fill out out a schedule form on the site) and attempt to schedule an appointment.  We also offer the option to record all phone calls generated by our campaigns, so that offices can tell how many of those calls resulted in new appointments, and how many were just kicking the tires.  Our most diligent clients will also take that to the next level and track whether those patients come in for their appointments.

By providing this data, our clients are able to see instantaneously how well the patient generation campaign is working, and get a full end-to-end view of the patient generation process so they know exactly how many patients are generated for their practices each month, and what that means to the bottom line.

Gathering this data is also important in that it allows us to optimize the campaigns that we run.  Much of online advertising is about experimentation and testing — the Internet world is changing constantly, offering both new opportunities to find new patients, but also making older tactics obsolete fairly quickly.  The only way to make sure you stay ahead of the game is to constantly test new things, and measure, measure, measure results.  We are able to instantly tell when a campaign isn’t generating as much patient traffic as before, and make adjustments accordingly.  In this way we constantly optimize the campaigns we run, in order to make sure our clients are seeing a great ROI for their online advertising dollar.

Via the “Medical Quack” blog:

A recent article in the SF Business Times finds that the proliferation of ratings and reviews is having little effect on consumer behavior because it is confusing them.

Based on our experience, I’m not sure whether the conclusion is totally correct — we have seen a positive effect in generating new business for dentists and other healthcare providers based on positive reviews that we have helped them generate through their patient bases.  My guess is that the effect of the reviews probably depends on the sector and the source of the reviews - and the effect may not be as measurable in the aggregate, but for individual healthcare practices that manage their online reviews well, it can make a big difference in generating new patients.

I had meant to blog about this earlier, but it somehow got lost in the holiday rush.

TechCrunch published a great chart that shows the traffic for the various Google properties. Google Maps ranks 4th, behind general search, image search, and GMail, and also posted one of the top growth rates of all the properties (52% growth from a pretty large base of traffic).

Coupled with the recent research that shows that online resources such as maps and local search has surpassed offline media as the main place people look for local businesses, it’s obvious that paying attention to making sure your practice is visible across the most important and fastest growing online properties such as Google maps.

How do you make sure your practice is visible? While conventional wisdom says that you need a website to get started on the web, the business listing is also becoming increasingly important. In fact, for many of our clients, business listings in local directories and those focused in dental, chiropractic and other healthcare-related spaces provides a significant percentage of new patients we drive to their practices, and are often more ready to set up an appointment (begin further down the decision-making cycle).

Business listings appear on Maps whenever a user searches for a dentist, chiropractor, or healthcare provider in their area from the Maps or Local interface. In addition, it appears on the main search page (if it is optimized correctly) when someone searches on a geographic- and category-related term (such as Dentist San Diego, or Chiropractor Chicago). A basic business profile may already exist in many of the properties for your practice — most of the big players buy their data from big data clearinghouses and pre-populate basic information to fill out their directories. However, I’d advise taking a closer look at what’s contained in those listings, as most potential patients will want to know more about your practice than simply name, address, and phone number. Most directories will allow you to add additional information such as a practice description, office hours, specialties, languages spoken, parking availability, and other information that is important to potential patients. Providing and updating this information is important, as the more complete the information is, the more likely a patient will pick up the phone and call you to set up an appointment.

One other thing to notice is that many of these directories collect and/or aggregate consumer reviews. This is also becoming increasingly important to marketing your practice, as managing reviews can make or break the image your practice has online. I will write more about this topic in upcoming posts.

Chris Smith at Search Engine Land posts a useful article about the many things to think about when creating and optimizing your business listing to become visible potential patients who may search for you on the Internet:

http://searchengineland.com/071217-081815.php

Based on our experience with our clients, the local listing is a basic building block for driving online patients to your practice. Many of the topics that Smith touches on are accurate — we work with our clients to make sure the important ones for their practices are covered, including making sure the address is correct and represented correctly on the various mapping services, office hours, languages, areas served, payments, and services provided.

Once the basic listing is created, it is then important to distribute the listings across the myriad of places where patients are searching, including Google Local, Yahoo Local, Microsoft Live, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Local.com, Citysearch, Yelp, and dozens of others. We’ve found that a well-managed and optimized listing can provide dozens of patient phone calls a month, and be a key part of a successful online marketing strategy for our clients’ practices.

Here’s an good article in Search Engine Land that summarizes the evolution of search and how it is changing how people look for products and services online:

http://searchengineland.com/071127-091128.php

Danny Sullivan has put “universal search” or “blended” search in the “Search 3.0″ category, which basically means that the search engines can now break down and show search results from more specific “vertical” search engines (such as news or shopping) that may give a closer approximation to what the user is looking for. According to Sullivan, the next generation of search includes personalization and social networking (a vague notion of social networking).

Of course this is all very search-engine-centric. As we’ve seen with our clients — much vertical search and social networking (predominantly in the form of reviews) is already happening today on directories, local sites, and social sites.

The key for local healthcare providers is being visible not only in search engines (which are an important part of any search marketing strategy), but also across a wide variety of sites where qualified searches for healthcare providers are happening in their area.

Latest numbers on online advertising from the Internet Advertising Bureau and Price Waterhouse Coopers:

http://iab.net/news/pr_2007_11_12c.asp

Online advertising hit $5.2 billion in Q3 2007, up 25% from a year ago. The dollars are following the potential customers — which makes a lot of sense. People are increasingly looking for businesses online (see my last post), and online advertising offers a great way to reach them — it’s much more measurable, and your spend can be scaled to results. What’s not to like?

Oh yeah — it is time consuming and complex if you don’t know what you’re doing. More on this later…