Elsevier

Dental Abstracts

Volume 63, Issue 1, January–February 2018, Pages 11-12
Dental Abstracts

The Front Office
Online marketing strategies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.denabs.2017.09.011Get rights and content

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Background

With any online marketing strategy or plan, the dentist should make the effort to understand some basics of website ownership and search engine strategies. If the dentist can answer a few basic questions about hacking, online directories, and tracking results of the marketing effort, he or she will be more secure and confident of the practice's online marketing presence.

Hacking

The website is a dynamic component of the office's online marketing presence. To protect it from hacking, it's important to complete a quick health check every 3 months. Among the questions to ask are whether a backup of the site was done recently, whether plug-ins and other add-ons are secure, whether fill-in forms on the site work and if the people who are supposed to receive messages or e-mails from the site actually do, if the site phone number works, and if the login information to the

Online Directories

A website is a good start, but the site should be legitimized by setting up accurate profiles on sites such as Yelp, Google Local, Bing Places, Superpages, and Manta. These help to maximize the reach of the website. Specific advantages are as follows:

  • 1.

    The address or hours for the practice can be verified by searchers, avoiding loss of business.

  • 2.

    Search engines use such listings as “trust signals” that the site is in good standing. They contain links that go back to the website and important

Tracking Results

Measures should be in place to determine the effectiveness of an online presence. These measures will help in determining where to put marketing dollars. Rather than trusting a single entity to provide such tracking, it's wise to use a combination of tracking tools.

Google Analytics tracks how much traffic the website gets on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis and is free. These basic tasks are easily set up, but it can also be used to track conversions. However, it's important to first

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Harbison S: Untangling web marketing. Dentaltown, June 2017, pp 82-85

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