How To Bring In New Dental Patients From the Internet

Tim Sawyer, president of Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, discusses how methods of attracting new dental patients to practices are evolving. SEO is still the dominant force at play, he says, however, social media is gaining strength.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“What’s the right way — best practices – to get a patient from outer space, the internet, into a dental practice? Of course, traditional, proven methods, are fairly simple. You have search engine optimization, which is just optimizing certain keywords in a geography. In other words, ‘dental implant Naples.’ A consumer goes online and searches ‘dental implant Naples,’ that phrase has been optimized for that practice, the person shows up, and they click on it. That’s one way, probably the most traditional way.

What we’ve seen now though is a huge shift in the emergence of social media. It’s not just Facebook anymore. While Facebook is probably one of the most cost-effective mediums, you’ll see dentists now getting creative, actually doing live treatments or live procedures on Facebook. But you’ll also see Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn is also a great place in terms of getting credibility, credentialing, establishing a presence and also back-linking.

I think SEO — whether it’s Google, Bing, Yahoo, all the major search engines – will be the number one for a while. Any modern dentist’s practice needs to take into account social media.

One final note on social media: A big mistake that practices make when they think about social media, they think about, ‘I want to put a picture of a dog driving a car.’ And they get 15 likes, and they feel good about that. They say, ‘I got 15 likes.’ And I’ll say to them, ‘OK, but how many implants did you do from that post?’ And so what we advocate for in terms of best practices is whenever you’re posting on any social medium, make sure that you’re creating a link from that post back to the associated landing page on the site. It’s about traffic. Likes and shares are great, but it’s about traffic.

It’s getting those folks to the appropriate landing page. If it’s any type of cosmetic procedure, have a nice before and after gallery. Have a contact form with a call to action. And then just rinse and repeat.

I don’t think it’s one thing, but I think it’s taking into account there are a lot of new, emerging mediums that are effective as well.”