Trying to keep a dental practice as competitive as possible within its local marketplace is usually tricky for any dentist. Although their considerable expertise is in dentistry, not marketing, it is also true that local marketing is highly competitive, especially if other dental practices already have a regional marketing strategy in place.
Does that mean you should give up if you have not yet begun marketing locally? Of course not. You should know that local marketing is constantly in flux, representing new and improved tactics and strategies that appear regularly. It is also the case that, whilst your competition may have done some local marketing already, it does not mean it is optimised or effective.
We often see that a dental practice will have tried to market locally, which is to their credit. However, without advice, input, or even action from a professional local marketing or SEO agency, they often fail to maximise the results.
This presents you with an excellent opportunity to use local marketing to get your website to improve its rankings and to make your dental practice increasingly known to those locally searching for the dental and oral health services you offer.
Rather than trying twenty or so different strategies, we recommend starting with just five. This may not be many, but get these five done correctly, and they can have a substantial positive impact. This can include increased knowledge of your dental practice and its branding, more traffic to your website, and more enquiries from new patients, which are undoubtedly essential for any dental practice to advance.
Local Marketing Strategy #1 – Proactively Seek Positive Reviews
‘Word Of Mouth’ is one of the oldest and most effective ways a business can succeed, and it is for this reason that we strongly recommend that you make this one of your local marketing priorities. Your dental practice’s reviews can play a huge role in its success, so proactively ask for them from your patients after every visit and publish them on your website and elsewhere, such as social media.
Local Marketing Strategy #2 – Carry Out Local Competitor Analysis
Many budding actors and sports stars have heroes they try to emulate, and whilst we are not suggesting you hero-worship other local dentists, you should at least try to learn from them. Specifically, you should analyse and research what they do to market themselves online, such as the keywords they rank for, to ascertain what steps you can take to do likewise.
Local Marketing Strategy #3 – Ensure Your Website Is Focussed Locally
One of the biggest mistakes we see local businesses make with their websites, including dental practice websites, is that they are generic, so nothing suggests that they are based locally. You can transform your website’s effectiveness in attracting local patients by ensuring that every part of it has something that links it to the local area, including written content, images, and the ‘About Us page.
Local Marketing Strategy #4 – Update And Optimise Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (formally known as Google My Business) is your business’s unique listing on Google, where you can let people know the basics about your dental practice. Ensure you have this fully completed with accurate information about your dental practice, especially since it has positive reviews, which we discussed in Local Marketing Strategy #1.
Local Marketing Strategy #5 – Seek Opportunities For Backlinks
A massive contributor to how Google’s algorithm calculates where a local website should rank is the number of backlinks to that website. Further, it pays special attention to where those backlinks come from, so the more extensive and authoritative the website backlinks originate from, the more weight they are given. You should seek backlinks from respected, high-authority businesses and dentistry websites to boost your local Google rankings.