MARC FOWLER
GETTING SLEEP PATIENTS FROM THE INTERNET
GROWING YOUR SLEEP PRACTICE WITHOUT PAYING FOR ADVERTISING
T
here are several keys to
successfully growing your
sleep practice through direct-
to-patient marketing. First,
and perhaps most important,
is properly positioning your
practice in the minds of
prospective patients.
As mentioned in an earlier
article, positioning your
practice starts with creating
a separate, stand-alone brand
identity for your sleep practice.
Everything from a name, to a
logo, to a dedicated website. All
of these should be completely
independent of your restorative
practice.
platforms. We’ll look at these in
a future article.
Today let’s focus on the second
method, growing organic
visibility. Organic visibility
is essentially being found by
prospective patients online
without paying for advertising
clicks.
It’s no secret that Google is
the 800 pound online gorilla.
According to Statcounter, as
of November 2018, Google
controlled 87% of the U.S.
search engine market, with
Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo
and MSN fighting over the
remaining 13%.
Once you’ve created a brand
identity and website, the real
work begins. How do you let
potential patients know that
you exist and that you offer an
excellent solution to their sleep
breathing issues? Given Google’s dominance,
the focus of your online efforts
need to be on Google. As a local
business, the best place to start
is taking control of your Google
My Business (GMB) listing. A
properly optimized GMB listing
can drive a significant volume
of website traffic and phone
calls. This article provides
details on how to optimize
your listing and show up
prominently in Google’s Local
Pack.
There are two ways to gain
visibility online. The quickest,
and most expensive method
is to pay for exposure via
advertising. Google, Facebook
and YouTube all offer
comprehensive advertising After taking care of your GMB
listing, you should focus next
on your website. One of the
many advantages of having a
dedicated sleep website is that
it doesn’t send mixed signals
to Google. When Google’s bots
scan your main practice site,
they scans content focused
on typical dental services and
terminology.
Content about sleep apnea
on a dental site stands out
(and not in a good way) to the
bots. They’re not sure how
to process it, which leads
to it being devalued since it
doesn’t match the majority of
the content on the website. In
turn, that can also devalue your
main dental content.
Google likes to put things
into neat, organized units
and having differing content
confuses the bots and
often prevents Google from
associating your content with
the correct search results for
critical keyword terms.
Having a separate sleep
website removes the confusion
and tells Google that the site
is only about sleep, which
allows Google to show the site
in the correct search results.
So Google isn’t indexing your
website for implants, ortho,
whitening, and a whole mix of
dental terms.
It is strictly categorizing you
as a sleep apnea treatment
provider. The result is
increased visibility when
prospective patients are
searching on Google for sleep
apnea related terms.