North Texas Dentistry Volume 9 Issue 3 2019 ISSUE 3 DE | Page 16

Where
practice marketing
the
Patients
are
by Marc Fowler
You’ve no doubt heard the saying that in retail,
location is everything. Every retailer from the
gas station to Starbucks wants to be on the
busiest corner in town. The more traffic going
by, the better.
Location is equally important online. There are certain websites
that receive a disproportionate share of the digital “traffic”.
According to SimilarWeb, the three most visited websites in the
U.S. are Google, Facebook and YouTube.
Google
As a local business, there are two primary ways to gain organic
visibility on Google. First is the Local Pack (red box). In order
to show up in this section, your Google My Business Listing
must be better optimized than those of competing practices.
That means completing every possible section and selecting the
proper category for your listing, uploading photos and videos,
gathering Google patient reviews, and having a comprehensive
description.
The second way to show up in Google is the section below the
Local Pack (black box), often referred to as the organic section.
Google has over 200 ranking factors that they evaluate when
determining which websites to list and where to list them.
Reviewing all of those factors is beyond the scope of this article.
However, we will touch on a few factors that have been shown
to have an immediate impact on your organic rankings.
Two of the most critical factors include content on your website
(within the code as well as the text used) and off-site factors
such as inbound links (other websites pointing to your website).
When generating results for search queries, Google attempts to
provide the most relevant data it can find related to the search
topic the user enters. Having content that matches the search
query on your page is a major factor in how your site appears.
If someone searches for “dentist Bedford” and your website con-
tent reflects that term consistently, then there is a higher like-
lihood your site will appear in the results for that query.
While you can’t improve your physical location without the cost
and hassle of moving, you can easily improve your online loca-
tion. Here are some tips for being found by prospective patients
on these high traffic websites.
16 NORTH TEXAS DENTISTRY | www.northtexasdentistry.com
Inbound links reinforce to Google that your site contains valu-
able content. Basically, Google’s thinking is that if other sites
refer to your site with a link, they are endorsing your content as
having value. The more valuable the content, the higher your
site will rank in search results. This is a gross oversimplification,
but it gets the point across - quality copy and inbound links have