Last updated by admin at September 19, 2017.

I’m absolutely crazy about Dr. Wayne Kerr

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Fred Joyal

I was lucky enough to see a presentation by Dr. Wayne Kerr earlier this year and frankly I was blown away. Wayne’s tales of success and failure from his 35+ year career in dentistry had me laughing hard and seriously rethinking a lot of what I thought I knew about how to succeed as a solo practitioner. I’m thrilled to tell you that Wayne is my special guest for an all-new webinar tomorrow.

“Winning the Long-Game in Dentistry” is filled with humor, great insights and proven business principles that improve lives, practices and financial health. I hope you can join us. A good time is guaranteed, especially during the live Q&A session. It’s going to be a wild one. Click here to register.

SEO: Can You Ever Stay Ahead of It?

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Fred Joyal

Every business dreams of coming up on the first page in an organic web search. And every day I talk to dentists who want to improve the SEO of their website. All while Google keeps changing how the results look and what satisfies their search algorithms. They just did it again on August 6th in a fairly big way.

Let’s talk about that change first. The big differences are:

1. The map results on computers now only show 3 practices. This now mirrors what happens on mobile phones.

2. The full address of the practice is gone.

3. Everything “above the fold”–what is immediately viewable on a computer screen–is now essentially paid for.

There are still listings of organic results on the first page, meaning if you scroll down you will see them, and not have to click to see the next page of results, but in this particular search Yelp had the first three “organic” positions. This is because they know how to maximize SEO, and can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making sure they are doing everything that Google wants. You can’t do that.

Also, notice that on the right the paid ads do get their address to show up. And they can even offer specials or a have a specific message. But clearly Google makes it easy to get to the paid advertisers’ websites. And you can be sure that the bidding for those places is escalating all the time.

This is all happening because Google is in the ad sales business, and they want you to pay to appear. The results are even more narrowed toward paying advertisers when you search on a mobile device (which is where more than 60% of searches begin, by the way.)

Face it, when you have 80% of dentists who now have a website, they’re not all going to show up on the first page organically. It’s not physically possible, and clearly getting more challenging all the time.

So what should your strategy be?

You still need to find as many ways to create good SEO as possible. But don’t fall for some company guaranteeing that they can get you on the first page. There are too many factors out of anyone’s control. Read my previous blog on this for more insight on that. It’s more true now that ever.

Here’s what you need:

1. A dynamic website that allows you to change content easily yourself and have constant new content feeding to it automatically. It should be simple, modern-looking, and easy to navigate.

2. Reviews are powerful content, and if you are surveying your patients using PatientActivator or some other application, then you can have those appear automatically.

3. Embed Yelp reviews in your site. It will only show three, but it will keep people from leaving your website and going to Yelp to see reviews.

4. Add new patient testimonial videos every week.

5. Write a blog, and link it to your website. It should have your town included in most posts, as well as some key dental phrases. Your blog is for Google to read. Most humans won’t. So being local and with relevant words is what matters most.

6. Make sure all the directories across the web have the exact same information about your practice. ReputationMonitor, which is included with PatientActivator, makes it much easier to do this.

7. Have a form where patients can request an appointment.

8. Make sure your website is responsive, meaning it plays properly on every device–particularly mobile phones–and in every browser. The first test is to look at your website on your own phone. Easy to read? Pretty? Better be!

But overall, concentrate on giving a great patient experience, because your website is only one part of your promotion and practice awareness. Social media and review sites will play a larger and larger part of that with every passing month. It all has to work together, with your website as the hub. And what patients post out there matters more than ever.

We build websites with our WebDirector product, but there are other reputable companies out there as well. You can tell who they are because they don’t promise magical results. We will also help you integrate all the social media aspects that you need to make everything look consistent and connect to each other.

It’s a daunting, moving target, I know. But it’s the way of the world, and ignoring it or thinking it doesn’t relate to your neighborhood is going to prove to be failed strategy. So stay on it!

Creating Your Panoramic Photo Images

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Fred Joyal

A dentist asked me recently, regarding Facebook Timeline photos, “What camera takes pictures that wide? It’s crazy!” I took out my iPhone 5 and said, “This camera. And Apple just sold another 15 million of them this week.” I then showed him the “panoramic” option on my phone’s camera.

Of course, Facebook allows you to reframe an uploaded photo, but the picture needs look right when it is cropped deeply at the top and bottom, and you can only adjust up and down.

But then, wouldn’t you also like to add your logo, or some other message on the photo? How the heck do you do that!?!?

Amazingly easy, even for us old folk. First, you sign up at the website www.canva.com. The tools on this site are FREE. Their goal is to sell you the rights to uses images, which they provide very inexpensively. But you can upload your own pictures and combine them, add text to them, frame them, all sorts of things, in a nearly idiot-proof environment, and not pay a dime.

The home page looks like this:

You can create any shape you want, and they have the templates for practically everything, from Facebook ads to Timeline photos, your Twitter heading, website images, your thumbnail photo, your business cards, whatever. You just upload the pictures you want to work with (and it stores them for you forever as part of your media library), and then you can drag it into the template you want, stretch it, move it add another photo next to it if you want, or super-impose one onto another.

Then you’ll want to add text, and they have all different fonts and colors to choose from. If you’re color blind, like me, get some help with your choices. Or you can drop your logo onto it. Now just save it, download it, and then upload it to whichever site you made it for.

You can also use Canva to design Facebook contests and promotions, and they have templates for those and many other things. They also have millions of photos that you can access, and you only pay $1 for each premium element you use for your design. That’s cheap. Especially since the rest is free.

You can get way trickier if you take some of the tutorials–framing photos, changing background colors, drawing on the image–but for now you have a simple solution that makes great-looking images.

I did this for my Facebook book page in about three minutes,and the template made sure I knew exactly where the thumbnail photo was going to appear over it, so I could get it looking right the first time:

I still recommend you get team photos professionally done, do nice photos of your office, and take good thumbnail photos of yourself. But now you can dress them up and personalize them easily.

You can also use it to design printed materials, if you’re still into that sort of thing.

I haven’t found any photo tool that’s easier with such versatility. Give it a try!

Dental Blogging Made Easy

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Fred Joyal

You may be asking, “Do I really need a blog? Who the heck is going to read it?” For most of you, the answer is, “Nobody. Except Google.” In other words, you’re doing it for SEO, the Google juice. You are creating content relevant to dentistry that links back to your website and practice. Google likes that a lot.

As far as consumers–patients–not that many are willing to read blogs written by dentists. They like food blogs a lot more (like my wife’s, The High Heel Gourmet). But if your blog is displayed in your website they will be more likely to at least glance at the posts.

But because search engines like Google are looking outside your website to see what other content or mentions there are about your practice, then a blog is critical, especially since it is unique content, and by that I mean not just content supplied by your website builder. Your blog doesn’t have to be brilliantly unique, just written by you or someone on your team.

GETTING STARTED:

Step one is to pick a blog hosting site. I recommend WordPress or Blogger. These are free, and if you pay a little, they don’t run little ads inside your blog.

Step two is to pick a theme. Many of these themes are like online magazines, which is overkill for what you are intending. Pick something simple, and also “responsive”, which means it adapts easily to any device and still looks good. Something like “2011” in WordPress or “Simple” in Blogger.

DESIGNING YOUR BLOG LOOK:

As you set up your blog, they will ask you what you want to call it, and specific questions about how you want it to look.

You will need a name for your blog. Nothing long or elaborate, but not just your practice name or your website domain name. More like this: “The Blog of Ed Flynn, DDS”. Part of it should have “dental” or “dentist” or “smile” in it. You want to be identified as dentistry, not just health care, or just you.

Then you will choose a domain name. It’s going to have “blogspot” or “wordpress” as part of it right now. Let them add this. Don’t worry about your own domain just yet. This domain name can be something shorter than your blog title, and they will show you if it’s available. Here again try to get “dental” or “dentistry” into it.

You can choose your favorite color palette and upload an image, possibly your practice logo or a picture of you or your team or even something that just looks good.

As part of your setup, you want to connect your blog to Google+, which you should already have a profile on for your practice. If not, you need to claim your business on Google, which means you need to read this blog and the blog it links to.

Believe it or not, you’re ready to start blogging. You can tinker with the settings later, none of that is really critical at this point. And you can even change the theme later on, and everything will change and nothing will be lost.

WHAT TO WRITE:

This is where you are going to write about dentistry, any way you can think of. Two short paragraphs, two or three sentences each. You don’t need a lot of content here to be effective.

So write about:

Your technology
Your training
Your favorite electric toothbrush
Managing gum disease
Bad breath
Etc.

Get it? Pretty much anything.

HOW OFTEN TO POST:

Weekly, ideally. But you don’t have to do it every week. The beauty of blogging is you can schedule when they post. In the “Publish” section on the blog composing page you can see where you can edit whether or not to publish immediately. So you can write five or ten blogs at a time and schedule them to publish in sequence.

I don’t necessarily recommend the dentist be the author. I think it could easily be the social media designee in the office. Remember, you’re not publishing a paper for JADA. You’re writing for spiders. (That’s the term for the Google robots that “read” everything on the internet.)

AMPLIFYING THE REACH AND SEO:

If you have a website that is dynamic, your blog can feed into it automatically. This is one of the many reasons why you want a website like we build with WebDirector. To learn more about dynamic websites read this post.

You can also post your blog on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. There is a button in the blog editing page called “short code”, which gives you a simple code to put into a post on social media, and it doesn’t just provide a hotlink but also the title and beginning of the blog, as well as any picture you posted.

This is Blogging 101, to get you in the game. You can certainly take it to the next level if you find it interesting to do. An excellent example is Dr. Charles Payet’s blog, Smiles by Payet, which he has been writing for years, and doing a marvelous job. In fact, he has multiple blogs, some for patients, some for dentists.

So get started. It will take months for Google to index your blog, and you can always go back and re-edit them after they were published. You can do very little harm and eventually get a lot of Google juice out of it.

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