On Your Dental Web Site, Content Should Be King

Creating a Web site for your dental specialty practice costs time and money. But if prospective patients search for your practice online and instead find the site of a competing practice, your efforts have been wasted. Your Web site has to rank high on the search engine lists, and the best way to boost your ranking is to update the site regularly.

Some patients may find your dental practice by entering your exact URL, but the success of your efforts depends on people finding you when they search online for “Cranford orthodontist,” “Walnut Creek prosthodontist,” “Elmhurst pediatric dentist” or whatever the location and nature of your dental specialty practice may be. Search engine optimization experts have offered hundreds of tips over the years about how to boost your rankings, but almost all agree on one point: Content is king.

“Try to make a site that is so fantastic you become an authority in your niche,” said Matt Cutts, who heads the Webspam team at Google. Regularly adding valuable content to your dental Web site positions you as an expert in your specialty. If you place valuable content on your site and update it regularly, the search engines, as well as potential clients or patients, will take note. Consider these numbers:

• 52% of consumers say that blogs have impacted their purchase decisions.
• 76% of marketers with strategic search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns in place invest in content creation.
• 92% of marketers say that content creation is either “very effective” or “somewhat effective” for SEO.

Launching a new Web site may bring a sense of accomplishment, but it should mark the beginning of a process, not an end. It is not enough to be one of the 92% of marketers who merely know that content is effective. To run a successful dental marketing program, create content and post it to your Web site at least once a week.