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.

We’ve said before that when it comes to impressing the search engines, content is king. “Fill your Web site with original, useful content, free of errors—spelling or otherwise—and the search engines should reward you” is how we succinctly put it in a previous post. However, Google also takes note …

With so many voices pushing the importance of Internet and social media marketing, you might wonder, how does all this new marketing translate into revenue for your dental specialty practice? Several studies have set out to measure this on a grand scale:

As a dental specialist, you are probably interested in making sure your Web site appears at the top of Web searches. Hiring someone to optimize your site for search engines is a good move for some people, but for others, free information is available all over the Internet, including from Google itself.

Building a blog for your dental specialty practice is a great way to bring your dental practice Web site to the top of the search engine lists. In addition, a well-categorized blog will, over time, serve as a library of information for your dental patients or dental referral sources. How can a blog best benefit your dental specialty practice?

Some dental Web sites rank high in the search engine lists, generate new patients and referral sources, and have visitors coming back on a regular basis. Others sit on the Web, stale, forgotten and of little use. Which category does your dental specialty practice’s Web site fit into?

Whether you use Google analytics or some other tracking technology to measure visitors to your dental specialty practice’s Web site, you have a wealth of information you can use to make your Web site even more effective. Looking at the number of visitors to your site is important, but be sure to delve deeper into the data. Here are a few statistics to keep close tabs on:

Trust is the cornerstone of your dental specialty practice. Patients return to you because they trust your expertise and your treatments. But building trust with patients starts long before they call your practice for an appointment. Here are three ways to build trust among people before they come into your dental office.

When potential patients search online for your orthodontic practice, what are they likely to find? Your Web site or the Web site of a competing practice? Like it or not, those who receive recommendations for or referrals to your practice are likely to check you out on the Internet before picking up the telephone to make an appointment. And there’s a good chance they could land on the Web site of a neighboring practice.

You probably have already created a Web site for your dental specialty practice. A well-optimized Google Places page can increase traffic to your Web site and, ideally, increase the number of patients coming to your dental specialty practice.