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 …

While it may not be as popular as Facebook among your dental patients, Twitter can be an important marketing tool, especially if you update your dental practice’s Web site regularly with valuable content. Some people use Twitter as they do Facebook, for mundane updates. But the best way for a dental specialist to use Twitter is to tweet useful dental hygiene tips, links to relevant stories or studies online, or links to new content on your own dental Web site.

A couple of recent marketing surveys bring to mind a crucial missing piece in the marketing plans of many dental specialists. The first survey, conducted by Sagefrog Marketing Group, found that 68% of business-to-business (B2B) companies allocate 5% or less of their revenue to marketing.

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?

Our newsletter marketing company works with hundreds of medical and dental specialty practices. Some, we are surprised to see, have no Web site at all. This is not a good idea because people of all ages look to the Internet for more information once they have been referred to a practice.

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: