Building Your Reputation

A well designed and effective website is a powerful tool to have, but it’s only 1 piece of the puzzle. Before patients even find your site, they’re searching Google and other search engines for local dentists.

The practice that shows up first captures 30% of the traffic in results, with second and third claiming 17% and 12% of the traffic respectively. So if you’re not in the top few positions for the terms people are searching for, will they be able to find you?

Placing trust

Who do you trust? Bear with us here, because admittedly, that’s a heavy question to start off a dental marketing blog.

As consumers, we tend to spend our hard earned money on items or services we believe provide an equal or greater value to that price. In essence, we spend on value. For years business has been built on this tenement.  We don’t invest our money with a broker we find shady and we certainly wouldn’t let a surgeon without a degree lead us to the operating table. Trust is paramount.

Brand confidence

Building confidence in your brand can be the difference between making it and failing miserably. So the question becomes: how do we build trust? We have one of two options here.

1. You can knock on doors, build relationships, give free advice and generally be an amazing practitioner (like we know you are). The trouble with this is that it can take years, decades even, to make this kind of impact by yourself and it doesn’t solve the digital part of the equation.
2. You can receive “good word” from a trusted source. This avenue relies on the trust associated with the entity vouching on your behalf.

Google; our friend

When it comes to digital trust the best word of confidence you can receive comes from Google. Since 1998 it has built its business on serving up the most accurate and user friendly results. There is a reason we don’t say “just Ask Jeeves it”. Today Google dominates at 77% of the market on desktop & 85% of the market on mobile.  We all trust Google to give us the correct answers.

That means when patients Google “best dentist” or “implants Sydney” and your practice is displayed in the top results you are granted that trust by extension.

Lonely at the top (in a good way!)

The numbers don’t lie. The lower you rank the less likely you are to be seen. The less likely you are to be seen, the fewer chances you have to obtain a new patient. You get the equation here.

We believe in Google so much that the top 5 results for any search query receive 70% or more of the total search traffic. Not being in the top positions means giving up a significant amount of your potential patients.

If Google thinks you are worthy of a top spot people believe your business is worthy of their time. This trend persists if we look at the macro level.

91% of people don’t even make it past the first page. Being off the first page is like sending out flyers to abandoned houses. Sure, they are technically going to an address but that address is of  no use for you. Your site needs exposure to become a patient acquisition channel.

Concluding!

People trust Google. If Google trusts you, people trust you. You want Google to trust you.

More Traffic + Good User Experience = More Patients

So, the question remains: “how does one build trust with Google?” For over 10 years Great Dental Websites has helped dentist just like you succeed in building their brand’s trustworthiness. From Web development to digital marketing we can help your practice achieve it’s goals.

Check back soon for our next installment.