General

Google Sends a Warning – Go Mobile or Go Down

Google Warns Website Owners

Google is systematically working its way through the hundreds of millions of websites on the internet and evaluating their performance on mobile phones.

When the performance is poor – they are sending out a warning. The key line in the warning is this:

These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.

Texas Dental Website Testing Shows 61% Are Mobile Phone Visitors

Using a group of 67,805 internet visits to Texas dental offices, an astonishing 60% of all visitors came from mobile phones.

Mobile Phone Visitors:	41,254	61%
Desktop Computer Visitors	17,345	25.5%
>Tablet Visitors	9,206	13.5%
Total Visits	67,805

Find Out if Your Website Is At Risk

The software that Google uses to evaluate websites is publically available.

It is part of the Google Developer Tools, but open to anyone. Click on this link to use the tool – it is called Google PageSpeed Insights.

Once you are there you need to look at the bottom of the report. The tool is primarily for testing the speed that your website loads but it also tests how your website responds to a mobile phone acessing it. This test, which is at the bottom of the report will show a warning if your website is not properly configured for mobile.

The warning looks like this:

This page may not pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

If you see this warning, then your website is in danger of getting demoted in 61% of all searches. True to it’s sphinx-like reputation, Google has not exactly stated how much this penalty will affect your website. However pundits are saying that Google is going to put mobile optimized websites at the front of the results for any mobile phone users.

Take the test. Know your risk.

This is what your website test should look like:

100 / 100 User Experience

Congratulations! No issues found.

Orthodontist Marketing -Website Conversion

I just completed a fresh website for a McAllen orthodontist and used a fully mobile responsive framework. The result has been an immediate surge in conversion rate. This is not unexpected because visitors to this site are running at 55% visits on mobile devices which mea.ns that mobile users are a dominant factor in this particular orthodontist marketing strategy.

Bringing a better mobile experience to website visitors has had an immediate impact on inquiries and has been very valuable.

While this website was running a mobile version previously, it did not have the same visual impact and ease of navigation that the new fully mobile responsive site has. Orthodontist marketing is very much new customer driven with little repeat business. Because of this orthodontists need to caepture as many of their website visitors as possible. It also seems likely that the mobile percentage is driven by the specific demographics of an area. For example a dental website I am running San Antonio is getting 40% of it’s visitors over mobile, a considerable difference.

Orthodontist Websites and Inquiries

From what I have seen, call to action is very important on orthodontist websites and dental websites in general. Good eye trail and a clear and compelling call to action make a big difference in the number of inquiries. This is especially important where the orthodontist or dentist is also using paid advertising to drive traffic to the website. Paid orthodontist marketing is very competitive and if the visitor arriving is not immediately engaged, then they are going to bounce to the next provider. “Free consultation” or some other simple call to action makes a big difference in the results from paid marketing.

PPC Advertising and Mobile

Pay Per Click Ads (PPC) are also very significantly mobile driven. This website is getting 45% of all its paid visitors through mobile. So once again, strong presentation to mobile visitors has a significant impact on your return in investment for your paid advertising.

Improve SEO with Regular Blogging

One thing that anyone can do to improve SEO on their website is begin a program of regular blogging.

I am an San Antonio SEO expert and have done search engine optimization for some of the busiest websites in town. Good SEO in a competitive environment can be very time consuming an expensive. One thing that I always press hard with clients is that we will cross the finish line faster as a team. Yes, I can write great content and I am very familiar with the dental field and several other health fields as well. But somehow it works so much better if the owner of a practice writes the blog or at least contributes on a regular basis.

You can get a fantastic mix of great content that is specifically relevant to that practice (or business). And if you have no budget at all, and have decided not to hire a fancy SEO expert like myself, well then blogging becomes incredibly important. You can’t do all the technical wizardry but you can do the very foundation that all good ranking is built on – create unique on a regular basis and keep pumping it out on a steady schedule.

Steady Blogging Will Improve SEO Better Than Irregular

My experience is that you get a much better result doing a short post each Monday morning than doing four longer ones at the end of the month. Not to mention that it is so much easier to keep up a steady schedule if you have a set time to get it done by. We are all busy professionals, so setting a specific time to public makes it easier. Of course the fact that I build all my websites in wordpress and that it has an option to schedule when you post will publish helps too.

Search engine optimization and the state of your website is being judged by machines, not people. Machines can easily judge things like frequency of content. I learned a lot of what I know from a true pioneer in the field of SEO – a man who was doing search engine optimization before the words were invented. He taught me this trick and I have seen it keep working all the way up till today. Blog at a steady pace. Once a day is better than once a week. Once a week is better than once a month. But however you blog, keep it consistent. Publish every morning at 9am, or every Monday at 5pm. But make sure you publish on a steady schedule.

Blogging is a huge point to improve SEO and I could write a lot about owner blogging (and I probably will). But the purpose of this post is to express the importance of keeping a steady schedule. And if you need help, feel free to give me a tinkle (don’t get any ideas – that’s British for telephone call).

Increase SEO Ranking with Paid Ads?

Yes, you sure can. Increased traffic always impacts your SEO ranking. So this is not quite the way that conspiracy theorists might like to present it. Does Google skew search results in favor of their own Adwords customers? I have never seen evidence of this. But absolutely and categorically you can give your website a general boost in SEO ranking when traffic picks up. (To learn more information see my article about general SEO.)

My personal observation is that the amount of traffic across your website is a significant factor in ranking your website again competitors. This is especially true of websites that have a very low amount of traffic to start with. Extremely low traffic on a website is an immediate problem. It “proves” to Google that your website is not relevant and not interesting. However this is often the biggest hurdle for a website – the “Catch 22”. It’s hard to rank well if you don’t have traffic. But you can’t get traffic if you dont have good page rank.

The answer to the catch 22 is to work over your website and stick with it till you do have a good SEO ranking and start getting some organic traffic.

But the dentists I deal with often can’t wait. Few businesses can. For a dental website that is in trouble and is lacking traffic I always recommend as step one- “get some paid advertising running and drive traffic any old how”.

Having a good steady flow of traffic will up your ranking and Google does not seem (thus far) to penalize paid traffic. In fact, Google does not even seem to differentiate between paid or unpaid traffic.

Your SEO Ranking and Adwords Search and Display Options

My speciality is dental marketing, so I tend to do mostly dental websites and dental paid ads. I have done so for years now so I am very familiar with conversions and what drives them. When it comes to conversions – people who actually go to a dental website and make an inquiry the search driven ads drive dramatically more conversions. However display ads are much cheaper and thus you can buy sometimes 4 display clicks for the same price as one search click.

The reason that this is a good idea is the cost-benefit ratio means that you can pay the same amount per conversion for display, but also get the benefit of lots of cheap visitors- and thus increase your SEO ranking at the same time.

Website Conversions and What Drives Them

I have consistently seen a 50/50 split between organic conversions and conversions from paid advertising. In other words, if you have a website with a good SEO ranking and are getting a decent amount of traffic from organic search, you can expect to see steady conversions on your website from that alone.

If you would like to know more about SEO there are more articles here.

Dentists Best Use of Social Media

It is generally understood that the power of social media is something that any business must harness and use if they expect to get ahead of competitors in today’s busy marketplace.

However for dentists, social media is a bit more obscure. There are some age groups and activities that lend themselves very well to social media. Fashion has always been driven socially. For a business to understand how they can use social media they have to understand the two very different approaches.

First you have activies that have been driven by social pressures in the past and likely will be always driven by social pressure. Fashion, dining, most sports and many other activities are social activities. They are done with other people and driven by interaction. Any activity that is actually social can and should be driven hard with social media.

Dentists are Not Inherently Social Media Driven

The big question looms, “how can an activity that is done alone and which is not social driven, use and benefit from this strong medium?”.

Dentists have asked me this question many times over recent years. The problem is that things you do alone are not driven by social pressure. They are driven by other pressures. Beauty can be social driven and thus cosmetic dentists can focus on beauty and create followings and engagement. The more social an activity, the easier it is. Thus a cosmetic dentist has a harder job than a fashion designer. Similarly orthodontists can tap into the beauty pathway and also into the teen age group and effectively use social media.

The other approach is indirect and requires following your own interests to create a social media following and then use this to direct people to your specific services.

For example, a dentist who is also a tennis play can drive his social media through tennis. If you are imaginative and fun, you can gain a following and use this to direct your social circle to your services as they need them. This is a less direct path, but much more effective than just sticking to dentistry and trying to create a social following about a technical subject such as dental care.

Engagement comes first and if you have set yourself up well, this results in visibility and branding. Learn more about social media and our related services.

Obviously with enough investment of time, anything can be done. Any that includes building a huge following for your dental practice. But in real-life that costs a lot of money and the actual return on investment is very low. This is a case where for a dentist, social media works in reverse to say a fashion designer. A socially driven activity can get a big following very inexpensively and thus get a big return of sales on a small investment. As a dentist, the reverse is true. You must do a lot of work to get a large following and generally you will get poor sales compared to time/money invested. So seeking a huge following and spending a lot of money on social media is not a smart strategy. What is a good strategy is finding group-driven things you enjoy and then personally building a wide following or circle and using that presence to bleed visitors to your main website. Then you get the cost way down, the return goes way up and bingo, you are mining a great source of patients for your practice.

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