Drinking coffee while flying on an airplane. That means nothing other than optimal blogging time.

TODAY'S TOPIC:  Dentists and Websites

To those of you dental professionals who have a website, you are excused from reading on. This is directed to the tremendous percentage of dental professionals who do not have a functioning website. No more excuses. They stop here. With increasing competition in the marketplace, having a functioning website is critical to long-term practice growth and sustainability.

It always amazes me how many clinicians I meet who are 100 percent open to advertising externally yet do not have a functioning website. These same clinicians want their ads to tout their state-of-the-art in-office technology. Well docs, I have news for you all. The general public DOES NOT care about what you have in your office. Chances are the general public doesn’t even know what an i-Cat or a Cone Beam scanner is. They don’t care about what YOU can do, but they do care about what you can do for THEM. Consumers are very selfish in nature and rightfully so. Remember, they are paying YOU.

Let’s play out a brief scenario. Say a Balihoo employee (who does not work within the Nobel program) is looking for a good clinician to visit. Likely, they will ask around for a few recommendations from friends, family and co-workers. That Balihoo’er now might have the name of two clinicians, Dr. A and Dr. B, near their home. They head to Google to run a quick search for the names, because that is what people do these days, and find Dr. A online but Dr. B is nowhere to be found. Dr. A clearly has a well-optimized website because he shows up on the first page of the Google organic results (+1 point Dr. A). Furthermore, he shows up on the sponsored links section on the right hand side showing that he has a well optimized paid search campaign running (+1 point Dr. A).

Immediately, the Balihoo employee in search of a new dentist associates Dr. A with being up-to-date and in touch with modern technology regardless of the level of technology in Dr. A’s office. Dr. B might have twice number of space-age looking machines in his office but the simple fact that he was not online is enough to lose out on a new patient.

Now don’t take this as me saying that you need a Rolls Royce of websites. All you need is a functioning, decently optimized site and maybe some Pay-per-Click to drive traffic to the site. Easy enough. Think about it. It’s simple really. By getting a site, you will be miles ahead of the competition. Once you have your website up and running, it’s time for the next level. See Balihoo Dental Marketing.