If you’re a medical professional in or near Orlando, you know that this is one of the best places in America for doctors. Floridians are affluent and they make great patients. Of course, other doctors in Orlando also know what a great business environment our city is. According to the 2011 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, there are 62 primary care physicians for every 100,000 people living in Orlando. Whether you’re a primary care doctor or a specialist, you’ve got plenty of competition.
Do you know how your competition affects your online visibility? Search for the phrase “doctor in Orlando,” and Google returns 47.7 million pages. The story is the same for virtually every other medical field.
- Dentist in Orlando: 17.1 million results
- Endocrinologist in Orlando: 995,000 results
- Urologist in Orlando: 723,000 results
- Cardiologist in Orlando: 609,000 results
- Plastic surgeon in Orlando: 424,000 results
If your medical practice needs to attract new patients, a strong digital marketing effort is the best way to begin. Digital marketing can make your practice more visible online, help you attract new patients and make your existing patients more profitable.
The primary goal of digital marketing in Orlando is to ensure that when people search Google or business directories for medical professionals like you, your practice will appear as high on the list of results as possible. These are just a few of the techniques that we use to help our clients get more patients.
Search Engine Advertising
Google allows companies to display advertisements on its results pages. Bidding on a keyword phrase such as “doctor in Orlando” in the Google AdWords system allows you to display an advertisement on the results page for that keyword phrase. When someone clicks your advertisement, you’ll pay approximately the amount of your bid. Google will send that person to your website. He or she will hopefully become a new patient shortly thereafter.
The problem with search engine advertising is that the cost can exceed the money that you earn if you aren’t careful. For the keyword phrase “doctors in Orlando,” for example, Google suggests a bid of $6.54. If one out of every 100 people who click the advertisement becomes a new patient, the cost of acquiring the patient will be $654. If your practice doesn’t earn $654 from that patient, you will lose money. Having a digital marketing agency to guide you through the process can help to ensure your success.
Google is the most popular search engine for advertising, but Bing and Yahoo also allow paid advertising. Since Bing and Yahoo are less popular than Google, the typical bids for some keyword phrases are lower.
Content Marketing
Advertising on search engines is a great way to receive consistent web traffic — but it can quickly become expensive if it is your only strategy for generating traffic. Every time someone visits your practice’s website from Google’s standard search results, the visit costs nothing — and free web traffic is something that every medical practice can use.
When someone searches the web, Google tries to return documents that relate to the keyword phrase the searcher uses. If your website doesn’t have a page that’s relevant to a given search, your site will not appear on the results page for that search. That’s why so many business websites include blog sections — because creating documents targeting as many different keyword phrases as possible helps a business attract more web traffic.
How can your practice attract more free web traffic from Google? Creating articles that answer the most common questions of prospective patients is an excellent way to start. Suppose, for example, that you are a plastic surgeon in Orlando. Your website could potentially generate web traffic by publishing helpful articles answering questions such as these:
- What is the typical recovery time for a rhinoplasty?
- Are new mommy makeovers invasive?
- What are the pros and cons of Botox vs. Dysport?
- At what age should I begin thinking about getting plastic surgery to minimize the appearance of aging?
- Are patients typically happy with the results after receiving facelifts?
The more helpful content your website has, the more free traffic you’ll receive from Google. A large content marketing campaign requires a great deal of time and research, though, so many medical professionals outsource their content creation needs to digital marketing agencies such as ours.
Business Directory Marketing
Not all potential patients in Orlando use Google to find doctors. Many use Yelp and other business directories, so a comprehensive digital marketing effort should focus plenty of attention on business directories in addition to search engines.
Different business directories use different rules for ranking search results. Yelp, for example, places great importance on businesses’ average review scores from customers. One thing that you can do to improve your practice’s performance on all business directories, though, is to claim all of your profiles. Claiming a profile lets potential patients know that you are serious about your practice’s online reputation and value traffic from that business directory.
When you claim a business directory profile, take a few moments to add or correct your contact details, type a bit of information describing your practice and upload a few photos. Don’t forget to link to your website. You want to give potential patients an easy way to learn more about your practice if they’re curious but aren’t ready to schedule appointments yet.
Claiming your business directory profiles and filling them out completely has an additional benefit in that it creates pages online that reference your practice’s name, address and phone number. If you write a description of your practice on each page, you’re also adding keywords that increase your business’s relevance in Google’s eyes for various search terms. Have you noticed that Google almost always includes a few businesses in a featured area at the top of the page for local searches? Claiming, creating or completing your profiles on as many business directories as possible will help your practice appear in that featured area.
Lead Generation
Generating as much web traffic as possible is only one aspect of a successful digital marketing campaign. The other part is convincing as many of those visitors as possible to become new patients.
Every page on your website should display your practice’s contact information as prominently as possible so people who want to schedule appointments will know how to do so. However, many of the people who visit your website will not schedule appointments immediately. Some people are simply browsing various doctors’ websites. Others are looking for answers to their questions. Those who don’t want to schedule appointments immediately will leave your website after getting the information they want. By the time many of those people are ready to see physicians, they’ll no longer remember your practice.
Lead generation — capturing a casual visitor’s contact information — gives your practice a second chance to earn that visitor’s business if he or she isn’t ready to see a physician right away. You can generate leads by adding forms to your website’s pages. The forms should ask visitors to enter their email addresses. Many forms also ask for leads’ first names.
On the surface, lead generation may sound easy. If you think about it, though, it’s doubtful that you can remember many times in which you willingly gave your email address to a business that you weren’t ready to patronize yet.
Typically, the best way to get casual website visitors to give you their email addresses is to offer rewards. If the reward relates somehow to the content of the page on which it appears, that’s even better.
Suppose, for example, that you are a plastic surgeon. Your website has a page comparing Botox and Dysport. If you offered a website visitor a 25 percent discount for his or her first treatment, that person might complete the form. Alternatively, you could offer an electronic reward such as an e-book containing dozens of before-and-after photos illustrating the results of both treatment types.
Capturing a person’s email address allows you to market directly to him or her via email; and if you send interesting, helpful content periodically to the members of your mailing list, you’ll ensure that your practice is always the first one that comes to mind when those people need a physician like you.
Building and nurturing a mailing list can help your practice make the most of every website visitor it receives. To ensure that lead generation efforts are successful, many Orlando physicians choose to work with outside marketing agencies such as ours.
Work With Orlando’s Top Digital Marketing Agency Now
Crystal Clear Digital Marketing is Orlando’s top digital marketing firm. We work exclusively with medical professionals, so we understand your practice’s needs and know how to help you acquire new patients. Contact us now to learn more about what we can do for you.
