You own the keys to your marketing kingdom, but when you pass the keys along from company to company, you might sabotage your online dental marketing in the process. Your specialty is dentistry, not marketing, so how would you even know if your kingdom is being sabotaged? You likely wouldn’t. Until you see poor marketing results, you might not suspect something is up.
Save yourself from sabotage by avoiding these common mistakes.
1. Changes to Online Listings
One of the first ways you can sabotage your online dental marketing is by making changes to your online listings. For example, if you need to change your business hours, that’s fine. The problem is that you need to update not just your Google listing, but also your website, and other online listings like Yelp. Every online listing should be consistent and show the exact same website address, hours, physical address, and phone number. If inconsistencies take place, patients will get confused and it can affect your SEO.
Fortunately, making changes to your online listings is easy as 1, 2, 3. Our Online Listings Manager where you can easily keep all your online listings up to date in one place. Google My Business is also rolling out a new direct editing feature that allows you to directly edit your listing on search or maps to make the process much easier.
2. Website Edits That Affect SEO
If you go through your website and make changes to the content, links, meta descriptions, or even rename photos, it can hurt your website’s SEO. A lot of factors go into on-page SEO and making any changes without realizing what you’re doing can have a huge impact. It’s best to leave website updates to professionals who know exactly what they’re doing and what kind of mistakes to avoid. Otherwise, your edits might cause your website to drop dramatically in rankings.
3. Accidentally Deleting Profiles
If you decide to no longer put effort into social media marketing for dentists, that doesn’t mean you should delete your profile. The same is true with online listings. Just because you don’t want to gain reviews on Yelp doesn’t mean you should delete your listing. It’s best to keep all profiles active so that way if someone searches for your practice on a certain platform, they can find you. As long as all your information is up to date, there’s nothing wrong with keeping your profile or listing.
4. Creating Extra Websites or Profiles When Working with Different Companies
One of the biggest issues with switching to different dental marketing companies or taking your marketing into your own hands is the possibility of duplicate profiles, websites, and listings. For example, if you decided to create a new website with a new domain but never took the old one offline, this can cause a whole array of problems. For one, it can affect your SEO. You will be competing with yourself for rankings.
Duplicate profiles, listings, and websites can also confuse patients. They will wonder why there are two and question whether the information is right on any of them. This can cause your business to lose trust. If you’re going to put effort into your dental marketing, make sure it’s to the same profile, website, and listings. Before you create anything new, decide whether you’re going to update something old or if you need to delete it first.
5. Missing Deadlines
The last way you can sabotage your own online marketing is by missing out on deadlines. If your dental marketing company is waiting for your feedback to push your new website live, publish a blog or post on social media and you don’t provide their needed feedback, it will only hurt you. If you have a deadline for providing feedback, make sure you reach your deadline so your marketing sticks to its correct timeline. When you miss your deadlines, your marketing strategy starts to go out of the window. Timing is just as important as the quality of the product — don’t ignore one to benefit the other. They are equally important.
Stop Sabotaging Your Marketing
Are you guilty of sabotaging your own online dental marketing? If you are, at least now you’re aware. Now you can make a conscious effort to stop sabotaging your marketing and finally see results. One of the easiest ways to ensure you don’t sabotage your marketing anymore is to let experts take care of it from start to finish. When you sign up for one of our dental marketing packages, we’re here to help you avoid mistakes that can hurt your results. You will also gain access to our dental reputation management tool which provides dozens of helpful tools to help you take charge of your dental marketing.
Let us help you protect your kingdom from making marketing mistakes again. Contact us today at (970) 672-1212 to schedule a consultation.
