The Costly Myth of Dental Online Marketing
Digital marketing is a necessity for dental practices since 87% of consumers use the internet to find and evaluate local businesses. Many dentists try to break into their market with the idea that online marketing is an inexpensive or one-time investment. However, we have found that creating a cheap, static website is a costly myth in online marketing that will not generate lasting results in 2023.
Understanding The Search Engine Market in 2023
Before we can discuss why cheap and one-time investments in online marketing won’t work, we have to address one major fact about the industry: Google basically owns a monopoly over the search engine market.
In North America, over 90% of all online searches are done through Google. For better or worse, other search engines like Bing and Yahoo cannot touch Google’s hold over the market. This means that your online marketing campaigns will have to adhere to Google’s rules and regulations in order to have any substantial ROI. Focusing on any other search platform will not generate enough revenue to justify the expense.
Google’s Struggle With Online Content
As the top search engine in the world, Google has the difficult task of separating the chaff from the wheat through various algorithms and crawl bots. A quick Google search reveals that there are well over a billion websites on the internet right now. With services like WordPress and Squarespace, new dental practices can easily create a website for their business.
The constant exponential increase in online content becomes a problem for Google since there are technological (and physical) limits on how much data can be stored and processed in a search.
We’ve seen signs that the company is struggling to index and rank the sheer amount of online content, such as the quote from John Mueller where he admits that Google may take months or even half a year to evaluate your website’s quality, which in turn affects the ranking and indexing process.
Google Will Always Prioritize High-Quality Content
Now that creating websites and content is more accessible than ever, Google has the tough task of filtering out irrelevant search results. Google tries to keep up with new technology and massive amounts of content by constantly updating its search algorithms. Search Engine Land even estimated that Google changes its algorithms an average of 13 times per day.
Google also has the job of ranking the content as well, which adds further complications. Google earns a huge amount of ad revenue because it maintains the search engine monopoly we mentioned earlier. Even though we’ve seen ads take the top spots in search engine results pages (SERPs), Google still needs to keep its user base happy with the search platform.
If users aren’t satisfied with the top-ranked results, they may defect to other search platforms and break Google’s hold over the market. This will obviously hurt the company’s bottom line, which is why Google will always prioritize high-quality content.
What Counts as High-Quality Content?
Google created many regulations and guidelines for publishing high-quality or “helpful” content. Most of these guidelines focus on points such as:
- Providing accurate and original information that benefits the reader
- Demonstrating the proper expertise in subjects such as dental or legal issues
- Providing a good page experience including loading speeds, page navigation, and more
- Avoiding bad SEO practices such as keyword stuffing and clickbait
- Creating content based on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
With these qualities in mind, you will not be able to rank well with an outdated website and mediocre content.
Any “shortcuts” you take with online marketing won’t last since Google is constantly releasing new updates to punish bad SEO actors. For example, Google has released several massive updates in the past year to curb the wave of AI-generated content.
Changing Your Approach to Digital Marketing
The number of dental businesses in the US has also steadily increased over the past several years, which means you’ll have more competition as you try to attract new patients to your business. Patients will judge your practice based on their experience with your website, and their standards continue to rise as new technology and features become the new norm for online content.
If you take your foot off the gas of your digital marketing campaign, then nearby competitors will claim the high-quality leads that would’ve gone to your dental practice. Online marketing has essentially become a long-distance race, so slowing down or wasting all of your gas during the start will hurt your new patient revenue and ROI in the long run.
Avoid the Costly Cycle of Short-Term Solutions
The well-known adage about repeating the same choice and hoping for different results also applies to digital marketing strategies. We’ve been helping dental practices improve their ROI for decades, and during that time we’ve seen so many dentists jump between digital marketing providers every few years.
Why? Because the revenue and ROI of half-baked digital marketing strategies don’t hold up over the long run. We’ve seen several clients switch to other providers and then return once they realize that cutting cost and quality will ultimately cut into their revenue as well.
How Much Should You Invest in Online Marketing?
The amount you should invest in your online marketing will depend on your goals, priorities, budget, current rankings, and more. Any good digital marketing company would have to gather that information before constructing a solid dental marketing strategy.
However, we have noticed some recurring themes after creating digital marketing solutions for dentists over a few decades. Clients that invest more into their online campaigns are happier with the results than those who invest less, and many of our clients with higher budgets have some of the highest EBITDA despite spending more money on online marketing.
In general, we recommend investing at least 8-10% of your gross revenue into online marketing in order to maintain a significant ROI.
Don’t Waste Money on Short-Term Strategies
If you’ve switched between digital marketing providers three or more times in the past decade, then it’s time to reconsider your approach to dental marketing. Einstein Dental has helped many dental professionals retire by improving their ROI, and we can do the same for you. Learn how to improve your digital marketing strategy with a free SEO consultation.
