Jonathan's Web Marketing Blog

As with any mass media, credibility is crucial to the success of your website. Much of ensuring that your website exudes credibility is common sense (no spelling and grammar errors), but some things aren't as obvious if web marketing isn't your full-time job.

First Impressions Are Everything
When people land on your website, their first impression of your site is absolutely critical. You literally have a few seconds to convince them that they've come to the right place. If you fail in those three seconds, they'll click back to the search results and find one of your competitors.

Your website should have an up-to-date design, or at least be competitively designed when someone clicks through the search engine results and compares your website to those of your competitors. Think of how people prepare for going to an interview. They'll dress nicely or risk being dismissed because they didn't care enough to dress for the occasion. People visiting your website are looking for that same care in how you present yourself on the web, if only on a subconscious level. Even if you have the most fantastic content on the planet, it won't be read by the majority of people who come to your site if you don't package it with a handsome design.

It's also important that your site is created to be viewable by most everyone regardless of what size their computer monitor is and what browser they're using. You won't be able to create a website that is viewable by everyone because standards in technology are always changing. Still, by designing a website for the most base-line system and adhering to what standards have been established, you can ensure that the vast majority of people coming to your site won't leave it because it isn't displaying properly.

Something to Hide?
You can dispel suspicion by exhibiting proof that you're good at what you do. Depending on your industry, such proof may actually be expected by your visitors. For instance, in web marketing for plastic surgery or cosmetic dentistry, if you don't display before and after photos, your visitors will be left wondering what you have to hide. If you have an ethical reason for not displaying photos, create a Before and Afters page that discusses why you have elected not to display photos on the web.

For industries like ophthalmology and law, testimonials, verdicts and case studies are highly effective at showing credibility. Sprinkle these trophies throughout your site so that visitors can't help but see them. If you simply relegate them to a dedicated Testimonials page for instance, then unless people click to that page, they won't get the added assurance that these tidbits bring, telling visitors, "You've come to the right place."

Tell Me About Yourself
Going back to the interview metaphor, a common question asked is, "Can you tell me a bit about yourself?" This is very important on the web. A good About section tells the world who you are and begins to develop a relationship between you and the prospect visiting your site. On your website, include an About section that features:

• A Photo of Yourself - Consider including candid shots of you working with clients/patients.
• A Brief Bio - including links to your academic and professional associations. Here's a great attorney bio page.
• Your Curriculum Vitae - should be featured as a link beneath your bio to a separate page that houses your C.V.
• Information About Your Staff - This can be a summary or can feature the integral members of your staff. Visitors like to know that they will be dealing with friendly people.

Developing A Relationship
Everything that you can do to start nurturing trust from the visitor will help you increase the number of inquiries that you receive from your website. If you can't break free of the natural anonymity and distrust that comes with the Internet, your website will continue to be a financial liability - an island in cyberspace that no one cares to visit.

Labels: For Attorneys, For Dentists, Visitor Conversion, Web Design

Content is arguably the most important part of your website. All the classy website design work in the world won't bring you a single patient if the site doesn't have an informational backbone.

Many doctors and web marketing lawyers are attracted to the stereotypical "high-end" website that has motion-graphics and music, all contained in a nice, neat little window. The problem is that both human visitors and search engines have problems with these sites.

Humans are frustrated by these designs because they have to wait through an animation and decipher navigation elements that are sometimes cryptically simple (think "Artistic Creations" in lieu of "Our Services"), only to find that the only information available is a list of services with little or no information about the services themselves.

Humans use the web because they are in search of information. Sure they want to find someone who provides the service that you have to offer, but before they make the decision to contact you, they want to have their preliminary questions answered. If your site doesn't do that, they'll click back to the Google results and find a site that does have the answers. Guess who they'll contact when they're ready to move forward? The practice whose website answered their questions.

Search engines have problems with these "greeting card" or "online brochure" websites because first, they are harder to spider because they are usually constructed with Flash animation technology, which isn't very search engine-friendly. Search engines like Google also tend to discount these sites because it is painfully obvious that either the information that they offer is either scant or painfully hard to access by design. The search engines want to supply their users with information that is high in quality and easily accessible.

When crafting the content for your website be thorough above all. There's no need to be obnoxiously verbose, but do be detailed. If you don't care to have elongated pages, you can simplify the look by creating your content in layers of detail, offering overview pages that click to additional pages of depth on each of the topics in your site. Just be careful not to needlessly complicate your website's navigation.

Each topic that you mention on your website should have at least one full page devoted to it. For more important areas of your site, add as many pages as you can in a logically organized manner, and continue to add content to those areas on a regular basis.

Your site should be so useful that it actually helps you educate prospects for your practice. You can send links to people interested in your services. When your site is easily the most informative in your geographic market, it will be a more logical choice as the search engines evaluate all of the candidates.

Labels: Content, For Attorneys, For Dentists

At Page 1, our philosophy of website design is pretty down-to-earth. Your website should be on a mission: a mission to sell your services.

That may seem like a no-brainer, but the question them becomes: What is the best way for a website to convert visitors into clients?

Our experience has shown us that there are a few key elements to creating a website that succeeds in conversion:

• Be a source of useful information
• Be credible
• Be up to date
• Move visitors through the sales process - get them to act

These are all crucial to the success of a website. I'll touch on each of these in the next several posts, but suffice it to say that an online brochure won't satisfy these criteria. Something that looks Flashy, but doesn't answer a visitor's questions will likely lack in conversions. Don't make the mistake of spending thousands of dollars on developing a website that feeds your ego. Your mission as a web marketer has to be to develop a website that feeds the needs of your site's visitors.

Labels: Call-To-Action, For Attorneys, For Dentists, Visitor Conversion, Web Design

We're finally thawing out from a snowy December/January. This is one of many snow piles in parking lots around the Denver area. I guess it brought out the kids in us. Check out the photos.

Labels: The Page 1 Team

I just came across this article that I wrote for the Plastic Surgery Administrative Association. In it, I discuss content relevance and depth.

Labels: Content Freshness

new strategies to get higher listings

While the Internet marketplace continues to experience sprawling growth, search engine optimization has maintained its importance as the foundation of any effort to market a website on the web. As the search engines have grown more complex to better serve up useful search results to their users, search engine optimization has grown into part of a larger search engine positioning effort. Long-gone are the days when we could just tweak some behind-the-scenes parts of a website and watch it rise on the Google listings. Now, especially in geographic markets that are even somewhat competitive, it’s necessary to implement several additional tools and coordinated strategies to set your website apart from those of your competitors, catching Google’s eye, and snagging top search engine placement.

Understanding the need for these tools and strategies is easy when you look at the needs of the search engines. Search engines exist to serve up helpful information. The challenge of the search engines is to find the most helpful information out there. The search engines aren’t interested in serving up websites that exist solely for the purpose of marketing. Think of the search engines like the front desk of your office. If someone walked into your office asking for information about LASIK, you wouldn’t want the person at your front desk to hand them your business card. That wouldn’t answer any of the potential patient’s questions. You would want the front desk person to actually address the patient’s questions.

The search engines want to address the root question of the user. In order for your site to be successful on the search engines, we have to show them that your site is a great source of answers. Google and the other search engines use more than 200 criteria in evaluating websites to determine whether or not they are good sources of information. By far, the top three criteria are:

• Relevance
• Content Freshness
• Link Popularity

Relevance

Modern search engine optimization and good copywriting will satisfy the search engines that your website is relevant to the user’s questions. Your website’s meta tags, which are some of the behind-the-scenes parts that used to be so elemental, are still important. An optimizer should make good use of these tags by including those keywords that are relevant to the text of the individual pages of your site. He/she should also be sure that the description tag of your site includes calls-to-action as the search engines use the description when they display your site in their results. This means that instead of a list of keywords, your site will be displayed with meaningful text that asks the search engine user to act.

Content Freshness

Imagine if your local newspaper published the same newspaper every day without adding any new articles. They’d be out of business by the end of the week. The search engines are on the constant hunt for new information, and if your site doesn’t offer something new on a regular basis, you won’t make much of an impression on the search engines. A competitor’s site that is more frequently updated than your site may push past you in search engine rankings. For these reasons, it’s important to formulate a plan to keep your content fresh.

There are several ways that you can keep your website updated with new content for the search engines to find.

• Add new pages
• Add testimonials
• Add a blog to your site

Adding new pages of substantial content is highly effective, especially if they add depth to key topics on your site such as, LASIK. Of course, it’s difficult to continue generating page after page of content, but with a little planning you can come up with a list of pages to augment your existing content. Write all of the pages at one time for efficiency’s sake, and instruct your web person to add one or two of them per month until all of the pages are in place. Of course, these pages should also be search engine optimized.

You can also trickle in patient testimonials. The more substantial the testimonial, the more effective it will be in satisfying the need for fresh content. A testimonial that simply says, “Dr. Smith did a great job and everyone in his office was very nice,” while certainly positive, doesn’t offer much in the way of keywords. You can improve upon the value of your testimonials by adding some information:

“Dr. Smith did a great job and everyone in his office was very nice!”

John D.
Lasik Patient, Chicago, Illinois

By adding the procedure and the patient’s location to the testimonial, you can add some keyword density to your testimonials page. The link from the doctor’s name improves the navigability of your website and increases the amount of weight that the doctor’s bio page carries by adding one more place in the website where the bio page is linked from. It’s also important to note that your testimonials don’t have to appear on a designated testimonial page. You can sprinkle them throughout your site, thereby ensuring that more visitors read your testimonials. Don’t assume that every visitor will visit your testimonials page.

Lastly, you can greatly increase the search engines’ opinion of your site’s content by adding a blog to your site and by posting to the blog on a frequent basis. A blog is an area of your site that is specially programmed to allow you to add content on a regular basis without any web design skill. Google likes blogs because blogs by nature are growing parts of websites. The only catch is that blogs do not update themselves. If you don’t feel that you or members of your staff will enjoy (or have the time for) updating the blog on a weekly basis at the minimum, then stick with monthly page additions. A neglected blog makes your website look bad. The visitor’s assumption tends to be, “If they don’t care about their website, what else tends to fall by the wayside at their office?”

A final word of warning where content is concerned: Just copying and pasting someone else’s content won’t get you anywhere. The search engines are highly adept at recognizing duplicate content and will simply disregard it.

Link Popularity

The search engines were forced to factor in link popularity in their evaluation of websites because even at their most complex level, search engines are robots. They can count the number of words on the page, but just having a certain keyword a thousand times on a page doesn’t mean that that page contains helpful information. By factoring in the number of outside websites linking to any given website, the search engines are able to determine the value of a website with more accuracy. The logic is that if a website that is run by a human is linking to your site, then that human must have found your website to be helpful. The more links you have going into your site, the greater respect Google will have for it. It’s also important that the links going into your site be relevant. If the source of the link is relevant to your webpages, it will be more valuable in Google’s examination of your site.

There are a number of ways to accrue valuable links to your website:

• Obtain “authoritative” links.
• Create a “link magnet”.
• Use press releases and informational articles that link back to your site (e-PR).

Authoritative links can win some major battles for you on the search engines, so do everything that you can to obtain links from ophthalmic organizations, any academic institutions that you are/were associated with be it as a student or as a professor, government websites, chambers of commerce, etc.. All of these can lend credence to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

If you can offer something of value on your site that is available nowhere else, other websites will start linking to your site to point their visitors to your “link magnet”. This can be an online tool. It can be something humorous. Your blog will act as a link magnet if you post enough informative content.

Another way to obtain links is to offer content in exchange for a link. Just as your site needs new content, so do other sites. If you give them content to use, many sites will link back to your site. Press releases and informative articles are great for this. You can submit an article about LASIK or any ophthalmic interest to any of a host of websites and in exchange get a highly relevant (and more often than not, free) link back to your site. The key to this type of link building strategy is to submit an article or press release on a monthly basis. The websites that are receptive to these exchanges are constantly adding new articles just like yours to their database, which means that your article will eventually lose good placement and your link will be depreciated or lost entirely. Even so, this is one of the most effective methods of link building because you have a greater degree of control. If you need links, you can get them quickly by submitting articles.

While this may all seem overly complex, the important thing to take away from this article is that in order for your website to gain and maintain good visibility on the search engines, you must be sure that your web marketing is a comprehensive effort that goes beyond search engine optimization. This is especially true in competitive areas of the country. Be certain that your Internet marketing person is taking every opportunity available to show the search engines that your website is the answer to the questions that your potential patients are asking on the web.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Internet Marketing Consultant
Page 1 Solutions, LLC

Labels: Content Freshness, e-PR, Link Popularity, Relevance

The first step to a successful internet marketing campaign is to be sure that you're targeting the correct keywords and locations. If your site targets the incorrect terms or too many terms or even too few, all of your web marketing efforts will faulter.

The best way to create your list is to figure out which of your services are in demand on the internet. An experienced web marketing consultant can help you with this. You also need to select the locales that you want to target.

Of course everyone would like their site to come up when someone searches for your service, but the people who are seriously interested in purchasing your services are those that are searching for a professional in your area. So, instead of "cosmetic dentist", they search "cosmetic dentist washington dc". You'll notice our client, The Washington Center for Dentisty shows up #1 on Google.

If your website isn't optimized for the key locale names in your area, you'll miss out on prime opportunities.

It's equally important not to go overboard in this regard. Trying to target every suburb and town within a 100 mile radius of your office is usually a big mistake. It's important to pick your keywords with the end user in mind. If someone lives in a suburb, they'll usually still use the major metropolitan area as their search criteria and then select a provider from those results who is either located near them or is obviously the right person for the job and is worth the cross-town trip.

Lastly, once you have your list of keywords established, be sure that your website can support your list. If your site is slight on content, then you'll have to cram the optimization for your keywords onto too few pages. You should have at least one page of content for every keyword phrase on your list, and plan on adding content on a regular basis.

By starting off with the correct targets, you'll be far more likely to hit your mark.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Internet Marketing Consultant
Page 1 Solutions
800-916-3886, ext. 210

Labels: For Dentists, Keywords, Optimization