Impact of Net Neutrality on Your Dental or Medical Practice

Internet service providers (ISPs) can now charge extra to ensure that businesses have a speedy internet that runs smoothly— a sort of “tiered” system with a fast lane and a slow lane.

Net Neutrality: What it is, and How it Affects your Practice

Simply put, net neutrality is a network design paradigm that argues for broadband network providers to be completely detached from what information is sent over their networks.

Since the internet was first widely available, we have seen it grow and expand tremendously, often without very many rules or regulations. The ability to view and read articles, watch patient education videos, listen to podcasts, search, and send email have long been taken for granted based on “network neutrality,” a guiding principle that preserved an open and transparent internet for all content and all websites equally.

The Future of Your Website

With these changes coming, it’s important to take a look at your website and figure out how it might be affected. If you choose not to pay the fee for upgraded service, here are some tips to optimize your site: 
• Avoid graphics-heavy content, such as Flash, or large photos that will load slowly.
• Keep patient education videos short, and use lower resolution for faster loading times. 
• Build websites that have a mix of text and video content, with smaller video files and smaller photo files so the site continues to load quickly. Adding more text can help portions of the page load quickly so potential patients will not get frustrated and surf away from your site.

The internet is a constantly changing medium, and it’s important to continue to adapt to maximize the way consumers can find and use information from your site.

2014's Top 4 Internet Marketing Tips for Dental Practice

As we all know, online marketing is constantly changing and developing at a fast pace. To keep up with the trends and changes in marketing, technology, social media and algorithms, we have come up with a list of top marketing tips to help your practice get off a positive start this new year. Solution21's Victoria Calaguian details some of the top marketing tips to help you market your practice online this 2014.

A lot of dentists, surgeons and other medical professionals are looking at new ways to improve their practice profitability, better promote their services and overall improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Paid Advertising & Marketing
Social media and blogs are free channels to advertise your practice, but they take a lot of time, and relying on organic ranking just won't cut it anymore. You have to consider your practice like a real business that requires budget for advertising. Online paid advertising with AdWords, Remarketing and Facebook are highly strategic and relatively affordable. Developing a comprehensive marketing strategy through ads and press releases for publicity is a smart way to attract new patients.

Enhanced Content
Because content is king and considered the most important part of your website. Through great content, you will be able to generate leads, referrals, build loyalty and increase patient retention. With the search engines focused on your content, you need to provide your website visitors and potential patients with current, timely, helpful and relevant content. You need to have an informative content that will answer to their questions and address their health issues. Make sure to include positive reviews as part of your content to promote your practice's commitment to great customer service. Furthermore, good content means good traffic on your website, which will help increase your search rankings.

Be Sociable
Be more involved and ramp up your social media efforts. In today's connected world, social media is paramount to the success of your practice and your online efforts. Social media can take a lot of energy and time to manage, so choose the right network that works best for your practice and focus your efforts there. If you are to choose more than one social network, you will need professional help to strategically manage your multiple social media involvement.

Build Backlinks
This is simply based on the premise that the more people like your website, the more valuable it must be and the higher ranking it deserves in search results. It boosts your credibility when other websites point relevant links and bring attention to your websites through blogs, articles, photos or social media. Backlinks fuel traffic to your website. However, you have to be aware of the guidelines set by top search engine Google on what websites should and should not do in order to get a higher ranking.

Solution21 specializes in website design and marketing for dentists, surgeons and other medical professionals. For more than a decade, Solution21 has shown thousands of dentists, surgeons and physicians that right website design and strategic marketing are highly effective at building practice profitability.

Top 14 Dental Marketing Trends for 2014

Did you get the most out of your website this year and did you see an increase in your patient numbers? If you have never bothered to track the number of visitors coming to you website and the number of new patients coming to your office, now is a good time to start getting more involved. Through tracking and analysis of data, you can determine whether your marketing efforts are gainful or just plain waste of investment.

The new 2014 offers a clean slate and great opportunity for greater success with your website. The internet has become the most viable place to market your dental or medical practice. With marketing playing a crucial role in the health of your practice, here's a list of 14 marketing trends for a successful dental and medical websites for 2014:

1. Conversion Optimization is what you need to focus on your website to increase the number of visitors who turn into leads and patients. There are paid for optimization tools like Bounce Exchange or Crazy Egg that can provide invaluable insights into your website's conversion activities. If you don't have the budget and not prepared to make that investment, Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to help get you starting with conversion optimization.

2. Original content gains more dominance in 2014. Design and form make up the body of your website, the content its heart and soul. If you want your website to matter, it must remain active and regularly updated. Ten new pages filled with fresh and unique content every 6 to 12 months is ideal. If you want to market your website more aggressively and competitively, you will have to create few pages each month. Your website will be ranked for quality of content and frequency of change. Updating important parts of your website, such as landing page, news and blog site will be crucial to your ranking.

3. Blog about your practice and become an expert in your field. Post original, keyword-focused, natural-sounding blogs, at least three times a week, and establish authority over your dental content. Active blogging will raise the value of your practice and contribute to your website ranking. Sign up with Google Authorship for added credential.

4. Advertise to spread the word about your practice and get ahead of the competition. The internet is teeming with competition that relying on organic ranking will just not cut it anymore for your practice. Invest back in your practice with the online marketing and use Google AdWords or Facebook advertisement.

5. Manage your reputation and sign up with Google, Yelp and Rateadentist for your online reviews. Make it easy and accessible for your patients to leave comments about their positive experience with you and your staff. If you have negative online reviews, don't panic. All you need to do is encourage your loyal patients and request them to leave a positive review for you. To neutralize negative review, the rule of thumb is to get 5 positive reviews for every negative review. 

6. Get on Facebook and Twitter and request your patients to share your posts. These leading social media networks can help publicize your dental website and have a multiplier effect. They help boost your page rankings on various search engines.

7. Get Google Webmaster Tools to help you assess spam, bugs, errors, or any crawl errors affecting your website and rectify them quickly.

8. Take Google Analytics more seriously and assess your website traffic and data periodically. 

9. Keep old and relevant content because search engines understand the uniqueness of dental or medical content. You see, new content is not always necessarily better than old content for some websites. The life of original and unique content can be extended as long it stays relevant to your practice.

10. Manage your phone calls and make sure all calls are answered with a smile during office hours. Your staff should make follow-up calls, personally, to patients you have treated. Your staff must be trained on the business phone etiquette because it can make or break your relationship with your current and potential patients.

11. Manage your emails daily. After all, it the most used online service and a valuable business tool that will enhance your relationship with your patients.

12. Track new patient numbers and find out how new patients learn about you. It a great way to measure which one of your marketing strategies is working for you.

13. Manage your reputation and get more actively involved with online review sites. Entice your patients to post their reviews in exchange for giveaways. More and more people are turning to online review sites to choose and evaluate their new dentists or doctors.

14. Give back and get more involved with your community by volunteering or donating. Acts of kindness make a bigger and more lasting impact on the community organizations you are supporting and on your practice.

If you are running a successful practice and you are seeing many patients, you will need help from the experts to manage your dental marketing. Online marketing requires staying on top of the ever-changing algorithms and trends of search engines and content management. The marketing experts at Solution21 are here to help you succeed this new year, and beyond. We are in the business of search engine optimization and we have a staff of trained dental and medical copywriters to produce unique dental content and contribute to your online success. For a complimentary website evaluation and proposal, call us today at 888-923-4235 or email marketing@solution21.com.

Here's wishing everyone a prosperous new year!

Sid M.
VP for Operations at Solution21, Inc.

Sunland-Tujunga Dental Care Provider, Dr. Ana Melnyk, Releases New Website

With 20 years of of providing family dental care, Dr. Ana C. Melnyk is pleased to announce the release of her new website. Launched with the help of Solution21, Dr. Melnyk’s new website, located at http://www.stfamilydentist.com designed to make her practice more visible in the online market for the community of Sunland and Tujunga, California and surrounding areas.

Patients who are in need of dental care in Sunland-Tujunga, can visit Dr. Melnyk's website to receive comprehensive information about the many cosmetic and general dentistry procedures she offers. You can visit the cosmetic dentistry section of the website to learn about teeth whitening, porcelain veneers, and cosmetic crowns. Dr. Melnyk and her staff understand the importance of patient education and are proud to provide patients with the information they need to make an informed decision about dental treatments and procedures.

Other sections of the website include sedation dentistry. With sedation dentistry, patients are able to have a comfortable, anxiety-free experience while having their dental work performed. Individuals who visit the website can also learn about Dr. Melnyk’s background.

More about Sunland-Tujunga Family Dentistry
Sunland-Tujunga Family Dentistry is a well-established family dental care office in Tujunga, CA, serving the needs of patients throughout northeast Los Angeles and Sunland-Tujunga. Board certified dentist Dr. Ana C. Melnyk has 20 years of experience in the field. To learn more about the dental procedures and treatments she offers, or to schedule a consultation, contact her practice today at 818-352-2669.

Sunland-Tujunga Family Dentist
7150 Foothill Blvd., Tujunga, CA 91042-2717

(near intersection of Commerce Ave.)
Phone: (818) 352-2669
Fax: (818) 352-4980

Customized Websites for Dentists and Doctors, Part 1

At Solution21, we know exactly what doctors, dentists, optometrists, chiropractors, and healthcare specialists are looking for in a web design company. We know that you don’t want to just keep up with your competitors, but that you instead want to exceed patient expectations with a state-of-the-art website complete with custom branding and cutting edge design. Perhaps that is why we have helped over 1.5 million visitors find our clients’ website in the past year alone.
When you choose Solution21, you can be assured that you are partnering with the best professional medical and dental web design company in the industry. In fact, we are so convinced of our excellence in medical and dental web design and marketing, that we will never require you to sign a contract or agreement.

Continue reading at solution21.com/blog...

Solution21 Websites and Marketing for Healthcare Professionals

Remarketing for Your Dental or Medical Practice

Have you ever noticed that while browsing the Internet, the banner ads that show up on the top and sides of the web pages are promoting other websites you have visited before? This is not by coincidence; it is an advertising technique called "Remarketing."

To learn more about Remarketing, and how it is effective for dental and medical practices, visit our most recent blog post: Remarketing for Dentists & Doctors.

Solution21 offers Remarketing packages that have successfully proven to increase exposure and patient conversion. Call us today at (888) 423-9235 and let us describe how our effective remarketing campaign will benefit your practice!

Editing Your Website; Faster & Easier Than Ever

Great news! We just updated our Online Website Editor to a program that’s even easier to use than before. This means you can make changes to the text of your webpage in just minutes: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at your convenience.

This is perfect for edits to your home page intro, doctor bio, services, and more! You can still contact your Solution21 Website Specialist for large edits as usual, but this tool allows you t
o make instant changes exactly the way you envision them.

Very few dental and medical website design companies offer an online website editor for custom sites from scratch, at all. Our program is top-of-the-line, without the strict limitations to content layout and sizing that other editors enforce. To get started, please view these simple Online Editor Instructions and bookmark the link to the Login Page. Enjoy!

Visitor Reporting Statistics

If you have a dental or medical website, prospective patients visit it every day. How are they being referred to your website? What pages are they looking at the most? If you use visitor reporting programs, then you have all of this data and more at your fingertips that you can turn into valuable information. Ask your webmaster if they offer this tool, or consider third party programs like Google Analytics.

All visitor reporting programs should record more or less the same data. Start by looking at the Daily Averages. “Visits” tells you how many visitors viewed your website each day, on average. Under ideal conditions, this number will be at least 10. “Pages” tells you how many pages (Home, Services, Meet Our Team . . .) were viewed on your website each day, on average. If you take the number for Pages, and divide it by the number of Visits, you’ll get an idea of how many pages each visitor viewed before exiting your site. The more pages each visitor saw, the more interested they are in your office.

For more detailed information, select the month that you are interested in knowing more about. By clicking on your month of interest and scrolling down to the Daily Statistics, you can see how the number of visitors changed each day of the month. This is useful if you started a promotion or made
 a big change that you want to see the effect of.

Visitor reporting should also provide you with data about your top referrers. This lists the last website a visitor viewed before entering your site, and will include referrers such as search engines and any alias domains you may have. Since you can see exactly where your visitors are coming from, this information can be very valuable in terms of tracking your online promotions.

The last section you should review is the list of top search strings. You’ll find a list of key terms that your visitors typed in that lead them to your website. You can review and focus on those keywords to get a better understanding of how your website visitors are finding you. Again, there is a plethora of data at your disposal that you can turn into valuable information to fuel your office’s progress.

If you have concerns about traffic to your website, consider starting a marketing campaign like online marketing (also known as sponsored listings), search engine optimization, or social network marketing.