Maintaining Dental Websites: Who’s Doing It?

Big mistake many dentists make is not giving potential patients what they want and expect from the website. Most marketing companies, rather than first determining how best to help the dentist, are thinking foremost about how much money they’ll make off the practice.

In an effort to save money, or prevent being ripped-off, dentists go the homegrown route, usually not having much success. Unfortunately, the staff are pretty much clueless about website design, HTML, accessibility, search engine optimization, tracking stats and/or the site’s all-important conversion ratio.

Dentists or their staff will call asking if I will edit and update their page content weekly/monthly in order to improve their search engine positions. This alone shows most dental practices are grossly misinformed. One guy tells me he continues to pay a company to submit his website to search engines, even though he realizes (now) it’s a scam.

The elephant in the living room is that without knowing what questions to ask, without some basic knowledge of online marketing and without specific goals in place that will actually return benefits, dental industry predators are more than willing to scam dentists by telling them anything.

John Barremore
Houston, TX

Good points, John. Darrell