Blended results and perceived invasions of privacy aside; due to a recent major Google update, intrinsically personal social info will now be mixed into the search engine results pages along with the historical norm of what Google determines to be most relevant results relative to our search keywords.
Makes sense right?
It really goes soooo much deeper than that, but we’d lose ourselves and you’d rather be doing a chart audit than reading about the historical functionality of search engines, and how our digital social interactions now influence what we see online – besides that incredibly long-winded dental digital marketing blog post will soon be reaching you from every digital social touchpoint.
But what does all this social search your world business have to do with acquiring more new dental patients?
How we (dental patients) go about finding, researching, and ultimately connecting with our chosen neighborhood dentists (you) has certainly evolved over the past few years.
Picture this, a prospective patient runs a keyword search on Google – “anytown dentist.”
Now along with the normal array of generic search results displayed (in which you’re still probably trying to gain additional visibility), personal content (relative to the person searching, judging they are socially active on Google+) will also be made available.
Things like patient reviews, photos, videos, and status updates from people in your Google+ circles.
What impact does that have on your digital word of mouth?
In case your ears are tuned to actually practicing dentistry, listening to your patients, and allowing a little industry news to permeate the daily grind, we’ll go ahead and highlight some important considerations about getting your dental practice profile in the still somewhat new Google+ social search environment.
Wait, you mean to tell us that your practice is not represented in the Google+ social network?
That’s OK; we’ve been very lazy in building out our own profile…because of what we assume to be a lack of dentists to interact within Google+.
Do you see any correlation with our assumptive stance on Google+?
We’ll save you the roundabout reference mental navigation we confuse ourselves with daily.
Your dental practice is not on Google+; our digital marketing and social media monitoring company for dentists is not very active on one of the major emerging social networks.
We’ll start to practice what we preach if you start lending some attention to all these digital marketing, social media, local digital word of mouth, new patient recruitment opportunities.
Deal?
Here’s a quick super easy 5 step list to getting started with your DIY Google+ dental profile:
Access the Google+ for Business sign-up page here Google+. (link removed, see here)
- You can use an existing PRACTICE GMAIL ACCOUNT to create your Google+ profile, if not create one and use it as the administrative account associated with your Google+ profile then add your own domain email (dr@drjohndoe.com) as the primary.
You will want staff to have access to this account, and all associated Google properties that evolve out of the Google Skunk Works…keep this in mind always!
- Choose your business classification – for most practices (much like Facebook) this will be ‘Local Business or Place.’
- Build out your profile – this is as easy as pie, follow directions and choose accordingly but no matter what do not skip the step of adding your tagline and logo or appropriate office photo.
Be concise and succinct on the tagline (what patients want to know about your practice), and be mindful of the cropping of images. Don’t waste time hemming and hawing, this info can always be updated later just get through the process and give yourself a gold star.
- Skip all the steps to ‘notify friends’ or invite contacts to connect with your page…etc. For NOW.
Basically, you’ll have an empty page right now but no use telling the world you’re on Google+ if there’s nothing valuable to share – yet.
Familiarize yourself with the functionality and all the attributes of Google+ profile; they do a great job communicating these business benefits through their videos.
Now go connect with Social Dental Network on Google+ (link removed, see here) and add us to your Circles and maybe we can start a Hangout!
This is still social media we’re talking about right?
No matter the specific social media environment, timely and relevant engaging communication is essential to success; and the only way to define success is to track, measure, and adapt to changes accordingly.
Congratulations, your dental practice is now part of the 1% (less?) of local dentists represented on Google+…but don’t expect anyone to occupy your circles just yet.
Get familiar with the layout, functionality, sharing, circles, hangouts, and profile attributes; we’ll cover optimizing your Google+ dental practice profile in another social dental centric DIY digital dental marketing blog post.
Here’s a great article to mull over for the Google+ power users out there, courtesy of PCWorld.com.
Here’s another from Reuters.
Your dental practice IS a local business, start acting like one.
*BONUS for new subscribers.
[si-contact-form form=’3′]
