Google+ 90M Patients
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Google recently announced to investors in their quarterly earnings call that they had reached over 90M users on their Facebook-competitor, Google+. They went on to announce that Google+ users “are very engaged with [Google] products – over 60% of them engage daily.” But wait, before you do the math that would lead you believe there are 54M people a day using Google+, note that they stated this number with regard to their products.
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Search+ Your Patients
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We reported last month on how Google had begun including Google+ pages in their search results. This week, they took it a giant leap further with the introduction of something they call “Search, plus Your World.”
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Creating a Successful Online Medical or Dental Ad Campaign for New Patients
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Having some lengthy experience with creating online ads for Doctor’s practices and seeing how some offices are advertising online, we thought that we run through some of the fundamentals today. For those of you not familiar with how setting up an online ad in Google works, it is similar to the stock market. Lets suppose you desire to show up for the term “Orange County orthodontics” or “San Francisco rhinoplasty”, well there are a few other offices paying for those terms so it works in a bidding system. Various offices will be bidding for those different terms and if you wish to be seen on the first page, you will need to be bidding high enough to compete.
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Google+ +625k New Users a Day.
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Something interesting is happening in social networking. We all know Facebook is the king of the social networks. It has over 800M users and, when it makes it’s initial public offering in 2012, will likely be the largest IPO since Google. But, don’t count that old-fashioned search-engine out just yet…
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Google+ Pages Now Included in Search Results
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Google started to include Google+ pages in their search results this past week. While everybody saw this coming, many of us were curious as to exactly how they’d go about it in light of others already crying foul on how they present search results in a manner that gives them a competitive advantage. After all, who knows better how to search optimize a profile for Google better than, well, Google?
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What to do with Your Online Visitors
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We’re glad to see many of you reaching out to us for more detailed advice on how to implement some of the techniques we’ve covered thus far in our “What the Heck is SEO” series. As such, we’d be remiss not to interject a bit of advice on what to do with the increase in traffic some of you have already started to see from your efforts. So, we’re going to take a quick detour into what to do with these online visitors when you get them.
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What the Heck is SEO? Part 2: Keywords
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Keywords are a big deal when it comes to search. Such a big deal, in fact, that they’ve been the driving force behind 96% of the billions of dollars in revenue generated by the mighty Google over the past several years. Granted, this money is made through their pay-per-click Adwords program, which is technically Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and not Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But, the ability to own a keyword organically through SEO is just as valuable as doing it through paid search via SEM. Plus, it’s far easier on the monthly budget!
What the heck is SEO? Part 1: Links
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This is the first installment in a series we’ll be doing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While most SEO principles apply across all major search engines, we’ll be using Google as the default since it currently processes around 2/3s of all online searches – more than 4x as many as it’s closest competitor, Yahoo. We’ll start with the basics and then discuss the effect of recent paradigm shifts in SEO.
Analyzing Your Practice with Google
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Google announced new features for their Analytics reporting tool earlier this month and they’ve now made these upgrades readily available. We know that many of you aren’t using Google Analytics on your website – but you should be. If you’re spending money each month on a website, you need to know what that monthly online budget is getting you. Enter Google Analytics – a free & simple way for you to track the effectiveness of the website you’re paying for every month.
Google+ Page +Features
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We’ve been getting a lot of questions from doctors this week about the new Google+ Pages. Many of you are still wondering what the heck a Google+ Page is and what it will do for your practice. Fair question. Let’s dig a bit deeper into a couple features of a Google+ Page to understand how it can help your practice…
Google+ Your Practice
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Google finally started allowing doctors to setup Google+ Pages for their practices this week. While many businesses were denied the ability to utilize Google+, some doctors were already utilizing a Google+ profile since they could set it up under their own name (which is often used as their practice name). But, now that business-specific features have been launched, there’s a lot more you can do for your practice with Google+.
Three Myths of “Google Agreements” Explained
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Over the last few years we’ve seen numerous vendors claim that they have “special agreements” with Google. When they eventually get a Cease & Desist letter from Google, Inc. they try and get around this by using words like, “Preferred Data Provider” or “Google Affiliate.”
Then they sell healthcare providers and organizations on the idea that they have special access which can be had by purchasing their services. Since Google dropped 3rd party reviews from showing up in Google Local listings recently, here’s the three most common myths we encounter when speaking to our community of doctors about Google ‘partnerships’.
Myth #1: We are a Preferred Data Provider to Google.
Truth: Ask to see a blurred out copy of their Google agreement. They will demur, because they don’t have one.
DoctorBase and other sites like InsiderPages, CitySearch, Yelp, etc. have long had enough reviews and traffic to our sites that Google will one day just start taking reviews and placing them in Google Local listings. Because the ‘mojo’ of how Google selects which sites to ‘scrape’ these reviews from is little understood by doctors, it’s easy to think that these sites (like ours) have a partnership with Google. After all, how else do our reviews get listed there?
No one, and I mean no one, has a special agreement or partnership with Google to do this. Google used to scrape 3rd party sites like ours when it felt it was convenient for them – and decided to stop doing it when it was convenient for them not to. Anyone that touts a partnership with Google – of any kind – should be met with the question,
“I don’t mind if you blur out sensitive information, but can I see a copy of your Agreement with Google? I just want to see something with a signature from a Google employee.”
They will likely reply with reasons why they can’t release such sensitive information, which gets to my point…
Myth #2: We know people at Google.
Truth: In Silicon Valley, many of us have friends at Google. No ‘Googler’ would risk losing their job to lie about a partnership that doesn’t exist.
Knowing someone at Google and having that special ‘in’ is oft brandied about like a trophy (and as a reason to give your money to that vendor) but the reality is that the engineers who design the algorithms for local search results are far, far isolated from the tens of thousands of other employees at Google. In fact, Google has long had a strict zero tolerance policy about employees implying any partnerships with anyone.
Myth #3: Using our services will make your website rank higher in Google.
Truth: It won’t. But I’m willing to bet that if I place a made-up $ value to each email and appointment confirmation, I can have you stay long enough for our over-priced services to add to my company’s bottom line.
The only long term solution to having a well ranked web presence is to have a marketing partner (or internal hire) who understands the basics of search engine optimization to work continually on your practice’s behalf. Tricks, partnerships or software alone will not do the trick. At the end of the day, ranking well in Google remains the same it has always been – good fresh content being posted by someone who understands search engine optimization. If you don’t do this internally, you should use the services of someone who does, and can.
A lot of vendors have made pretty pennies lying to doctors for years. In 2011, it’s caveat emptor. There are lots of low priced appointment reminder & patient survey services (some of them are even free) and there are plenty of ethical search engine optimization consultants (who do not work for free and can be quite expensive) – not great news for doctors looking for a short cut. But if it’s your hard earned money you’re looking to lose – plenty of vendors are willing to take it.
