• Do you hate this?
• What could we improve?
• Anything that is not working or clunky?
• Any other comments at all.

Email me!

Blogs on Deck

With Mobile finally knocked out, we're turning our attention to a new blogging engine that will be incorporated into the platform.  This is currently in testing and should be available by the end of the month. 

New Website Around the Corner - Active Blog & Support Forum

We're going to be launching a new website soon, and we'll have a very active blog (several staff members will be blogging as will I) and a support forum too.  Lots of exciting things happening!

Please let me know if you have any questions, and looking forward to your feedback!

Jeff Gladnick
jeff@greatdentalwebsites.com
President & Founder
www.GreatDentalWebsites.com
Phone: (415) 814-0078

Adding fresh content to your website regularly offers a few advantages for your dental website.  Prospective and current patients tend to notice when you keep your site up to date. Google and other search engines appreciate fresh content as well, and will usually reward your site with an added boost in search rankings.

“How should I update my website?”

In years past, adding new content to your website hiring a web developer.  Since our dental website platform is easy & intuitive, it is simple to add new content to your site. If you can update your facebook page, you can add new, fresh content to your website.  Still daunted? Watch our how-to videos on our YouTube channel.

“What does an update consist of?”

Don’t worry, you don’t have to do a dramatic overhaul of your site’s content every month; keeping your content fresh should be quick and easy. Try adding a new testimonial from a happy client. Showcase a recent success story by adding new ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos to your Smile Gallery.  If you have setup Twitter and Facebook on your dental website, mark the checkboxes when you add new content, so your new material shows up on your social media accounts.

Many of our clients find that they benefit from updating or rotating a promotional item on the homepage of their website. Use your Easy Editing tool to add an offer to your homepage: specials on teeth whitening and new patient discounts are popular.

“What are the SEO benefits to updating my site regularly?”    

As the web becomes more social, and websites become easier to update, Google and other search engines have started giving higher positions in SERPS to websites that are rich in new, socially-oriented content. Within the past year, Google has started putting more emphasis on the freshness of your website's content. Websites with newer content are considered to be more accurate, better-maintained, and therefore more important than site with stale content.

Maile Ohye, Google's Developer Programs Tech Lead tells us that one of the fundamentals of SEO is to “stay fresh and relevant. Keep content up-to-date and consider options such as building a social media presence... or creating an ideal mobile experience if your users are often on the go.”(source:: http://bit.ly/GAF5Kd).

Take ten minutes per week for the next few months, and add a little something fresh to your website. We're sure it will make a big difference!

And if you're too busy helping all of the new patients, contact us and we'll arrange for our professional copy writing staff to take care of the changes for you.

A customer send cc'd us this email that they got from a less-then-reputable company:
----------------------

From: carter Jennifer
Phone: 321 327-9428
Email: carterjennifer77@gmail.com

Message:
Your company’s credibility can be improved! Our services can improve your company’s ratings on the major review sites and bring up more positive links to the first page of Google search results. Having a good reputation both on review sites and on Google will surely make more people choose your services and make them trust your right from the start. We make sure that you can be easily found by everyone that uses the internet and what they read about you will make them want to choose your business. Our technicians have years of experience in promoting businesses online. Let them help you too. For more information, visit our website at: [removed] Or call us: 321 327 9428 

1. Improper capitalization
2. Gmail address from a company that is actively seeking business.  And who the hell registers a gmail addess last name first?
3. Awkward language

If you goto their website they suggest that they will be posting reviews on your behalf to help you disappear negative ones.  This is probably a huge no-no from Googles perspective and may even get you banned.  

Be careful out there and feel free to bounce scams like this off of us for our opinion.

Quick Announcements

Free Whitepaper -  4 Things you can do TODAY to help promote your Dental Website online and attract new patients.

Read our latest whitepaper here: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/gdw/assets/4_Things_you_can_do_today_to_help_promote_your_dental_website.pdf

Take our short customer suvey!

Answer all the questions or just one question! http://form.jotform.us/form/20947713933156  

We're re-doing GreatDentalWebsites.com and would love your videos

If you have a video testimonial you'd like to share on the new http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com (eta 1 month) please email Jeff.  If you'd like to be in our featured customers section, again, please email us - you get a free link back to your website.

New Features

Improved Video Tutorials

We've re-done all of our video tutorials and they can be found here.  They are also integrated into the relevant section of the admin menu when possible.  They are now more thorough, more up to date, and most important, do not have my horrible voice. 

Mobile

It's arrived.  Our sites already looked pretty good on mobile devices, but starting today they look spectacular.  All of our customer's websites' have been upgraded with a dedicated mobile site for visitors browsing on iPhones, iPads, Android, or other mobile devices.  This is free for all existing customers, but will be available for a small additional monthly fee for new customers.  We'll extend this offer through the month of July, then we will begin charging for mobile websites.  So if you were on the fence about signing up, act before the end of July to get a free mobile website.  Mobile websites will continue to be free for existing customers come August.  You can view your mobile website right now by viewing your website URL from a mobile phone.

Watch the video here

Simplified Schedule Appointment Form

In one of our recent updates - we overreached a bit.  And we heard from you.  Before we had updated the Schedule Appointment Form to look into your location(s) and automatically figure out what days you were open and only display those to users.  Well we got feedback from (3) of you and it was all negative.  So we'll rolling back this change. From now on the Request Appointment Form will show every day of the week (There is a way to still disabled days - contact us).  We figured it was better for you to receive an email from a patient requesting an appointment on a day you were closed then to have the patient decide to not email you at all.  

HUGE SEO Boost: Pageload times reduced for all customers by 41%

Everyone knows that Google rewards faster-loading dental websites with higher rankings. Because of that, we're always looking for ways to shave a few percentage points off here and there. Little things do add up! However, we recently made one change that floored us. We knocked 41% off of the time it takes to load your website. Read the full story here: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/news/pageload-time-for-all-customers-reduced-by-a-whopping-25/

Bug Fixes

1. Sometimes when editing site settings if you added funky characters you were unable to edit it.  This is now fixed.
2. Some minor theme issues were fixed for some customers.

Everyone knows that Google rewards faster-loading dental websites with higher rankings.  Because of that, we're always looking for ways to shave a few percentage points off here and there.  Little things do add up!  However, we recently made one change that floored us.

Wow.  We made a few minor upgrades and a few tweaks to our servers and when we re-tested we had shaved 25% of the page load.  This was way beyond our expectations and you can actually see the difference with the naked eye when you load up your website.  For most sites it will be a full second off bringing you into < 3 second zone.

Here is a graph of our test for the curious:

So 1 second faster, 25% reduction in pageload time.  Not bad for a days work!  This should give everyone a slight SEO boost across the board.

We had another customer email us today and forward us an email they received via the contact form on their website.  Any offers to:

1. Put you in the front page of Google
2. Offers to submit yout website to search engines
3. Pay-Pay-Click ads
4. Inclusion in online directories

These are the most popular sorts of scams - so be careful and feel free to send them to us if you're not sure.

If you are migrating an existing dental website onto our platform, and you had a decent SEO presence before, it's very important you setup 301 redirects for each page you want to preserve ranking for.  This helpful video shows you how to do it, step by step.

I received the following question from a customer today:

"I want to tie a blog into the site we are building,  which Blog software should I use (Wordpress)?  Something else?"

The blog will give you some links back to your website plus additional results on search engine pages - but don't neglect your website for the blog!  Make sure you have time set aside to:

Once you have 1-3 under control and you want to do more - blogging is one option!  Social Media promotion is another - more on that later.

We had a great time @ Temple Dental School's Annual Golf outing, where we sponsored a closest to the pin challenge and the longest drive competition.

Here is a pic

Whether you are a student @ The University of Delaware trying to make a good impression, a professional in Wilmington "

The name of the game is more reviews

We've mentioned this before, but it is imperative that you develop a strategy to generate patient reviews on Google Places, which dramatically affects how Google ranks your practice's website when patients are searching for dental services on Google.

A typical Google Places profile page looks ike this: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=838190700176857523.  This is generally the only link you really need to send to Patients, and the "CID" is unique for your Google places profile page.  If you're having trouble getting this link, please contact us for assistance.

A few strategies that have worked for some Dentists are:

1. Using an automated patient reminder service like Lighthouse 360
2. Having a "review station" in your waiting room or an iPad available that is dedicated to this purpose
3. Asking patients directly for reviews

To help you with #3, which is free and easy to do, we've crafted a brief email template you can send to your patients below:

============================================

Greetings!

Quick Announcements

Congratulations to Dr. Ross Allen - 22 new patients in one month

Okahoma City Dentist, Dr. Ross Allen recently shared some good news with us: 22 new patients came from his website in January alone!  Great Job Dr. Allen.  Here is what he had to say:

I have been extremely pleased with the service, product and most importantly results from GreatDentalWebsites.com. I am a new practice owner and needed to establish a web presence to boost my new patient number. Our office website has been the most effective (and cost effective) means of attracting new patients. In January 2012 I received 22 new patients directly from my website and Google AdWords. This beats our internal/patient referrals and guerrilla marketing campaign. Jeff and his team have provided excellent customer services during our relationship.

All that for $588/year.  If you have similar success stories, we'd love to hear about em.  If you need help tracking how many patients you received, we can setup tracking numbers to help measure call volume, but its always best to ask every patient for specifics about how they found you.

Pssst - Did you know we're on Facebook?  You should like us!

Like us here: https://www.facebook.com/GreatDentalWebsites 

New Features

Rich Text Editor Upgraded

Improved Form Styling

Cool new themes

Refer a Dental Colleague and get FREE Service Credit

Have ideas or suggestions for new features?

Recent Blog Posts

Read all of our blog posts here.

• Warning! Cut & Pasting content from Microsoft Word into your Dental Website
• Why should I use Great Dental Websites instead of a WordPress system?
• The Importance of A Dental Website and SEO Presence
• Creating QR Codes for your Dental Practice's website - make sure to strip down the URL!
• 5 Things Dentists can do to improve Social Media Marketing Efforts
• Adding a link/icon to your Google Plus business page on your dental website

Special Offers!

Spotbookers

Spotbookers enables visitors to your website to browse your allotted time slots and request an appointment immediately. The visitor will immediately receive an email confirmation and the appointment details. The search is over. The patient looks no further. At this point, it is your office's responsibility to be in touch with the patient via phone or email to make the appointment official and put it into your office's scheduling system. Spotbookers is a marketing/capturing tool on its own server, which eliminates any security risk to your site or practice management system. Our analysis indicates that less than 1% of visitors to your site will complete an on line form requesting an appointment; however, 40% of visitors will take the time to browse available appointment slots. Spotbooker's helps you to provide better service for clients and increases the chance that visitors will book an appointment.

Our low annual fee of $89 per year makes this a great investment in growing your business as the cost will be recouped with just one new patient. But, for Great Dental Website Customers, Spotbookers will offer you $20 off this price. Go to www.spotbookers.com to learn more

Jeff's Comments
Unfortunately, SpotBookers cannot integrate directly with your practice management system. But where it may be very useful for you is if you have a block of time you like to keep open for patients, and allow them to schedule appointments via spotbookers. It may help you convert some website visitors who otherwise might have moved on, and even if you need to reschedule them, you still have their contact info. Second, it's only $69 bucks a year, so you don't have a whole lot to lose.

Any customers who take advantage of this offer should contact us and we'll assist you with integration.

We got the following question from a customer today:

I'm working a bit on the website and wanted to know if there is a way to copy some text either from Word, Safari, or the Web and paste it into the text of the Welcome to the Practice page?
When I'm on that page the Word icon is grayed out in the toolbar.

 

Pasting from word is dangerous because word dumps in a bunch of junky meta-data that you don't want and will slow your pages down and/or mess up formatting.  The best practice way to paste from word is this:

 

1) Open notepad

2) Open word

3) Paste from word INTO notepad

4) Paste from notepad into website.

 

This will strip all the junk you don't want and help keep the pages trim and quick! 

One of our customers had followed our handy QR Code Guide For Dentists, but ran into a problem generating a code for his Google Places page.  This was the QR code he initially generated:

As you can imagine, this isn't easy to shrink down to a small size, and as a result, it was difficult to scan with a mobile phone.  The problem here is that Google Generates giant URLs by default, with lots of worthless junk in there that you don't need.  All you really need is something like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=13693662398849837547

Compare that to the URL string on the same Google Places page generated by Google:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&safe=off&gs_upl=&ix=sea&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1680&bih=889&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=brentwood+dental+group+st+louis&fb=1&gl=us&hq=brentwood+dental+group&hnear=0x87d8b4a9faed8ef9:0xbe39eaca22bbe05b,St+Louis,+MO&cid=13693662398849837547&dtab=2&action=openratings&ei=4Y5GT5_QOK_-iQKz1enaDQ&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=write-review&resnum=1&ved=0CEQQtwQwAA

Good Grief!  After we got rid of all the junk, we had this nice little QR Code:


Much better huh?

What about URL shortners:
Avoid them - a lot of them are fly by night and might go about of business. Plus if the user scans the code and sees a url shortener, its anybody's guess where this might point to. Could be to your dental website, could be to malware. Better to just give them a link to the real thing.

New Features

1. Vastly improved hours/days open system.  It's now way, way easier to setup your days/hours open.  Plus the new system places nicely with the way Google expects to find your data!
2. Improved page load time for all websites by 1.6% - Blog post: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/news/caching-improved-all-dental-websites-now-load-16-faster/
3. Improved the aesthetics of the "pods" that appear around the site which show related content.
4. Made it easier to delete records while editing them if you please.  If you're editing a record, you can delete it on the same page.
5. Live online chat support now integrated into all accounts!  If you're ever feeling stuck live help is a single click away!
6. Dynamic Phone number switching - if you want to track how many calls you get via your dental website or from adwords campaigns or anything else, we'll help you setup "Dynamic phone number switching": A different, tracking phone number for each source of patients that helps you calculate ROI.
7. Pagecontent now on testimonials - embed testimonials from 3rd party souces like Lighthouse360, etc
8. New Themes - We've hired a new designer to make some awesome themes for us.  They'll be rolling out next week.

Bug Fixes

1. Smile gallery before & after gallery images are displayed with more variety in the services section. Before sometimes there was unnecessary duplication
2. Video testimonials can now handle the new style of youtu.be links (and anything else youtube throws at it)
3. Smile Gallery images always display at the right size now