Inbound Marketing Blog

One of the great things about the digital marketing industry is that it’s always changing. Flat out - it’s always changing. Google changes its algorithm. Social networks rise and fall. Search behaviour changes. Buying behaviour changes. All this change makes things enjoyable though. How we do things as an agency now is, in some ways, different from how we did things a year ago or two years ago.

One of those Inbound marketing channels, ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO), is a perfect example. It’s the perfect example of an Inbound channel that has been bastardized over the last 5 years — mostly by black hat ‘marketers’. I say ‘Search Engine Optimization’ because that term has eroded a little bit and I’ll explain why in this blog post. In my view, the term ‘SEO’ (the term, not the concept) is rapidly changing.

As I am sitting here thinking about what to write, all I can think about is how excited I am about this new experience with LocalTrifecta. The past three months I have experienced a lot of life changes such as graduating college, then understanding how it feels being an unemployed degree holder, moving out of my childhood house to a new part of town, and lastly - willingly starting CrossFit for the first time, where you basically sign on the dotted line to get your butt kicked on the daily basis. But then, all these series of events had led me to the office of LocalTrifecta.

The primary marketing goal of every dental practice is to bring in new patients and keep existing patients coming back in. It’s what will keep your practice running. But what will grow your dental practice is being able to attract patients through digital marketing channels. Search engine optimization (SEO) is starting to be more and more used as an Inbound marketing channel by dental practices across North America. Put in a geographic search for dentists into Google and you’ll see a local 6-pack result show up of all dental practices in that area. You’ll see well-optimized websites also show up in the first organic results. It’s clear that more and more dental practices are leveraging the power of the Internet to attract more patients - because it works.

While SEO is just one channel under the Inbound Marketing umbrella, it's an effective one and deserves a micro-examination of how it alone can grow your dental practice.

We've seen it ourselves that this works for dental practices so let's go into what every dentist ought to do with respect to SEO.

Too many business blogs out there are done poorly - in a number of ways. Some are content braindumps while others are just sales promotion vehicles. While good content will get you found in search engines, a lot of business blogs aren’t optimized for some of the basic SEO factors that should increase your business’ online visibility. This post will show and explain 6 tips to optimize your blog posts so you can be found in search engines and bring in sales through the lucrative organic channel.

We are in the process of helping a potential client understand how internet marketing can impact their business when they drop this bomb:

The video is half a year old, but provides great insight by the Google Engineer (and prolific blogger) Matt Cutts and his team.

Eric Enge of Search Engine Land recently made a very insightful blog entry regarding "What’s Next In The Evolution Of Local Search?"

For businesses located in the USA finding local citations is actually quite easy. There are a couple of BIG players that help you submit your business to the biggest citations on the web. The 2 big players for US companies are localeze and getlisted.

For any other company and specifically those located in Canada the process is a bit more involved. The 2 big players are the internet yellow pages (yellowpages.ca and canpages.ca) but this is nowhere near as powerful as mass submission resources like the US has access to. So the real question is where and how can a business find good citations for their local maps!?

I stumbled across an AMAZING resource/tool yesterday and with their permission am sharing it now. The company is Whitespark and the tool is a local citation finder or http://www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder/.

Simply put you can enter either a keyword or phone number and the tool will find citations on the internet and provide you with a list of highly relevant sites to submit your business to! Even MORE powerful the tool will also help you track and monitor which citations you have submitted to and which work best for your businesses.

As an internet marketer I have to say this tool is nothing short of incredible! Please ... do yourself a favor and check it out!