Optometrist Advertising - How to Boost Your Practice With a Web Site

You advertise your optometry practice in various different ways: you have business cards, yellow pages listings, and other avenues of publicity that you use to reach potential patients. Chances are, you also have a website. But are you using your web site to its greatest advantage? Web sites can be an unbeatable form of optometrist advertising, used correctly.

Organic Search Engine Results

These are the results that users see when they type queries into Google or Yahoo: those first ten results are the Internet equivalent of gold. Appear in them, and you'll see the difference. Making your site search-engine friendly can help you do this, as can publicizing your site so that other people link to it (see "Social Media" below.)

Your best bet is to make sure your site uses key words and phrases that are relevant to your practice and your community, so that local patients searching for an optometrist can find you. Hire a web designer that knows SEO basics, or consider hiring a reputable SEO company to help you with on-page optimization and other factors. (There are also a number of not-so-reputable SEO's out there; beware of any firm offering a guarantee of placement in the top ten results.)

Pay Per Click

Another effective form of optometrist advertising is running a pay-per-click ad campaign. These are the text ads that you see online, typically above or to the right of the main search results. Although they're not free, they are cost-effective because they offer a huge advantage over traditional advertising. You can track your results for the ads you run and adjust your expenditures accordingly. Knowing exactly which ads are getting you results is a powerful asset.

It's best to be specific rather than overly general in your ad headlines-an ad that just says "Glasses" might get more clicks, but if you're trying to see new patients at your practice in Boise, a better header would say "Boise glasses" or "Boise Eye Exams." Include mention of your latest incentive-like a 10% frame discount-and you'll probably get even more interest.

Social Media

There's a lot of hype about social media these days, and some of it is justified. While not suitable for every practice, it can potentially be a good source of optometrist advertising, at the very least in the form of links to your site. Social media sites (like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon) offer users the chance to recommend sites and pages to each other, voting on the ones they find most useful/entertaining/funny/outrageous. This can lead to some great publicity, if done properly. A piece of content on your site that is truly original or fantastically useful may draw significant interest from users of these sites. (Another good way to get noticed on a social media site is to do something awful to alienate and anger your patients or the larger Internet community; this isn't recommended.)

Most doctors use less than 20% of the potential of their website for gaining new patients. A great looking website is only one part of getting patients from the internet. Are you getting as many patients as you can from yours? You may find the free expert guide, “7 Mistakes Doctors Make When Getting Their Website Done,” a valuable eyecare marketing resource.