Medical Spa MD: Physician community of skin clinics, laser centers, plastic surgeons, dermatologists and aesthetic doctors practicing nonsurgical cosmetic medicine.
Tru-Skin Dermatology, formerly known as Austin Skin, is building a nationwide network based on the "Business Concept Franchise Model".
Name: Dr. Daniel J. Ladd, Jr. Clinic: Tru-Skin Dermatology Location: Austin, TX Website:tru-skin.com
Dr. Ladd is a man of action, an energetic person with various interests and enjoys telling jokes. Aside from founding The Shade Project, Dr. Ladd is a Board Certified Dermatologist and Mohs Surgeon who has seen far too much skin cancer. Committed to help prevent it, he has started a local sun safety dialogue with the Dr. Dan Radio Show.
The show welcomes guests from all areas of medicine and the non-profit world alike. Listeners can become informed on the many aspects of wellness, healthy skin, skin cancer prevention, and current events on a local, regional and national basis.
Is there anything that is unconventional or uncommon from the average clinic in any way? How do you separate yourself from your competition?
Tru-Skin Dermatology is an industry leading, board certified, state of the art fully integrated dermatology practice; surgical, medical and cosmetic, composed of skin cancer experts and MOHS surgery specialists. Our brand offers patients a dependable, predictable patient centered experience in a clean modern office facility where they will receive expert care. Our affiliation with The Shade Project sets us apart from other clinics. A portion of every service, patient visit and product purchase at Tru-Skin Dermatology is donated to The Shade Project to help skin cancer prevention efforts. The Shade Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing skin cancer through education, community outreach and building shade structures where children and families play.
You’re using video in your waiting room to market to your patients. How effective is that?
We've begun a concerted effort to promote cosmetic services available at our practice through internal marketing. We're using a customized waiting room video from Frontdesk that has proved effective for awareness of additional services available. Having the videos in our waiting room has allowed patients to feel comfortable bringing up a procedure they saw on the video with the provider during their appointment. The folks at Frontdesk were very easy to work with and responsive to our questions and needs for customization unique to the Tru-Skin Dermatology brand...
Push Marketing is any type of marketing that pushes a client through your medical spas door.
It may be a referral from a satisfied client, or possibly a business partner. It may be an article in a publication, a video interview or a promotional video you made. To put it simply, it's marketing that covers everything except ads.
Pull Marketing on the other hand is anything that "pulls" a consumer through your door. These are mainly your marketing materials such as your main website and your advertising, especially those "Specials" ads. Don't forget that these "Specials" are targeting customers that are either unfamiliar to your practice or unfamiliar with your products/services.
It's obvious that higher conversion rate is expected from Push Marketing because people already have a general idea of what you are offering. Before they arrive at your door, they already hold a positive opinion of you. That is unless there's anything unfortunate that comes along the way. These bad marketing bridges may be as simple as poor office behavior, overpricing, etc. Generally speaking, you should be able to convert over 90% of all your push consumers.
In order to increase your conversions in the Pull marketing, it is important to focus on the consumer's trust. If you own an aesthetic practice, adding high quality before/after photos (this needs permission of course!) will definitely increase the consumer's trust as well as adding testimonials to your marketing materials and website from your customers. You can do so by providing testimonials in both writing and videos to your blog, newsletters and auto-responder emails.
If you are able to have access to passers-by that are potentially customers, consider putting banners in your windows showing before/after results. This is great if you're offering aesthetic treatments. But again, make sure you have the patient's permission to use their images, especially if it's in a very public form.
Here' s a promo video that the good folks from our Select Partner Frontdesk SEO built for Medical Spa MD to show their new video offering.
It's pretty damn slick if I do say so myself.
Frontdesk SEO is already offering a host of social marketing tools and services for the Medical Spa MD Members who subscribe to thier business services, and now they're adding selected video services in to the mix.
Video has moved into the forefront of both internet marketing and traffic conversion since the fact that it's generally difficult to produce offers something more than simple text.
If you need help with your search engine rankings to drive more traffic, take a look at Frontdesk to see if you need some help in generating new patients while, at the same time, interacting with your existing patients more frequently outside of office visits. There are a number of our Members who use the service and love it.
If you' haven't yet run your existing website through through the free reporting tool to see what Google and the other search engines think of your site, you can do it through the link below.
Frontdesk has a growing number of full-service website SEO accounts from Medical Spa MD Members and additional do-it-yourself accounts popping in all the time.
Since we've had so many Medical Spa MD Members sign up and begin using our SEO software or outsourcing their SEO to us, I though I'd comment on one of the most common questions that we get from plastic surgeons and medical spas that are just starting; keyword selection.
What are keywords?
Keywords (or key phrases) are what someone who is looking for your clinic types in to the search engine. For many, selecting the right keywords can be of the utmost importance. If you select the right keywords your marketing efforts should see some pretty significant results after just a short time, but select the wrong keywords and you're going to be banging your head against the wall with little to show for it. So, let's talk keywords that are going to be most useful for Medical Spa MD Members.
Most Medspa MD Members are individual physicians who have a single clinic location. As such, you're targeting potential clients based on geographical location; a certain 'radius' around your practice that you typically pull new patients from.
This one single piece of info gives you the ability to be especially effective by using your geography in your SEO efforts. And since 85%+ of your potential clients are now using the web to find local businesses it's more than just a 'nice to have', it's imperative for success if you're looking to grow.
Selecting Your Medical Spas Best Keywords
There's some good news here. If you're offering Botox, Dysport, laser hair removal, or photofacials, or you're using technology that clients might be searching for like Fraxel, Thermage, or IPL treatments, you can just stick your area code or location on the end (which is how people commonly search) and you're set; so 'Fraxel' now becomes 'Fraxel Manhattan', 'Thermage' becomes 'Thermage NYC', and 'laser hair removal' is now 'laser hair removal 90210'.
Of course there's a hitch. Just because you're being ranked for 'Fraxel NYC' doesn't mean that you'll rank for anything else. So, you'll need to keep up your marketing efforts on all the keywords that you're targeting at the same time. (This can be pretty difficult if you don't have a system in place.)
If you've got any website SEO efforts in place, you'll do better with just adding your local city or zip code to your normal process.
Where to start
OK, here's the plug; you should run a free SEO website report on your domain name. We offer this service (and it's a valuable one) so that you can see exactly how your site's performing at any given time.
I've received a couple of emails asking exactly how easy it is to use Frontdesk SEO by docs who are concerned that their front desk staff my not be technically savvy enough to handle the SEO software.
Here's a couple of website SEO videos from Frontdesk's support and 'how to' area that give you some idea of just how simple and easy this SEO software is to use.
And of course you can modify or change your keywords and everything else.
SEO is fast becoming a necessity in the plastic surgeon - dermatologist - medical spa - laser clinic space.
The need to get your clinic's site ranked on the search engines (most importantly Google, Yahoo and Bing), has led to a proliferation of vendors, many of which engage in nefarious SEO and SEM tactics that cause a lot of irritation and can actually hurt you in the eyes of the search engines.
A case in point is the 'comment spam' that I regularly have to deal with and remove from Medical Spa MD a couple of times a day. These spam comments used to be the familiar junk websites but there's been an increasing trend towards comment spam from more legitimate physicians and medical spas.
This kind of spam is increasingly an irritation as the amount increases and can cost you dearly as websites start banning the IP address that the comment originates from, removes the comment, and reports your IP address to services that monitor and take action against spammers.
The new name of the company sounds good and much better than before. I've heard of this before and been looking for it. I was planning to have a consultation from them for this anti aging services. I heard they're good on it.
Name = Cosmetic surgeon Los Angeles Email = Dr.Calvert09@gmail.com URL = http://www.jaycalvertmd.com
doctors actual email address = info@jaycalvertmd.com and cerissa@roxburysurgery.com
Dr. Thomas McHugh
Liposuction and Smart lipo procedures in Houston, Texas is offered at the plastic surgery practice of Dr. Thomas McHugh. Ambreen Tariq <a href="http://www.tpmchugh.com/liposuction.asp"> smart lipo Houston </a>
peter thomas ambreen_directory@yahoo.com http://www.tpmchugh.com/liposuction.asp
Dr. Shelton for Botox in NYC
Being in a profession where appearance and first impressions are important, I decided to have some “work" done. I never thought I would undergo such a procedure but in today's competitive world and being in my early 40s, I decided to take a proactive approach to aging, my skin and my overall appearance, and consulted Dr. Shelton for Botox in NYC, http://www.thenyac.com/botox-dysport/index.html. My life has never been the same since the procedure. http://www.thenyac.com/
You can see from the comment above that it's clearly spam. The grammer is poor, the comment is totally irrelevant, and there's a link and fake email address. This is clearly just an attempt to get a link from Medical Spa MD.
These spamming services typically use low wage Third World labor oversees to try to spam sites that already rank highly in the search engines in an attempt to build backlinks and increase their own rankings. It's crass, it wastes everyones time and lowers the quality of the sites that are spammed, and it doesn't even work that well. Since the quality is so low the majority of these links are removed anyway. Worse, if anyone reads this crap they think you're an idiot that can't write or spell. Who would want to be treated by a cosmetic surgeon or medical spa that can't spell or form complete sentences?
If you're going to insult me (and every other Medical Spa MD Member) by wasting my time employing this kind of BS, you can bet that it's not going end in the result you're hoping for.
So what should you do?
If you actually want to get high-quality website SEO and SEM services as either a do-it-yourself user that employs your front desk staff to do it five minutes a day, or you want to outsource your medical spas search engine marketing SEO experts that speak English and know what they're doing, contact Frontdesk SEO after you run a free SEO report on your site.
For those of you who have not yet run one of Frontdesk's website report on your site, you'll want to ASAP. It's somthing akin to a credit check for your website and gives you a look at your Page Rank, links, SEO, competion, trends, and lets yo knowwhat Google, Yahoo, and Bing think of your website.
The report is free of course, but you'll undoubtedly receive an email at some time in the future about Frontdesk's do-it-yourself SEO software or outsourcing services (Which are fantasitc by the way and we use them ourselves). That's the trade of course, which is fine. After all, we're all capitalists here.
Since we get a lot of inquires around online marketing and conversion, I'm planning to do these as something of a regular series that breaks down common mistakes and how to implement some simple tactics that will improve your search engine rankings and visibility, and your site's conversions.
If you've got any questions after watching the video, please post a comment and I'll try to answer it there, and address it in future videos. The goal is that these will start out fairly broadly, but get much more specific. After watching just a few you should be much better equiped to make better decisions that could really impact your business.
If you'd like your own site reviewed, please contact us and let us know. Include any specific questions you're looking to have answered and we'll address them.
Ah, almost forgot. I'm thinking of starting either a pocast, or a combination podcast/video series that might include live interviews and interaction in real time. This would be a first for sure. If you're a interested in that be sure to let us know as well. Also, I'm going to include all the links that we discuss in these videos as 'show notes' so that you'll be able to find anything we discuss.
If you are new to "link building", it really isn't as hard as it seems.
Basically, link building is just a link from another website back to your own medical spa or laser clinic. The more back links your site has, the higher it will rank on the major search engines.
Link building can be very time consuming, but the FrontDesk SEO tool can really help you go out there and find the sites you should be listed on. This saves you a tremendous amount of time.
Because you will be resubmitting the same text over and over again, make yourself a document that you can keep all of your submission text on. This should include your Page Title, your website's URL address, a brief description of your practice, and important keywords. Website submissions also ask for a name of the submitter and email address. I would suggest setting up a email address with Google or Yahoo, one that you only use for submissions, this way your personal email won't become inundated with confirmation and/or spam emails as a result of your submissions.
View: 5 minute video introduction to linkbuilding and SEO
There are several types of link building methods you can do. Some are just basic data submissions, and some are blog and article submissions. I will describe the differences amongst the major link building methods:
Article Submission
There are directories on the web designed just for submitting articles and some for writing blogs. When you submit something you wrote about your practice or even a particular therapy you offer, you can attach hyperlinks to keywords in your article that direct the reader back to your website. Some quality sites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, and Wordpress.com. Let me show you how this works with just one line taken from a blog I wrote on my own blogpost:
"It's your body and you do have to be careful of who you choose to perform your laser lipo procedure. While no physician can have a 100% satisfaction rate, don't be afraid to ask questions about how long a physician has been performing these procedures, who they trained with, how many procedures do they perform a month, and also if they have any satisfied patients you can chat with. Also, it's important to ask to see a before and after photo book with their patients, and not someone else's."
By choosing a keyword you think your reader would be interested in, you can immediately direct them right to that page on your website with the hyperlinks.
Google considers a "Yahoo Directory" link as a quality back link. Unfortunately, they charge an annual fee of $300. It may be worth submitting to; however, there is no guarantee from Yahoo Directory that your site will be accepted.
Directory Submission
DMOZ is a directory worth submitting your site to. DMOZ is an Open Directory Project (ODP) mainly known as DMOZ which stands for "directory.mozilla.org" and is owned by Netscape. While DMOZ can substantially increase your SEO ranking, it's tough to receive their approval and the entire process could take months. If you are fortunate enough to receive their approval, many smaller directories use the DMOZ directory categories so if you can become listed with DMOZ this would mean you would also become listed on many other web directories as well. There are other major directories you can submit to such as the BOTW (Best Of The Web) directory ($99/year or $299/permanent).
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is changing in it's effectiveness all the time. In social bookmarking websites, users save links publicly (not personally on their own computers) to web pages that they want to store and/or share with others. Usually, these bookmarks are shared within an individual "group" someone may subscribe to (such as "Laser Hair Removal"). You can add descriptions to your bookmarks in the form of metadata, or meta tags, so that other users can understand what the content is of your bookmark without having to download it beforehand. Different types of "descriptions" can include comments or even reader's votes (favorable or not - like on YouTube or Digg). Again, FrontDesk SEO makes this process relatively easy.
Blog Commenting
MedicalSpaMD is a blog and, like most blogs, it is highly susceptible to spammers like we have all seen and Jeff so diligently tries to eliminate on a daily basis as it can be a true nuisance for people like us who use this site as a valuable tool for your practices.
If you want to find blogs to participate in and comment on, try to find quality blogs that are related to what you do as a profession. Again, FrontDesk SEO can help with this. And when you add your comments, try to make them content-relative because not only do your comments add value to the blogpost in general, they also have greater chance of staying on the blogpost with a link back to your website.
Press Releases
Press Releases have worked well for me, and I'm not too proud to say that I didn't write the ones that really worked. There are a lot of good and bad example press releases out there and I am no exception. Writing a quality press release is an art and, frankly, I don't have the talent for them and pay someone else to do it. Let me give you an example of my own good and bad press release experiences.
While this press release still continues to give my website hits, all it is is words: Paula's Bad Example
If writing a good press release including videos and back links is not your forte, then it's worth it to farm it out. Just writing a good press release is half the battle. Submitting it to the right press release agencies that will index it effectively for you is the other half.
Social Media Sites
Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube work very well by providing quality and relevant back links to your site that all the major search engines love.
So, this is back linking in a nutshell and we can really go deeper into the categories, but I fear you will become bored or even glassy-eyed if you're not a geek like me. So if you don't have someone out there performing these activities for you and you really are serious about your web presence, you really might want to take a look at FrontDesk SEO and see what it can do for you. Just remember, building links doesn't increase your website's internet presence overnight. It does take some time, like my good friend Jeff keeps reminding me! In a world of available "instant results", it's hard to be patient sometimes!
Frontdesk SEO seems to be gaining some momentum with thier front end search engine marketing solution for physicians and medical spas.
If you haven't run a free SEO report on your current website, please do. With something like 98% of potential patients using the web to search for local businesses online, this kind of marketing solution offers the best bang for the buck by far... and it's easy.
Frontdesk offers do-it-yourself SEO software that lets you use your front desk staff to market your business. (They offer outsource SEO as well.) You can start for as little as $59 a month which is killer.
This is the same system that we use at Medical Spa MD to keep our #1 rankings in all of the major search engines and I can't say enough about the back end and how easy it is to use and works eaqually well for any business or web site. And, if you want to kick it up a notch, the have outsourcing options that use their SEO experts to do the work.
Protect your reputation. Get new patients. Medical Spa MD Members receive a special, full service Podium account that includes: no setup fee (save $300), a 10% discount forever (save $330/year) and on-demand patient review marketing training for your entire staff ($597 value). This offer is not available anywhere else.
A free SEO website report from Frontdesk SEO lets you know how your website is ranking on the search engines.
Frontdesk SEO offers do-it-yourself search engine marketing software for businesses who want to use their existing staff—hence the 'frontdesk' monkier—to build search engine rankings, increase visibility for their potential patient population, and drive traffic locally.
Frontdesk has a free SEO report that can give you a feel for how well you're doing in the cut-throat competition online.
And, if you really want to dominate your local market, Frontdesk offers outsource SEO packages that unique, combining monthly phone interviews, press releases, social media, blogging and article distribution to give you some serious marketing power.
Social media has been a hot topic in the business world, but many medical practices are still far behind in their implementation of it, if they're attempting it at all.
Many practices are not yet fluent in Twitter, citing the 130 character limit on posts and a userbase smaller than Facebook's. However, Twitter and Google recently announced a deal to index and list Twitter posts in search results. Can you say backlinks?
Want to learn more? MedicalspaMD is pleased to announce our first free webinar in an instructional series on social media and SEO, on Thursday, February 25, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Presented by Alex Panagiotopoulos of Freelance MD, the webinar will serve as an introduction to the sites Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, covering how to set up accounts and a blog that can eventually increase profits and local awareness of your practice.
The webinar is designed for doctors, practice administrators, and support staff who are either starting from square one or want to see how they can do things differently.
There will be a question and answer session at the conclusion, and it will be recorded for future viewing.
