1. Offer Great Deals

Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t just for clothing, appliances, and other material goods. You can also use these busy shopping days to encourage sales at your practice. Set up a few specials with limited-time discounts on some of the most popular procedures that your clients request. If you sell skin care products, you can also emphasize these since they make great gifts for the holidays.

2. Limited-Time Savings

Giving your clients a limited time to earn the deals you are offering creates more incentive to quickly schedule a consultation. If patients see they only have three weeks to save on the procedure they have been dreaming of, this acts as a powerful call to action. In fact, limited discounts influence about 36% of buyers on Black Friday – that’s a huge percentage of possible clients!

3. Develop a Landing Page

A landing page announces all your upcoming specials and highlights different procedures that you think are the most popular among your patients. Giving your readers specific information about the discounts you are offering and how they can earn them.

4. Social Media Engagement

Along with your landing page, make sure to promote current offers and encourage patients to receive procedures on your social media account(s). Our marketing specialists can set up this social plan for you, with posts announcing the new offers and counting down to the “last chance” notification.

5. Email Marketing

If you have great specials and amazing offers, you need to make sure your patients or prospective patients know about them! Constantly remind your subscribers with advertisements about the savings in your email newsletter. Make sure to include a call to action that encourages patients to call your office and schedule that consultation for the offered procedure.

6. Free Gifts

Free gifts create a personalized customer experience and encourage patient loyalty. These gifts don’t have to be large. You could consider a small accessory, sample-sized skin care product, or a coupon to use on their next visit to your office.

7. Interactive Experiences

Take advantage of the holiday spirit and have fun with your marketing strategy! You can create a discount wheel, sweepstakes contest, or award small purchases for patient loyalty or other factors. This will make you and your practice memorable while generating a good patient experience.

8. Keep Your Offers Going

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two biggest shopping days, but the buzz continues throughout the entire “Cyber Week.” Let your limited time offers expire a few days after Cyber Week, or until the end of the week, to encourage more patients and generate more traffic.

Purchase eCommerce with DLM

Paid advertising with Google Ads is a great way to promote your practice and garner attention at your ecommerce store. At Digital Limelight Media, we can also help you develop an eye-catching social media profile, engaging email newsletters, and beautifully designed advertisements. Contact our office in Grand Rapids, MI, and let our marketing specialists help you prepare for your biggest sales of the year.

The post 8 Marketing Strategies to Prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.

What is a LinkedIn Headline?

When creating a LinkedIn profile, users are asked to create a LinkedIn headline, which can be found at the top of the profile where you describe what you do in 220 characters or less. It should attract readers to click on your profile to learn more about your background and experience. You want possible leads to be able to learn more about your offered treatments and procedures, as well as be able to learn about your personal background.

What Should My Headline Say?

The LinkedIn platform has a default option to create a headline based on your current job title, however, it is not advisable to use this default option. A customized headline allows you to distinguish yourself from the rest and start building a case for your product or service. Overall, your LinkedIn headline should describe who you are, why an individual should connect with you, and how you can help them help you.

Tips for Writing a LinkedIn Headline

To write an eye-catching LinkedIn headline, we have put together some easy steps.

Step 1: Tailor Your Headline to Your Audience

When creating a headline, your target audience is prospective patients. Because of this, you will want your headline to be catchy, informative, and trustworthy; all important aspects that a possible lead will be looking for. Also, take into account your specific audience- if you are targeting an audience that is 50+, take into account their specific wants and needs.

Step 2: Include Your Value Proposition

It is beneficial to use the next part of your LinkedIn headline to describe how you can improve your patients’ lives. For instance, a possible headline could be “Board Certified Plastic Surgeon: Helping Patients Look and Feel their Best.”

Step 3: Avoid Hyperbole

It is advisable that you avoid bragging about yourself in your headline, as this can come off as off-putting. Try to avoid certain adjectives such as “Expert”, “Superior”, and “Best”. Even if these words do apply to you, you could also risk coming across as arrogant.

How to Change Your LinkedIn Headline

Updating your LinkedIn headline is very simple. First, you will want to click the “edit” icon at the top of your profile, beneath your banner. It is shaped like a grey pencil symbol. Once you click on this button, it’ll open a window titled “Edit Intro”.

Next, you’ll find the “Headline” text box. Here, you will type in your attention-grabbing headline for everyone else to see. You will now be able to refresh your profile, and your new LinkedIn headline will be in place.

Give Us a Call

Are you interested in learning more about how LinkedIn may be beneficial to your practice, as well as other social media platforms? Contact Digital Limelight Media today online or give us a call at 616-222-3735. Our team of marketing experts, content specialists, and creative designers can work with you to create the social media presence you desire.

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Universal Analytics (UA) is the name of Google’s website performance tracker, more commonly referred to simply as “Google Analytics.” It’s been the default measurement protocol for information about your website at both a high and granular level for years. UA allows people to track who has visited their website, including users’ locations, time spent on specific pages, which pages they visited, and other relevant information to help website owners make decisions about how to best manage and encourage people to visit their site

If you created your Google Analytics account before October 14, 2020, you’re using UA. Accounts created after that date are likely built with Google Analytics 4 (GA4). If you have a marketing team, ask them whether you have UA or GA4.

What is Google Analytics 4?

The new generation of Google Analytics is called Google Analytics 4. It represents a few key changes that increase privacy for individuals while enhancing the accuracy and granularity of collected data. The dashboards and current user experience will be updated slightly to better allow marketers or managers to see drill-down analytics and establish goals that align with their marketing funnel.

How will GA4 Be Different?

Here are a few of the main differences between GA4 and UA:

IP addresses are no longer collected (enhanced user privacy) User interactions no longer aggregated within a given time frame (increased granularity) Machine learning tracks a user across multiple devices (greater insight into user journeys) Integrations with other Google services, including Ads (paid ads easier to track performance in one location)

While they may seem like small changes, they represent an effort to future-proof Google Analytics with looming data privacy laws across the globe and provide analysts the ability to better track what is fast becoming a key gap in understanding: how people use the web across multiple devices.

When Should I Update?

Changing over from UA to GA4 isn’t a matter of “if,” but “when.” UA accounts will no longer work after July 3, 2023. Fortunately, the process of updating your Google Analytics account is simple. You can choose to simply re-add your website to push the tool to use the newer GA4 platform, or use Google’s GA4 Setup Assistant within the Analytics site.

Your marketing agency will be able to handle this transition without losing access to relevant prior website data.

Get Data That’s Relevant to Your Marketing Practice with DLM Insight

Google Analytics is the foundation of a strategic, data-driven practice growth strategy. It’s a free platform that allows you to see who’s coming to your website and what they’re doing on it. However, gaining real insights from all this raw data can be confusing for people who don’t have the time to learn how to use Analytics and monitor performance metrics full-time.

At DLM, we provide end-to-end marketing analytics to ensure your practice is maximizing ROI by linking lead data all the way through to your EMR, which allows you to see real dollar amounts rather than vague metrics like page views. Find out how your website stacks up to competitors by calling our team or filling out a contact form today.

The post Google Universal Analytics Is Dead, Long Live Google Analytics 4 appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.

Ranking high in search results organically requires understanding how these algorithms parse your content, site, and other data and compare it to your competitors. First, however, you need to know exactly what we mean by an algorithm.

What are SEO Algorithms?

An algorithm in the most basic sense is a set of instructions that software tools used to accomplish tasks. In Google’s case, SEO algorithms attempt to serve users the most relevant results possible to an unlimited number of potential searches. Algorithms are rigid, but combining many different algorithms allows results to be more dynamic, where one algorithm might rank pages for how recently they were posted or updated, one ranks them based on how quickly the page loads (key for user experience), and another checks for the number of times the search term is used on the page.

The multiple algorithms weigh each other’s results against each other for relevance and then rank the pages that each one thinks are the “best” for the search term. Sometimes these are all distinct web pages, although recently the Google results page includes more user-friendly results based on the likely search intent behind the words and phrases used. This is why, for example, a search for “poppy” returns pictures of the flower whereas “poppyseed” might return recipes.

Algorithms rely on criteria and vast amounts of information to display helpful results. In this sense, although they are “cold” lines of computer code, SEO algorithms are shaped by previous searches and user experiences, which means they change over time.

In addition, SEO algorithms can be updated directly by software engineers at Google. Throughout the years, these discrete updates have created a major shift away from certain practices and have begun rewarding (in most cases) higher-quality content on better-performing websites, which means the competition has never been more fierce for that coveted first-page rank.

How Google’s Algorithm Has Changed

The medical marketing industry has had to deal with several major algorithm overhauls in the past decade or so, although, with marketing strategy experts like the ones at DLM on hand, many have benefited from these changes rather than being hurt.

Some of the major updates that have changed the best practices medical marketers have adapted to (not in chronological order) include:

• Hummingbird Update: Reinforced “semantic” search interpretation, meaning Google doesn’t just look at how many times a search term appears on a page to determine relevance, but also the meaning of a given search.
• HTTPS/SSL Update: Prioritized secure and/or encrypted websites in search results.
• Mobile-Friendly Update: Prioritized websites that provide web designs that are easy to use on mobile devices.
• Page Experience Update: Prioritized websites with quick loading times, responsive layouts, and multiple visual elements.
• Panda Update: Punished low-quality content, such as duplicate (plagiarized) content, keyword stuffing, and web pages with few words.

Google updates its algorithms at least once a year, which is why it’s essential to keep an eye on these more substantial updates, which are often announced years in advance to give medical practices and every other internet user time to adapt their strategy as needed. With DLM as your medical marketing partner, you never have to worry about what algorithm updates will mean for your website and rankings since our SEO experts keep tabs on even the slightest tweaks that could affect our clients.

Medical Marketing for Google’s Modern Algorithm

The cosmetic medical industry is always changing and combined with the volatile marketing landscape that we all participate in online means that it’s nearly impossible to do well in both arenas without fully committing to one or the other. That’s why partnering with a team like DLM helps fuel growth for your practice: we handle our area of expertise while you focus on taking care of your clients to the best of your ability.

Learn how we can help your website rise through the ranks and get your practice more exposure without needing to spend money on advertisements by calling our team or contacting us online today.

The post What Is An Algorithm? appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.

What is a Physician Profile?

Physician Profiles are provider-specific accounts within a site like Plasticsurgery.org or RateMD. These profiles compile information on a doctor, nurse practitioner, or provider. This information provided can range from basics about the practice, education and experience of the provider, contact information, and more. These profiles also often have their own review system where patients can leave individual doctor reviews and some offer scheduling functionality.

These profiles are often created for you and linger in the directory until claimed by the physician or the office. Claiming a profile gives you the ability to control the account and update the relevant information. Additionally, these accounts often also offer a paid version of the profile.

What Are the Benefits of Physician Profiles?

The features offered in an advanced profile will differ from site to site. However, Physician Profiles in general offer significant SEO value and help new sites gain authority quickly. Oftentimes, profile sites will allow you to customize one link in your profile description to link users back to the homepage of your website. This will increase trust from search engines and website rankings, which increases the likelihood of new leads either seeing your Physician Profile or website.

A personal human connection can also be gained from creating a profile. New patients looking for a doctor can learn more about you from your Physician Profile and the personal touch of that profile could attract them to your practice.

Should You Pay for Advanced Physician Profiles?

Before paying for an advanced Physician Profile, make sure you are getting your money’s worth with the features offered by the site you are looking at. Some things to consider are whether links can be built to internal pages (and how many links) and whether the profile will generate an ROI. You should also look at the track results of different web pages. Plasticsurgery.org is one of the biggest sites for Physician Profiles and is a reliable place to start your profile.

What to Look for in a Physician Profile

Not all Physician Profiles are the same so you want to make sure the site you are joining fits your industry. You should look for high authority sites that are well-respected and established. This can be determined by how highly the site ranks in search engines. Regarding site rankings, you can also determine whether your profile is working well based on your own website’s search rankings. Look at the metrics and see whether your rankings, website authority, and leads have increased since creating your profile. If these metrics have increased since developing your profile, that’s a great sign your Physician Profile is working!

Feeling Lost? Digital Limelight Media Can Help

At DLM, our marketing specialists understand the intricacies of the medical industry and marketing specifically for medical professionals. We have relationships with several reputable sites and can earn you a discount on your advanced profile. To discuss your unique marketing strategy and navigate Physician Profiles, give our office at 616-222-3735 or visit us online.

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1. Statistics on Frequent Reviewers

New statistics show that 8% of unhappy customers will write another negative review if their first one is removed. 40% of those reviewers will even make that second review worse, so it is very important to carefully monitor your reviews.

2. Promotion of Eco-Friendly Features

Yelp has debuted a set of searchable, eco-friendly terms like “EV charging,” “plastic-free packaging,” “compostable containers available,” and “reusable tableware.” Google is also rewarding eco-friendly businesses by including sustainability details in business reviews. These details include the location of nearby recycling centers and recycling attributes for various goods.

3. Accountability for Fake Reviews

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is narrowing in on review platforms that publish fake reviews. As a precaution, Google has started to take down a significant number of reviews, but they may also be targeting legitimate ones alongside the spam. Because of this, local SEO industries have noticed a significant rise in complaints about review losses.

4. Products Declared a Visibility Factor

Businesses can now improve their local search rankings by including the products or services they sell in their Google business profiles.

5. Google’s Trusted Store Badge

The trusted store badge is a new icon introduced by Google to reward visibly trusted stores with good shipping and returns services. These badges are not just given to large corporations, but also to smaller businesses that could greatly benefit from a boost in traffic brought about by this badge of trust.

6. “At This Place” Feature

Google has started testing a new feature that highlights smaller businesses located within large venues. For example, if your practice is located within a large office building, people will see your practice under the “At This Place” tag when they look up that office building.

7. New Label for Complaint Forms

Complaint forms have been around for a while to flag fraudulent businesses, but now you can finally report if “this business doesn’t exist.” This will help Google separate which businesses are real but have incorrect information and which ones are completely incorrect in that they do not exist. Clearing the search page of businesses that do not even exist leaves more room for your practice to be highlighted.

8. Deletion of the Google My Business App

To promote the updated listings search in Maps, the Google My Business app is being terminated. It is a good reminder to not base your entire local marketing strategy on new Google features since they are often experimental and might not stick around.

9. Thumbs Up/Down for Businesses

Have you ever noticed the “People often mention” feature that lists topics and keywords related to certain businesses? This feature has now been given an update with the addition of an up or down thumb so that viewers can see not only whether certain keywords are associated with that business, but whether those keywords have a positive or negative association. For example, if your practice is handicap accessible, your “Accessibility,” tag should be given a thumbs up!

Upgrade Your Marketing Strategy with DLM

With new developments to boost your local search results, now might be a great time to upgrade your marketing strategy as well! Digital Limelight Media has a team of marketing specialists, website designers, and content writers dedicated to helping your business grow. Check out the services we offer online or schedule a quick 15-minute demo with our team.

The post Local Search Developments from Q2 appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.

Link Relevance

Link relevance refers to the location of the website (domain) and where the link is placed. Link relevance includes:

• Domain relevance: the broad topics your website is classified by
• Page relevance: the specific category and subcategory each page fits into
• Anchor text: links to other pages and different subtopics/subcategories

Content Relevance

Content relevance refers to the pages on your website that you get links to. For SEO purposes, you want to include a certain number of links while remaining on topic, which can be tricky. It is a balance of creating content relevant to your practice and sticking the correct topic while incorporating as many links as possible.

What Matters More?

Some marketing specialists believe content relevance matters more. Here are the reasons why:

Any Person Can Link to You

Your website can be linked to the content of any other website. Even if it is a blog post or webpage with a topic not directly related to your practice, the link creates more traffic and boots SEO value.

Trust

When websites with a trusted domain (well-known, popular sites) link your website in their content, value and a level of trust also pass to your website. However, this value is only earned through link relevance. Content relevance gives your website value and boosts search rankings no matter how well-known the website linking your content is.

Content Creates a Strong Signal for Google

Even if you post content that is not related to your practice or the medical industry, this content is essentially owned by you. Therefore, if you post any content with keywords related to any topic, people can search for those keywords and your website may show up. For example, at DLM, we create backend pages of city-specific content for our clients. If you are a plastic surgery center in Grand Rapids, Michigan and we write a page about Grand Rapids or the surrounding cities, this helps your practice show up in Google search results when people search for that city.

Does Google Care About Irrelevant Content?

Usually no, as long as most of your content has value. That is, most of your content is topically relevant to your website and links together between these topically relevant pages and links. Even if you create topically irrelevant content, you can add internal links to more relevant pages which will make this content seem less isolated in the larger sitemap of your website.

Build Your Website with Digital Limelight Media

At Digital Limelight Media, we know all the newest techniques to create websites that generate online visibility and can quickly earn you more leads. Visit us online to learn more about developing your website and the services we offer.

The post Link Relevance vs. Content Relevance: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.

Optimize for users, not search engines

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the key terms to know when it comes to digital marketing. However, it’s easy to misinterpret this term and end up building your website and content incorrectly. Since search engines are the things crawling your website to categorize and deliver your content to users, it’s logical to think that you should optimize your website according to what search engines want to see.

It’s important to know this isn’t the case – in fact, search engines are just the middlemen. You should ultimately optimize your website for users, or the people using search engines. That’s because search engines have the goal of delivering the most relevant content to users, so search engines look for things that users are looking for. By optimizing for your buyer persona, you’re optimizing for search engines as well.

Make sure to take a step back and think about what would be most useful to people searching for a practice in your field and ensure your website reflects it. This means creating quality, genuinely helpful content that provides answers that users won’t find elsewhere.

Use the right keywords when creating content

Keywords are what help users find your site – without them, there’s no way that users or even search engines can find your relevant content. The best way to know what keywords are best to target is by partnering with your marketing specialist and developing buyer personas that fit your practice’s most common demographics. From there, you can use keyword tools to narrow down the most relevant keywords that users are searching for within the demographics of your buyer personas. Remember: people search for things in order to solve problems, so it’s integral to know what problems your potential customers might be searching for (and provide the right information they need to solve them!)

Make sure your site fits expectations

When you Google something like “plastic surgery Grand Rapids MI”, you probably have an image in your head of what a plastic surgery website will look like. You can largely expect dark, classy colors and neat, clean fonts. It will probably have images of idealized models and a before-and-after gallery of patient images. If the website you find is cluttered, outdated, or sore on the eyes, you’ll probably look elsewhere for a plastic surgeon. After all, a website is a reflection of your practice, so a plastic surgeon who cuts corners on their website might do the same elsewhere.

This concept is called “cognitive fluency,” or where a website fits the expectations of what users imagine a practice’s website looks like. These kinds of websites tend to drive more traffic. If you don’t already have a professional designer on your marketing team, then take a hard look at your site and others in your field to determine where it does and does not fit expectations. Consider a re-design so patients feel more confident in your skills and services.

Write relevant and useful blog content regularly

As we’ve discussed, people search things to find answers, and blogs are usually the most useful pieces of content for users. Your blog topics should never be generic – instead, take some time to consider what specific questions your patients usually ask and how you can thoroughly answer these questions in written form. If your potential customers can find these answers online from your website, it can be a powerful deciding factor in whether they continue to look for services with you. After all, it makes you look knowledgeable on top of being most relevant to their goals.

Additionally, you should be publishing blog content regularly (at least once per month). That’s because making regular updates to your site in the form of publishing blog posts signals search engines that they need to crawl your site more often, upping your chances of showing up on SERPs. So, regularly publishing relevant, useful content is a powerful and effective combination.

Let’s Get In Touch

It’s more important than ever to have a solid digital marketing plan for your practice. The best way to elevate your website and drive traffic is by partnering with an experienced marketing team and developing an effective strategy for your goals. Give us a call or fill out our online contact form to get started.

The post How Getting Back to Basics Can Help You Get More Website Visitors appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.

Link Building Metrics

Metrics should be fast, easily understood, and specified for domain or page linking. Domain authority, or linking, looks at how well a page will do on the entire domain, but page authority allows your metrics and analysis of link values to be a bit more specific. Page authority is initially informed by how well the page ranks on a domain but also lets you know how well each specific page is doing on your website.

Backlink Audit

One specific metric you can run is a backlink audit, which looks at all the backlinks directed to your website. Backlinks represent the traffic coming into your site and they link between the pages on your website to build a map. You can see if you are earning backlinks from high authority sites which will help boost your rankings on Google. You can also look for toxic backlinks which are from unreputable sites and remove them since they can damage your ranking value.

Keyword Position Analysis

Another helpful metric is a keyword position analysis. Once your domain authority improves from your link building, Google will look at the keywords on your website and determine whether to give you an even higher ranking in the search engine result. For this reason, it is important to base your website on SEO (search engine optimization) and utilize keywords on every page.

Track Organic Growth

By comparing the amount of traffic your site receives in comparison to new marketing strategies, such as link building, you can determine whether that strategy is working. If traffic increases after you begin to build links, this is a good sign that your site is starting to receive higher rankings and is valued more in search engine results.

Build Your Website with Digital Limelight Media

Our marketing team at DLM can easily track the metrics of your website using our software DLM Insight. By tracking the rate of organic growth and leads that your website receives, we will continue to develop your marketing strategies to support your business. Learn more about our services by visiting us online or scheduling a quick 15-minute demo.

The post How to Measure Link Building and Increase Organic Growth appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.

If you want your medical practice’s site to perform well, it needs to be optimized for both humans and bots, which we’ll explain in this post.

How to Write for Robots

Bots scan web pages through the back end, meaning they see parts of the code that people rarely look at, including things like structured content, which is code that tells a robot crawler that something specific is here that it should use in a certain way. All this is to say your site needs to be technically optimized first before thinking about how to write content that also makes things easy for bots to understand.

Primarily what you’ll need to think about is the purpose of each page and what you want, for example, Google to know about. This largely is done through using specific keywords several times per page. If your practice performs a specific procedure, it’s important to use the procedure name and other terms people use for it, such as “rhinoplasty” and “nose job.”

Both bots and humans understand that headers are used to introduce new sections of content, and different levels of header (heading 1, 2, 3, etc.) go further to say which topics are sub-topics that relate to the main idea. This enables bots to display paragraphs of text immediately at the top of a Google search page, such as for “Botox in Sacramento, CA,” when the header matches the search term closely.

Finally, keeping things interesting by having multiple types of media on your pages signals to bots that there’s valuable information on your page as opposed to a solid block of plain text. This is also beneficial for people, as having visuals like photos or infographics engages readers and makes it more likely they’ll stick around on your site for longer.

How to Write for People

This may seem like a no-brainer, but there are common things people get wrong when writing content that makes it harder to read, and therefore less likely to drive new patients to the practice.

The average person isn’t searching for academic text when browsing the web, so keeping your language simple and readable is key to drawing people in. Our writers are able to check what level of complexity their language is and optimize it for the average person looking for aesthetics or other procedures.

Making things readable also means making your writing clear and to the point. Using active voice, colorful verbs, and avoiding cliches are three ways to tighten up your writing and make it easier for people to digest.

Finally, many people will spot spelling mistakes and grammatical errors from a mile away, which can do irreparable damage of your practice’s reputation in their minds. Go beyond spell check and really read through content before posting it to make sure it makes sense and doesn’t contain typos.

Content Developers for Medical Practices

If you want to optimize your site, you’ve got to consider both the bots and the real people coming to your site every day. Our writing staff at DLM can take care of your regular content updates to help your site attract and retain visitors and drive new leads to your practice. Call or contact DLM online today to learn more about our services and your website’s potential.

The post Should You Optimize Your Web Content For Humans or Robots? appeared first on Digital Limelight Media.