Have you seen what your website looks like on your 
mobile recently? Chances are, if you haven’t invested in a mobile site, it’s a pretty slow sluggish process and you have to zoom in and out in order to view anything; even worse if your site is flash and you’re viewing from an iPhone you may see nothing at all! That is also what your patients are seeing- not very professional right?
Writing blog posts with an eye towards search engine optimisation, or any other content for SEO, can be challenging. This is why we have prepared the following blog writing tips to guide you through the process…..
Navigation can be very simple, or very complex. It can be horizontal, or vertical. It can be static, or it can follow you as you scroll down a page. Because navigation can vary so much between websites, there are no set guidelines or how-to’s for organizing navigation.
Designing navigation is an art in itself, and as designers we become better at it with experience. It’s all about using good information architecture: “the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems.”
The best navigation designs and structures will allow your site visitors to reach the content they want to see in the least amount of effort and clicks. If they cannot get to where they want to be within a maximum of two clicks, you risk losing their business completely. Continue reading
When setting up a new dental company or business idea, it is very important to focus on your logo and branding ideas – how do you want to come across to your audience, what design principles can you employ to ensure you desired target market will enjoy and frequently visit/use your website. Following on from this, your user interface must be clear and concise – if your UI is hard to use/navigate then users will not waste their time browsing your website. The following article highlights some key points relating to design.
A dental practice in the social media space seeking to form an ongoing relationship with its patients must observe the same rules of politesse when planning and executing a social media strategy. The goal is not just to tell people how great you are, but to underscore how important they—and their feedback—are to you, and to ask them for information you can use to serve them better.
It is important to keep your goals in mind when crafting your social media plan. Do you want to increase sales? Create a stronger brand identity and awareness? Get more sign-ups for your e-newsletter? Having specific goals will help you focus your approach.
Engaging users can provide multiple benefits. For example:
• You can get people talking about your brand.
• You can learn more about your patients.
• You can learn more about your competitors.
Continue reading
Here at Dental Design, we realise that search engine optimisation is incredibly complex. There are so many strategies, techniques and tactics that can be employed to help organically improve your dental practices search engine visibility that it can be easy to forget some of the basic principles that are equally as essential. In this blog I’ll discuss a few of those basic principles that often act as the foundation of an SEO strategy and if neglected could potentially slow the rate of growth that search engine optimisation can achieve. As with most web strategy related concepts, the place to start is with content.
For local service based businesses such as Dental Practices, PPC is one of the most effective ways of marketing to and acquiring new patients. Unlike SEO, campaigns can be setup and your ads can be showing at the top of Google immediately. Apart from almost instant results, PPC campaigns for local businesses can be particularly fruitful due to the amount of campaigns that aren’t setup correctly (from incorrect location targeting to budgeting mistakes and bad ad copy – a well run campaign will stand out from the crowd and be profitable.
As shown by the number of poorly run PPC campaigns, they are complex to set up and manage. Equally, measuring how well a campaign is performing is a task in itself and has a number of pitfalls.
Six months ago everyone in the office got excited about the 
announcement of Google+ and what it would mean for our clients. Would this become the new Facebook? Will it be as up to date as twitter? Is this just another thing where I hear about what people had for lunch that day?
However, despite the initial hype, Google+ just seemed to sit there happily in the background, lots of people signed up to it, but not much happened from there. Famously Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook signed up for the service and to this day has never posted.
Adobe conducted a study throughout 2011 to find out which 
online customers are the most lucrative: either tablet users, smart phone users or traditional desktop and laptop users.
The company analysed more than 16.2billion visits to various websites and found that tablet users spend approximately 20% more than those who use desktops and laptops. Continue reading
The power of bad reviews
Negative reviews can help your business. It runs counter to every marketer’s instinct: you don’t want people saying bad things about your brand, your products or services, and you certainly don’t want to publish that negative feedback on your own site. But the surprising truth is that bad reviews and other negative feedback bring a host of benefits, from greater customer satisfaction to improved product development. Consumers spend four times as long on site when they interact with bad reviews, trust the reviews they see far more and convert nearly 70% more often.
Every business will receive some bad reviews: you simply can’t please everyone. How you choose to deal with them will determine whether they’re an asset or not.
