Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here with another practice news update.

I have recently gone through an interesting exercise in my practice, and it yielded some great results.

I asked myself this question: “If my practice doubled tomorrow, where would it fail?”

By fail I mean where would your systems that normally deliver a great patient experience break down?

Can your front desk cope with double the number of patients coming through the practice? Or are they already overworked with inefficient systems?

Do you have the capacity to see those extra patients, or do you need another practitioner?

Will your follow up procedures keep that patient engaged with your practice in the way they should?

So I would suggest taking 15 minutes and brainstorming where your practice would fail if it doubled tomorrow. Then set to work coming up with new procedures and systems to help you deal with an influx.

This has been another practice tip from Clear Health Media.

The post How Would Your Practice FAIL When Faced With Success? appeared first on Clear Health Media.

Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here with another practice news update.

We all know that Google searches the internet looking for relevant information to deliver to it’s users.

It is in their interest to get the correct information to people first time.

You can help Google and other search engines achieve this by correctly marking information on your website with tags called structured micro data. These are html tags that you can insert on your site to highlight things like your business name, address and phone number. By using them Google can then categorize your site more easily.

Then when people search for your business Google can deliver your information directly to them.

Adding the tags to your site is easy enough to do for a competent web design company. Clear Health Media can add them to your site for you. Just purchase one of our 5 hour packs and use some toward this job (click here).

This has been another practice tip from Clear Health Media.

The post Skyrocket Your Practice’s Local Business Listing appeared first on Clear Health Media.

Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here from Clear Health Media.

Your marketing needs goals, strategy and tactics. I break these down as follows:

Goals are your business aims. For example, I want 20 new patients a month from my website.

The strategy is how you plan to achieve that. For example, I am going to have a rich media strategy that drives traffic to my website and establishes me as a trusted authority in the area of my practice. My practice will then become the default choice for someone with that particular problem.

The tactics are the steps I will take to get there. For example, I am going to make 2, 5 minute videos a month. I will then post those to YouTube, and then embed them on my website. I will then have them transcribed and post the transcript on my site as well. I will strip out the audio and submit it to iTunes as a podcast.

So first of all, define your goals. Work out what you want your practice to look like in 6 months time.

Next define what you are going to take to get there. This is your strategy.

Finally define the step by step process that you need to take to achieve the strategy.

Thanks for listening and we will see you next time.

The post Goals, Strategy and Tactics in Marketing Your Practice appeared first on Clear Health Media.

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Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here from Clear Health Media.

What is Internet Marketing for Practices?

Simply it is using the internet to market your practice, just like any other channel. Other examples are newspapers, flyers, Yellow Pages etc.

What makes internet marketing so unique is that it can be much more cost effective that traditional marketing, often because you can be super targeted on the group of people you are trying to reach. If you’re not sure about who you’re trying to reach, then pop on over to practicedna.com and listen to our episode on Chosing Your Practice’s Focus.

Internet marketing is also very diverse. It can cover things like:

Search Engine Optimisation to improve your website’s search engine rankings

You don’t need to do all of these, but you would be crazy to ignore internet marketing for your practice. Google has already replaced Yellow Pages as the place to look for businesses. We can help you develop a marketing strategy that fits the goals that you have for your practice. Contact us at [email protected]

The post What is Internet Marketing for Practices? appeared first on Clear Health Media.

Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here from Clear Health Media.

Hopefully you have some sort of website promoting your practice because with dwindling Yellow Pages and Local Paper use online is definitely where you need to be.

While you business is located in one suburb it makes sense to set a broader net. Most practices will draw their patients from at least a few nearby suburbs. When advertising that on your website you need to be careful how that is done.

Google has recently highlighted that they consider “stuffing” suburb names into a paragraph to be a practice they frown upon. An example for my practice would be, “If you live in Greensborough, Eltham, St Helena, Montmorency, Watsonia or Diamond Creek consider us for your chiropractic care”. Now you could argue that this is a legitimate descriptor, but if you depend upon Google for much of the traffic to your website, you should avoid this practice unless you want to be penalised or “Slapped” by Google.

How do you know if your traffic comes from Google? You need analytics installed on your website. We can do that for you via our web design services. We can also help you clean up the text of your website to ensure it is best optimised to avoid any penalties and to be the best on page SEO results. Visit our web design pages for more information.

The post Avoid the Google Slap appeared first on Clear Health Media.

Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here from Clear Health Media.

The post Choosing a Domain Name – Update appeared first on Clear Health Media.

Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here from Clear Health Media.

You may have noticed in recent months there has been a great surge of activity around the new website called Pinterest, and some practitioners are interested to learn how they can go about using Pinterest to market their clinic better.

Pinterest for those of you who aren’t familiar with it is a photo sharing or image sharing website where in your journeys across the internet you want to be trying to, or people are trying to discover images and share them on their particular blog, within the Pinterest website. So the ways that you can use this as a practice owner is that you can be pinning images that you may be thinking are relevant to you and to your patient base.

You may decide to set an account for the clinic itself or you may decide to set it up as a personal account and share it within the business. You can include Pinterest tag buttons on your websites so that if you get people coming to your site they can more easily share your images. You can also share any images that you have produced in relation to your website as well.

All of this information is going to increase the chances of somebody finding your website and it is also going to act as a source of back links which from an SEO point of view is going to be beneficial as well. So if you haven’t checked Pinterest I suggest that you take the time to pop along and see what you make of it. Think about how you can possibly use it in your business to promote your practice.

This has been another videoblog from Clear Health Media.

The post Engaging with Your Patients with Pinterest appeared first on Clear Health Media.

Since posting this video, things have changed – click here for the latest info.

Hi, Dr Matthew Holmes here from Clear Health Media.

I was speaking to a client of ours recently and the question came up about what web domain name should you choose?

For those who aren’t familiar, the domain name is the address of the site. The domain name of this site is clearhealthmedia.com.

If you know a bit about search engine optimisation you may know that having you keywords in the title can help the site rank better.

For example if you were a chiropractor looking to get good search results for Melbourne, having Melbournechiropractor.com.au would probably help you rank better if someone is searching for Melbourne Chiropractor.

The problem with this is that it is very location specific. So if you were to open in another location, the original domain name won’t fit that well.

The benefit that this provides also seems to be decreasing.

I generally recommend getting a brandable domain. That is a domain that is the name of your business. That way it can move with you if you move or expand to other areas.

If the location specific domain names are available, you may want to purchase these also and point them to your site. They won’t provide any search engine optimisation benefit, but it will prevent your competition from getting hold of them.

To see how we can help you rank better in the search engines, be sure to visit clearhealthmedia.com and visit our SEO pages.

The post Choosing a Domain Name for Your Practice appeared first on Clear Health Media.