The following is a guest post by Chris Barnard of SocialDentalNetwork.com. If you are interested in guest posting for Dental Heroes, please sign up here.

The search engine wars are over, the people won!

And it wasn’t an occupy movement parked in Google’s portico or a flash mob sit-in at Microsoft that led to the lay down of arms.

We did it to ourselves.

This continental shift in social local search and corresponding groundswell of opportunity favors the prepared and rewards the diverse.

How does the above average dental practice capitalize on this local search opportunity to increase online visibility?

Location, location, location.

As we covered in the intro post to local search optimization for the dental practice, the foundational elements in need of inspection with regard to properly communicating essential information about the practice are: Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, and MapQuest.

We should throw AOL in there too, just for semantics – AOL owns MapQuest at the time of writing this article, but it was astutely pointed out last week by a keen observer that AOL should be included. So, foot in mouth disease made an appearance somewhere in San Diego last week…mea culpa.

With the interest of keeping this local search series diatribe informative and educational we’ll KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid).

Because if we get into historical hodgepodge of where your practice info was ever entered online, if it was correct, if you’ve moved in the past few years, if you’ve had any legal issues, if you were a victim of unscrupulous marketing, and much more, you’d really be sick of reading.

We couldn’t possibly cover every contingency with respect to the individual dental practice, but the following tips should hold water whether your practice high and dry or bailing buckets.

Consolidate Don’t Procreate

Trust is a huge factor with regards to how your practice listing is represented. If it’s Google Places or MapQuest, the communication of verifiable practice information is essential.

There are lots of variables given the industry; is it a group, is it multi-location, is it corporate, and so on.

As we’re talking about a singular dental practice here, for matters of example, we’re dealing with one location. Don’t let the section header fool you, we’re not going off on some ranting tangent, and we won’t show up at your door later.

The point being stressed is, confirm, consolidate, and control YOUR practice listing.

Don’t worry about falling victim to the impetuous allure of confirming and controlling multiple listings within one environment.

For example, if your practice has 3 listings in Google Places (for one location), all of varying benefits…confirm them all, and then look to consolidate the listings to one primary pimped out profile with all correct info listed and benefits represented.

Multiple listings for one location within one environment is no good, it hurts the trust factor at the very least. And don’t think you’re the first dentist to think if you confirm every listing in your area, you’ll dominate.

You could actually get penalized, and that could hurt your online practice visibility for an indeterminable period.

A Thousand Words

We’re not talking about pedantic digital dental marketing blog scribes; we’re talking about first impressions.

If you were a new patient seeking a dentist online, would you rather visit the website – because that’s what consumers are doing before they call you – of a dentist that communicates a bland message replete with zero pictures, no video, invisible new patient offers, and nothing in the way of digital word of mouth?

Wouldn’t we all choose a dentist that engagingly communicates exactly what the new patient is seeking on their search – professionalism, comfort, and familiarity?

A succinct highly ranked local search profile is professional; it comforts people and transmits the message that you know what you’re doing and you’ll take care of us.

Reading reviews from people that have sat in your chair and experienced dentistry a’ la you, allows us to achieve some level of familiarity with your practice.

Same goes for photos, videos, links to your Facebook page, Twitter, business description, accurate hours of operation, and enticing call to action offers!

The Tips

• Add photos – as many as allowed, you don’t want a clinical pic scraped from a CE forum as your welcome message to people that land on your local search listing.
• Add video if possible – again, as many as you can, doesn’t have to be Scorsese-like.
• Write Engaging Business Descriptions – and don’t be afraid to test different versions.
• Offers or Promotional Messages – calls to action are essential in new patient recruitment.
• Social Links – if applicable, it soon will be.

Here are 10 more basics to follow courtesy of local search oracle – David Mihm:

1. Your physical address matching/listing the city where you’re located.
2. Manually verifying your ownership of the company’s Google Places page.
3. Having proper category associations for your page and citations.
4. Having a large number of “traditional structured citations” for your business (on sites like Internet yellow pages and local place aggregators).
5. Having your address listed on your company website, and make sure that address is crawlable.
6. Having a well-ranked (PR) company website.
7. Having high-quality inbound links to your company website.
8. Having your phone number listed on your company website, and making sure that phone number is crawlable.
9. Having an accurate local area code listed on your Google Places page.
10. Having your city and state listed in the page title for your Google Places landing page.

The items listed above can be treated as a checklist for establishing bare minimums for local search optimization.

You can read the full body of work and 98 ranking factors here – just make sure you read and understand it in its entirety before going out and putting rubber to the road. There are seemingly stupid mistakes to be made that can really negatively impact a listing.

Watch Your Back

In case you haven’t yet had the pleasure of getting cold calls from every marketer from Boston to Bombay promising to get you to the top of Google, or possess the special first-hand experience of having gone through the rip-off mill, social media and local search represent immense marketing opportunity for dental practices.

But there’s probably a bit more opportunity and low hanging fruit dangling in front of the unscrupulous marketing realm. Lots of small business owners don’t know where to start, and some fall victim to the slick words and empty promises.

Do yourself a favor, and rely on common sense when it comes to local search optimization for your dental practice.

Nobody on this planet can guarantee you top search engine placement on the results pages. And nobody can remove negative online reviews – at least legitimately.

The tools are available to do this yourself, and with a little planning and execution it’s certainly possible for you to confirm and begin consolidating your dental practice local search engine listings.

Then you can continue to educate yourself and build the citations and optimization efforts to consistently communicate genuine crawl-friendly easily verifiable info, automatically collect online reviews, and systematically syndicate your dental practice digital word of mouth.

Your Thoughts

If you’ve already dabbled in local seo for your dental practice, what specific issues are the most troublesome?

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