Put yourself in your new patients’ shoes for a second. Imagine you’re in the market for Invisalign®, and you’re ready to choose an orthodontist. You take to Google My Business to find one close to your home; you come across the first practice listed (we’ll call them Ortho #1) and click-through to their website.

Ortho #1’s website says, “High-Quality Orthodontist for Your Family” with supporting content that describes general ortho care.

You don’t feel connected to this orthodontist, so you go back to Google and select Ortho #2’s website. Ortho #2 says “Highest Quality Orthodontist” with more general ortho content.

You go back to Google, hoping Ortho #3’s website reads a bit more genuine… and it does! Ortho #3 has a strong brand presence with custom content centered around young adults looking for Invisalign. No questions asked, you happily book your free exam with Ortho #3.

See how important custom content is? The content on your website can make the difference between a new patient for your practice or a new patient for your competition’s practice.

Ranking on Google search isn’t going to land you new patients alone. Your website content has to support your position in your market- whether it be as the most affordable provider, the most experienced, the high end boutique, or all of the above.

First of all, what is custom content? Custom content is original content created specifically for your brand, your audience and your location. It’s how you deliver a personalized experience to your existing patients and potential patients through relevant messaging.

If your practice is geared toward families, you’ll want your website to reflect your family-friendly brand. If your brand is about health, wellness and feeling good, you’ll want your content to convey this. If your brand appeals to a demographic of young adults who are most concerned with the esthetics of their smile, you need custom content to show it.

It’s important to have custom, branded content on your website, because you’re more than likely not the only orthodontist available to your community. In most areas, you aren’t the only practice offering braces or Invisalign, so how is a potential patient supposed to determine what sets you apart from your competitors? You have to tell them through custom content.

What compels a prospective patient to schedule an appointment with you after visiting your website, versus your competition? From a brand standpoint, your website content needs to convey your unique value proposition to secure new patients.

To determine your unique value proposition, identify the features you offer—free orthodontic exams? CBCT scans? Free teeth whitening with treatment? Are you especially affordable compared to your competitors? Do you accept state funded insurances where others don’t? Is your brand committed to giving back to the community?

The unique nuances that make your brand.. your brand.. should be communicated through custom content. (And if you aren’t quite sure what makes your brand unique, we can help you figure it out! Request a complimentary session to get started.)

Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand. In fact, content marketing is SEO, and SEO is content marketing. You need content for search engines to index your website, and you need search engine optimization in your content for your website to be displayed on a search engine.

When content is not custom and is duplicated from other sites, this not only harms your brand presence, but in some cases can harm your search rankings. When content is duplicated on numerous sites, the search engine has to identify which website is most relevant to the user’s search.

Because the search engine is looking for one page that aligns with the user’s search, duplicated content can cause a website’s traffic and rankings to suffer, by making the website less visible on search.

If you duplicate content on your own site, this can also harm your search rankings. Think of it this way: Google has one glass of SEO juice. You want all of that juice to be given to one page on your site to boost the ranking of that page. If you duplicate content on another page (in the same website) and share the same keywords, then Google has to divide the glass of SEO juice between both pages, leaving both pages with less juice. A competitor that doesn’t duplicate its content would have one page receiving all of the SEO juice, boosting that single page’s rankings.

Plus, since content is so high on Google’s list when determining how to rank a website, you want to give your content the best chance possible. You don’t necessarily want Google seeking out other factors to determine if your website deserves to rank higher than your competitors.

Local keywords are an essential part of custom content and SEO. For your website to show up on the map pack (the first three local listings displayed on a Google search), your custom content needs to include location-specific keywords, like “orthodontist in Tampa” or “Invisalign near Carrollwood”.

Location-specific content is naturally custom content, because it’s relevant to your location and specific to your area.

If you want custom content writing done the right way while you care for your existing patients, we encourage you to schedule a complimentary discovery session with our friendly team of experts.

We have years of experience creating quality custom content that ranks on search engines, creates a connection between your practice and your audience, and showcases your unique brand. We know that you’d do it all if you had the time, but most orthodontists simply don’t have the time. That’s why we’re here.

We do the market research to identify who your audience is and determine what they’re looking for. We pick up on the nuances that make your brand different from the rest, to create custom content that leaves a lasting impression on your virtual visitors.

The importance of content (specifically custom content) that resonates with your audience, provides value to your new patients, and works with the Google spiders is absolutely paramount if you want to be found by prospective patients in your area.

Request a complimentary discovery session today. We’ll assess your current standing and your current website content to help you pinpoint areas for improvement.