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Interactive Refractive Lasik Marketing Community

LASIK Marketing Expert

Interactive Refractive is a marketing and communications collaboration of many companies and industry professionals dedicated to assisting refractive surgery practices in their quest to reach patients and excel in LASIK marketing.

Our website offers a chance for refractive coordinators all over the world to read articles, communicate and exchange ideas about their work as well as how to improve the overall efficiency of their practices.

Feel free to start by reading our latest article below, or simply use the navigation above to browse through the many sections on the website.

10 Steps to Help Your Ophthalmology Practice Avoid SEO Malpractice

admin January 5th, 2009

Search engine optimization has grown in Internet marketing importance over the last 5 years. Without a solid organic search engine optimization program practices simply miss hundreds of potential surgeries. If you are not where people are looking, you are simply not an option. It does not matter if you are targeting generation Y, generation X, or even baby boomers. They are all in need of your services and they all use the Internet by the millions. Over the last years many practices have successfully and unsuccessfully established their SEO programs. The top SEO performers continue to spend the money it takes to do well on the search engines because it simply works. So how do you choose the right company and avoid SEO malpractice.

As a practice you have the daunting task of trying make sense of these kinds of companies and whether or not they practice legitimate techniques. The SEO world is comprised of white hat (legitimate) and black hat (cheaters according to google) companies. Most companies operating in the field of ophthalmology practice legitimate white hat SEO techniques and are a solid bet for reliability, performance and safety from SEO malpractice, however, after attending several LASIK marketing seminars I was literally shocked at the confusion surrounding SEO in ophthalmology. Some practices justified saving a couple hundred dollars a month and ended up with serious problems resulting in penalties. Others just got NO results and spent a lot of money. Some even had outgoing links to pornography websites. If you are a practice that wishes to take the high road and practice correct and appropriate SEO you should continue reading. If you are a practice that has no problem trying to cheat google or work with “shady” companies you should probably stop reading at this point. The remainder of this article will attempt to help you understand the issues surrounding SEO malpractice. Remember, you are a medical practice! Act like one!

1. Discussing the 3 C’s of SEO.
Engage in a conversation with the SEO companies you would consider to HIRE. What are the techniques used to get first page results? Your SEO company needs to address how they appeal to the search algorithms. Be skeptical of companies that have a “PROPRIETARY METHOD” that they are secretive about. Your conversation should be centered around the 3 C’s of SEO which are content, code and connectivity. These three elements are the core of a good SEO program. As a medical practice you should be concerned with these elements and what the SEO company doe to appeal to the algorithm.

For more information please read Onur Birsen’s article that coined the phrase The 3C’s of SEO.

2. Unsolicited emails from people claiming they are SEO experts
This seems to be a surefire to waste a lot of time and money. I have heard numerous stories from practices who hired these kinds of companies and simply got nothing in return. No results and a website littered with keyword stuffing and poorly developed tags that hurt the website SEO more than helped it. Take the time to find the right company on your own. Word of mouth usually works the best. Some of these illegitimate companies are downright hilarious. The sales people in many cases having been selling SEO for 2 weeks, but they claim to be the best. They are not even educated enough to know what they are saying.

3. A WORD FROM Google (content source – Google)
A statement from Googles Webmaster Help Center: “Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Google Sitemaps program, and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.”

NO COMPANY can guarantee anything with SEO. What if the algorithm changes tomorrow and it determines the techniques on your website are now spammy. What happens next?

4. Do Not USE duplicate content
This topic is quite amazing to me! I am completely surprised at how a medical community like ophthalmology could unintelligently engage in this practice. Not only is duplicate content the work of other people, but it clearly has issues on the search engines. When duplicate content first became an issue on ophthalmology websites, many companies and people pushed back. Many people claimed it was a MYTH. Today, I am more confident than ever that websites will have issues if they do not take the time to write their own unique content. Is it worth it to have a possible SEO penalty dropping your results to page 40? Once this occurs you have a bigger and more expensive problem. My suggestion is to develop a robust set of content for website that is well written. NOTE: A duplicate content penalty does not just come in the form of text it may also have to deal with your URL structures and usage of domain name.

check your site and articles with tools like copyscape.com.

5. Use proper redirects – Use the 301
Do not let your SEO company engage in the use of shadow domains or domains that drive traffic to your website by deceptive redirects. Many of these types of domains can be actually owned by the SEO company and can be used without the awareness of the practice. Insist on 301 redirects and ask the company to not engage in shadow domains.

6. Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing does not work and makes your website look ridiculous. I think it is important to have visible keywords within the website content,  but just limit the over usage of keywords. Additionally work the SEO around the content on the page. Many ophthalmology practices still have tags on a page with no relevant content. All this does is limit the focus of the quality content on the page.

7. Do Not Hide Text in the Website.
Sometimes you can find hidden website text really easy by highlighting the blank area at the bottom of the page. Hiding text from humans or human website editors is an old black hat trick that non longer works and can get your website in big trouble. When consulting your SEO company make sure to address how the website tags are developed.

8. Differentiate Between SEO and SEM
Make sure the SEO company explains the difference between SEO(organic) and SEM(paid). Some practices think they are optimized for organic searches because they are on the google adwords program doing pay per click advertising. A SEO company should have a strategy to deal with both paid search and organic search. Make sure that there is a clear distinction between the two methods of search.

9. Avoid LINK Farms
Link farms are another completely misunderstood topic. According to Google, a link farm is a collection of UNRELATED website links put together for the purpose of tricking link popularity. LINKING with relevant websites such as other eye doctors is NOT a link farm, LINKING with your local media is NOT a link farm.

10. Hire a Professional But Know What They DO!
It is certainly possible that an ophthalmology practice could attempt SEO internally with a potentially savvy employee. Typically speaking SEO people with little experience make mistakes. Take for example to refractive coordinator who bounced from page 2 to page 40. Simply understanding how to construct proper and SEO friendly URLs and understanding the duplicate content penalty could have saved them the aggravation. Now, no patients will find you. You have to ask yourself this question. Is it worth saving $300 per month to get penalized and end up on page 40 where you are certain to get NO leads? Of course I am saying this as a SEO professional but I can say for certain how to avoid penalties and how to handle the situation if one does occur.

Page Topics Include: Ophthalmology website search engine optimization, ethical medical SEO, 10 keys to avoid SEO malpractice in ophthalmology.

About the Author: Michael Dobkowski is a seasoned ophthalmology practice marketing consultant for Glacial Multimedia Inc. If you need assistance with internet marketing, you may consult him at: 207.878.5900

Perception Vs Reality

admin January 31st, 2008

Many Doctor’s and Refractive Coordinators are so swamped with the details of doing their job. The daily level of office activity leads to the false assumption that their phones must have been answered properly to have generated such a huge volume of work. Time and again, when real calls are recorded and reviewed, we see that Administrator’s and Doctor’s preconception of these calls does not necessarily match their reality.

In actuality, phones are often answered by unprepared, uninformed, unenthused and often uncaring staff. Most of us experience poor customer service in some form every day, but when delivered over the phone it is most frustrating. When poorly treated, the customer’s choice is to deal with it or go elsewhere. “Can you please hold?” Most people don’t want to!

Our goal as a leader in the ophthalmology industry should be to always stand out as exceptional. There are no second chances to make a first impression. A bad first impression in the competitive Lasik and IOL market, simply leads to your potential customer finding someone else. It’s hard to imagine how disposable your premium lasik services really are. On recorded calls from practices across the country, we often hear the same potential client shopping price at competing practices. We’re here to tell you from experience, you are disposable until the caller has decided that you are the right place for them.

But how do you make the consumer realize that you are the best choice? The answer is to match your perception to your reality, and to become as excellent as you think you can be.

We have made over 400 secret shop calls to practices nationally over the past 3 months. During this time, we were able to reach a counselor directly only 66% of the time! The other 33% of calls were either transferred to voicemail, or asked to leave a message. Of the counselors reached directly, just under 1/3 of them, or in total about 18% of the calls, resulted in any effort to keep us as an active lead.

With our ACE program, we have the ability to listen to real patient calls for practices, we monitor every call. On average, before the ACE program is implemented, most practices were losing 30% of their new lasik leads by not capturing any information from the patient before ending the call. With a few changes we can help “lost leads” become a thing of the past.

Many practices boast a 90% phone inquiry to consult conversion, but don’t actually capture every lead. In effect they only convert 50-60% of their inquiries into consultations because the only calls documented are those willing to commit to a consultation now. Everyone else became a lost lead. Talk about missed opportunity! The stakes are high when each incoming call represents upwards of $5000 a pair of eyes. If the initial caller does not enter your financial funnel, most likely they will find another. Our point, lead capture is essential when in today’s market every call counts. The ACE program’s crux is lead capture and cultivation, but that’s not all. There is much more involved in maximizing your potential along with bettering your potential client’s experience.

Treating Lasik and IOL callers as if they were regular ophthalmology patients calling for the first time is one of the biggest mistakes that practices make. Answering Lasik calls like this……“Can you please hold? ,” or “ The price? Oh it’s $2600 per eye. Is that all ?, ok then, bye now.” …are more common than you can imagine and have a grave effect on the bottom line. Remember, these folks do not consider themselves to be patients of yours yet, nor do they have the time or patience to deal with poor service.

Here’s nine ways to improve your lasik calls and avoid the average practice’s pitfalls.

  1. Capture every lead routinely
  2. Ensure that calls follow a format that maximizes the potential of gaining new business
  3. Assign informed and well educated counselor’s to handle your lasik and IOL calls
  4. Script your lasik calls in advance so you can dependably predict the outcome
  5. Ensure that your staff is kind and correct on every call.
  6. Call your own office as a patient to experience and improve upon your own front office
  7. Research your competition and improve upon their style
  8. Allow your staff to answer lasik calls uninterrupted
  9. Prepare to make mistakes and accept that they will be made. The key is to learn from them while maintaining morale which ultimately reflects on your call quality.

Imagine if every call were handled as if the caller had reached the most knowledgeable person in your office, every time, without interruptions or unnecessary holds. That’s our perception. It’s up to you to match your perception to your own reality. You may soon be busier than you ever imagined.

About the author of this article: Bill Mercier is the president and CEO of OptiCall, Inc, a provider of consumer communications solutions for the refractive industry which increases conversion rates of prospective callers into viable patient consultations.

Achieving a “Triple Double” in SEO

obirsen January 24th, 2008

Aligning Responsibilities and Expectations in An Increasingly Competitive SEO World
By Onur Birsen, CPA, MBA

When is the search engine optimizer responsible for failure and when is it the client’s fault? Can clear lines be drawn between the borders of responsibility and when is the equation right for success? In this article, I attempt to provide some insight into these critical questions by making an analogy to a simple expression commonly used in basketball called a ”triple double”. A triple-double is defined as an individual performance in a game in which a player accumulates double-digit totals (i.e., 10 or more) in any three of these categories: points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocked shots.

All professional search engine optimizers agree that it’s their job to educate clients as much as possible so that they have realistic expectations about results. However, in some cases, even if the search engine optimizer does just that, clients can have difficulties coming to terms with certain basic facts about SEO. Of course, SEO is very technical and can be difficult to understand. Also adding to the stress, it’s their money on the line. They want to get a quick ROI like in any other business, but in today’s SEO world, “quick” is just NOT feasible unless some very important and specific set of requirements are met on three levels. These requirements (two pre-requisites, two client responsibilities, two search engine optimizer responsibilities) form the basis of my concept for achieving a “triple double” in SEO:

The Double Pre-Requisites for Quick SEO Success

  1. The domain name to be used for the optimized website needs to been registered and live for at least two to three years without ever being banned, blacklisted or penalized by internet authorities.
  2. The website using the aforementioned domain name must have a healthy number of quality incoming links. Although figures can vary greatly from one sector to the other, as a rule of thumb 100 or more unique incoming links can be considered healthy for a rural LASIK market, and 1000 or more unique incoming links can be considered healthy for a competitive LASIK market. (For help with determining the number of incoming links to your website please contact us)

It should be noted that the word “quick” is a relative term, and in the world of SEO, quick usually means approximately three months.

My experience with SEO in the last 8 years has shown me that a large portion of clients who want SEO services have domain names and websites that do not satisfy the pre-requisites above. As a result, it is an unfortunate fact that for the most part, expectations by clients and actual early SEO results by search engine optimizers often don’t align.

Clients, generally speaking:

  1. Want guarantees about performance before putting down significant sums of money and expect to see results in a short period of time.
  2. Want to see “top rankings” for a small number of specific keywords they feel are very important.

On the other hand, SEO providers:

  1. Reject guarantees and can only provide rough estimates for the time frames for “success”.
  2. Believe SEO is much more than achieving top rankings for a few “priority” keywords.

The magic element for success is an honest reconciliation between the two parties involved. In order to achieve this, both sides need to clearly understand their responsibilities. These two sets of responsibilities for each side complete the “triple double” in SEO.

The Double Responsibilities of the SEO Client:

Be patient and prepare for the process. Assuming the domain name is not brand new, the typical SEO campaign starts delivering results within three months. For new domain names and websites, this can take up to one to two years. Clients may want to call each week asking where the results are. Rather, they should communicate with their SEO company about how to get involved and speed up the process. They should also be prepared for additional recommendations and requests from the search engine optimizer that fall outside the original contract and related budget. During implementation, optimizers frequently uncover new issues and challenges which were not possible to determine at the beginning of the project. Don’t downplay these strategies in order to save money because they may be what are needed to get you to the top.

Contribute, since search engine optimizers cannot be expected to learn everything about your business. While they are implementing the SEO strategy, clients will have to contribute by approving keywords and content, pursuing links and write articles. Genuine content can not be made up by non-experts. If you make your SEO write your content it may discredit you in the long run. Provide all of the content, and then let the search engine optimizers work their magic on the words and sentences to make the content more SEO friendly.

The Double Responsibilities of the SEO:

Explain to clients what their expected involvement during any portion of the campaign will be. Most clients don’t mind getting involved, but nobody likes getting tasks assigned to them when they thought someone else would be taking care of them. If more programming and development may be involved and extra funds are likely to be required due to a competitive marketplace, let clients know of these possibilities before they sign on the dotted line.

Treat each campaign individually. Certain strategies that work for one project may not work well for another. The resources where you go to find links, the keyword density in the content, the types of keywords used and the structure of the website pages will have vary from one clients website to another. The search engine optimizer must take these details into consideration and formulate plans which are specific to the challenge.

Conclusion:

Achieving a triple double in a search engine optimization campaign comes as a result of the understanding and fulfilling of responsibilities by both the search engine optimizer and the client. Assuming this is accomplished, the speed at which the “SEO triple double” will come depends on whether or not the double pre-requisites mentioned at the beginning of this article are met. Three to 6 months is a fair time-frame to accomplish a “triple double” if the pre-requisites are met. Otherwise, when starting out with a new domain name and no incoming links, clients should be ready to wait one to two years before seeing any significant results.

Most importantly, it should never be overlooked that the success of a business itself lies solely with the owner of that business. Therefore, clients must be sure that their businesses can succeed with or without a triple double in SEO. Just like a basketball team needs to play as a team, and win a game regardless of a single player racking up a triple double, a company needs to be able to succeed without SEO in the first place.SEO should be like the butter on top of the bread. Any business solely depending on a SEO for success will probably fail anyway, regardless of the SEOs success or failure.

About the author of this article:

Onur Birsen, M.B.A, C.P.A. is currently a partner and the Chief Technical Officer of Glacial Multimedia, Inc. He has been lecturing for over 6 years within the medical community on the topic of search engine optimization, and holds a degree on e-commerce from Harvard University.

Advertising

admin March 7th, 2007


Identity Development - The Dawn of Your Brand!

Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name.
A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly
distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so that it can
be easily communicated and usually marketed. At Glacial Multimedia we
take pride in helping our clients achieve their branding goals.
Starting with a thorough analysis of the business goals and the
development of a logo we start to position the brand to meet its goals.

Print Advertising Design - Creative Through Visual Representation

Creating Your Image:

• Call to action advertising
• General advertising services

Glacial Multimedia provides advertising and graphic design services
tailored to meet the specific needs of business professionals. Our
creative staff combines traditional American marketing values with a
blend of European design flavor.

Pre-Press & Printing Services - Creative Through Visual Strategy

Glacial Multimedia offers full service digital or analog printing. Our
multiple years of experience working with printers and pre-press
manufacturers guarantees a professional solution for your printing
needs.

• Business Cards     
• Postcards
• Brochures
• Letterhead & Envelopes
• Flyers
• Posters
• Folders
• Newspaper Inserts

Direct Marketing - Elicit Immediate Reactions

Direct marketing efforts are designed to elicit immediate reactions
from consumers. These marketing efforts for businesses can be an
excellent alternative to display advertising and further play an
integral role as a marketing call to action. The Glacial Multimedia
staff will develop direct marketing and grass roots campaigns on a
local or national basis. We offer complete direct marketing solutions
and design-only options as well.

• Postcard development
• Campaign concept development    
• Complete direct marketing solutions

Digital Video Production - Emotion in Motion

The DV Team offers a full range of digital video services including
production work for TV commercials, music videos, corporate training
videos, or patient education videos. In addition to the actual
production of the video we can actually direct and write the material
needed for your project.

Audio Recording Production - Custom Developed Digital Audio Tracks

Glacial Multimedia Recording provides digitally recorded materials. In
addition to our recording capabilities we custom build audio tracks for
presentations, commercials, flash web sites, radio spots, and
multimedia CD-ROMS. All tracks can be custom built and mixed to meet
your specific audio needs.

• Custom developed music sequences    
• Digital recording and mixing

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