mylasikdr.com Lasik Surgeon Directory

If i were to ask a lasik surgeon if they advertise with a listing in the yellow pages, many would probably answer with a yes. In fact this trend probably goes beyond just Lasik as an industry. But over the past 10 years people have been moving away from yellow pages to look up Lasik surgeons and onto the internet. If I want to search for a Lasik surgeon, I would probably get on google and start searching “Dallas Lasik”. Okay, I really wouldn’t, but i am a special case. The average consumer is going to hop onto their favorite search engine and start searching some combination of “lasik” and their city name. Now if you come up on the first page for your city and/or have a little PPC advertising going on the search engine, your work is not done.

Online Directories

Chances are, if you searched your city name and lasik, you found a few sites that don’t belong to a specific doctor. Many of these are probably some sort of lasik surgeon directory. And in honesty, if you have marketing money going into yellow page ads, it might be the time to shift that money to an internet directory. The reason you would do this, is you want people to see your name in more than one place.

Are All Online Directories Worth It?

There is no concrete answer to this question. It really depends on the cost per lead ratio. The best way to find out is to try it out a bit, and keep track of the statistics. How many people visited your page on the online directory? How many people come to your site from the directory? How many people came to your site, and contacted your office? You may not be able to catch all the data you need, but you should be able to gather enough to make an educated decision on wether or not you want to continue to stay in the listing.

When Would I Stay In the Yellow Pages?

If you do more than just Lasik surgery, you might not want to pull all of your yellow page ads. If you do a considerable amount of cataract surgery, then you should consider keeping an ad in the yellow pages. Yellow Pages are definately and older demographic, but even that is starting to change.

Figuring Out Where to Spend Your Money Online.

Let me start off saying that there is no sure fire answer to this question. But I can give you some ideas and pointers to lead you in the right direction. First off, it might not be a bad idea to have a small questionare for your younger patients asking them what websites they frequent. I can guarantee you sites like myspace and facebook will pop up frequently, but I bet most Lasik surgeons don’t know what a myspace is, let alone have an account on myspace.

Also, consider many of your local newspapers. Younger patients arn’t going to be reading the newspaper anymore. They read the news on internet. So you could consider running banners on some local newspaper websites.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo are another place that people are flocking to find their lasik surgeon. These are probably the most obvious places to advertise and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big plus to get first page ranking.

Pitfalls of Online Advertising

Well, I just mentioned SEO, and most Lasik surgeons have a company doing SEO for them currently. But sometimes your SEO company is doing nothing at all, or even causing damage. Here are a few tips to keep your SEO company in line

• Ask for weekly progress reports from your SEO company.
• Keep your SEO company in the loop. Let them know what’s going on in your practice. Sometimes Online PR can do good
• Gather testimonials from your patients and send them to your SEO company for content
• Have your SEO company explain everything they are doing to build your site’s rank
• Read up on SEO. It’s not really as complicated as they want you to believe, it just takes work.

Other pitfalls come from putting your banners on a site cluttered with banners or that use pop-ups. There is a thin line of creating online advertising that is eye-catching while not annoying the viewer. I have found that creating interactive banners can do really well in catching and keeping the attention of the viewer.

Final Note

There is no sure fire easy way to succeed in online marketing, but I have seen the cost per call (CPC) of internet marketing for lasik and it can be much lower than the CPC for traditional marketing.