Today we're going to talk about the first of the top 10 questions that orthodontists should be asking but generally are not. The very first question that you should be asking or should be thinking about when it comes to your online marketing campaign is: What keywords should I be focusing on? Not just "How do I get on page one for Google?"

Because, quite frankly, anyone can guarantee you page one Google results. But the question is what keywords are they going to be guaranteeing that on? It's certainly not going to be "orthodontist" because you're never going to be able to get on page one of orthodontist if you haven't already had a website for years that has been optimized properly. So does that mean that you can maybe get on page one of Google for orthodontics in your area?

That would be "orthodontist Denver Colorado, " "orthodontics Manhattan, Kansas?" That answer is yes, you can most certainly do that. You want to make sure you're focusing on the right keywords.

How do you know what keywords you should be focusing on? There are a lot of tools out there to help you do that. Some are free, some you have to pay for. So let's just talk about the one that is absolutely free, it works extremely well, it's very effective, and it takes seconds to use. It is Google's keyword tool. It is very powerful. What it does is allows you to put "orthodontist" into their keyword search term, and then it will pull up everything that it considers related to orthodontist and show you how many people are searching for that particular term, both in the U.S. and globally. So you have a really good feel for whether or not this is a valuable keyword or not.

What keywords do you put in? Well, I would start with multiple words that include local modifiers. So put in the keywords that are specific to your area. If somebody puts "orthodontics" and then the name of your town, that's a pretty good probability that they need orthodontics or they are pretty close to getting started. That's the kind of thing that you want to put into Google and find out.

You will learn how many people are putting in that search term and then you'll discover what other related terms that those same people are looking for. Google will give you a huge list to choose from. Then you can sort it by the number of searches that are being done each month, and you know what search terms you want to focus on.

That's the answer to the first question that should be asked. I really want you to consider if you are focusing on the right keywords. Is your web provider or whoever built your website taking the time to really think through the right keywords to focus on? Are you doing Invisalign? Do you treat with Damon, Innovation? Do you have something in there that people are searching for, and focused in your area?

So that's it for question number one. I hope that you've found it interesting and it's given you something new to start thinking about when you go about creating your online marketing campaign.