LEAD GENERATION SOFTWARE: WHEN TO USE IT AND WHEN TO AVOID IT

LEAD GENERATION SOFTWARE: 

WHEN TO USE IT AND WHEN TO AVOID IT

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When it comes to dental lab lead generation software and platforms, there are two things to keep in mind:

1. If your dental lab's sales pipeline management process is broken, lead generation software won’t fix it on its own
2. However, if your dental lab's sales pipeline management process is well-defined, lead generation software can help you scale it

In other words, once you have all your sales ducks in a row, you can achieve more while doing the same (or less!) with the right toolkit in place.

We’re passionate about lead generation software because it helps salespeople do what they do best: sell.

It empowers reps to lead productive sales conversations and dig deep into their prospect’s pain points instead of getting lost in admin work.

The wrong sales software will slow your sales team down; the ideal one will cut hours of admin work and make them fly through their day with ease.

In this guide, we’re diving into the ins and outs of using lead generation software to help your sales team hit their quota efficiently and consistently.

Why you should use lead generation software

The answer to this question seems pretty obvious, right? Lead generation software lets you automate the search for new prospects.

That’s true, but there’s so much more a lead generation software can do for you beyond that.

Effortlessly prioritize sales workload

When you manually search for leads and take the time to contact them through cold emails and cold calling, it can take a long time before your efforts land on fertile ground.

In other words, you could spend hours on the phone with the wrong people before your first productive conversation of the day, or even the week!

This happens because a list of cold prospects is just that: a list of unqualified, unscored leads whom you know almost nothing about.

How does lead gen software make this happen? Here are a few examples:

• Leads who download lead magnets and become part of your mailing list could reveal their interests in the links they click through on your newsletters
• A person that visited your website five times in the last week and viewed ten or more pages is probably more interested than someone who visited just once
• A lead that filled out your contact form and wrote a long, detailed message is probably more invested than someone who only wrote a few words

This is the type of information your reps can never gather on their own, without the help of software.

The verdict here is an easy one: lead generation software platforms uncover key information about your incoming leads and helps your team work on hot leads first. It creates urgency and helps you not to waste key opportunities.

Route leads to the right sales rep

A great sales team is made out of people who are driven, assertive and confident while staying empathic, humble and honest.

They also set high standards when it comes to the velocity and size of the deals they close, their sales pipeline health, and their close rate.

The best sales team, however, is the one where everyone knows their undeniable strength and uses it to work through sales conversations and challenges. They use this advantage to complement the rest of their team.

Lead routing can help you make the most out of these strengths. Lead routing is the process of distributing new leads between your sales reps.

When you use a lead generation software, leads that come in have to be assigned to sales reps anyway, so why not use it mindfully, based on what your reps are best at?

Here are some examples:

• Some reps may win more deals over the phone, while others succeed over email or in-person
• If you sell based on geography, your reps will probably know certain areas better than others
• Certain reps may close deals easily with small companies, while others may excel at selling to mid-size and large enterprise

If you aren’t yet routing leads based on specific skills, start with something simple and expand over time.

Streamline lead generation from all channels

Finally, a lead software platform shouldn’t be an isolated tool that pumps prospects into your sales pipeline.

It’s supposed to be a tool that streamlines and combines the work your sales team does along with the marketing team’s efforts.

This is why it’s important to ensure your sales and marketing teams are synced up and on the same page when it comes to leads they’re targeting. All software that either team is using should follow suit.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when synchronizing your sales and marketing teams:

• All channels used to collect leads should be integrated with the same CRM software to send leads to
• Key messages around your company and product should be coherent between your website and other channels
• All lead generation forms should ask for crucial information the sales rep needs

In other words, all the touchpoints your lead goes through should be aligned.

The messaging on Facebook ads should match the tone of voice on your website. The lead forms should make it easy for reps to filter high-priority leads and understand where they came from.

Ultimately, this process should, above all, be simple to go through. It shouldn’t add more complexity to your team’s daily schedules; it should make it more straightforward and productive.

LeadBooster can help you filter leads from your website

DentalLabSupport’s new chatbot LeadBooster is fully customizable tool and can be put on any page of your website to ask visitors qualifying questions and route hot leads to the right salesperson.

DentalLabSupport.com LeadBooster can qualify leads based on the criteria you set, then assign quality leads to the most relevant salesperson based on things like location, availability, experience level or expertise.

Once qualified, you can decide how the information should be stored in LabCell CRM, which will automatically create a new contact as well as the associated deal information. You can set the owner of the lead and control who is allowed to see it.

You can even prompt your prospect to arrange a call, meeting or demo within the chat sequence. Leadbooster integrates seamlessly with DentalLabSupport.com Scheduler, allowing the lead to check the relevant salesperson’s availability and set up a time slot that suits.

When you shouldn’t use lead generation software

With all the benefits of using a lead generation software, are there times when you shouldn’t use it?

It generates more leads, but they’re less qualified

Your team is swimming in more leads than ever before, so things must be going great, right?

Not quite. Let’s say each of your reps was generating 25 leads each week manually. They did so by researching your industry and looked for companies similar to your existing clients. After conducting cold calls and emails, they qualified 15 of them and moved them further down the pipeline and worked from there.

The new lead generation software is bringing 70 new leads per week for each of the reps. That’s almost three times as much, so it implies it’s a good thing. However, as your reps start reaching out to their new leads, they find that they still only manage to qualify about 15 of them, but it takes them three times longer to go through them all.

Their increased efforts result in the same or worse results, making them less productive! Lead generation software should make each rep’s time more valuable instead of adding more menial tasks to their plate.

Your sales pipeline is clogged

This can happen as a result of the above scenario, but it’s possible you’ve just never considered cleaning out a messy pipeline and dropping cold or unqualified leads.

What makes a clogged sales pipeline?

• Leads that have been in it for longer than your typical sales cycle
• Leads that have gone cold and become unresponsive
• Unclear sales funnel stages and an inability to sort leads in your lead gen software and/or CRM based on those stages
• Unclear next steps for leads
• Inability to forecast sales for the upcoming month or quarter

If your CRM resembles any of the above signs, using a lead generation software can only create more mess. If you don’t have a process to sort and act on all the new leads that will come in, a lead generation software will be a waste.

If your pipeline needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, do it before you implement a lead generation software and you’ll do yourself and your team a huge favor for a long time to come.

The one lead generation software you can’t be without

Your company’s website is your internet house. You’re the homeowner. Everything else is rented or borrowed space.

Here’s what we mean by that.

For many businesses, social networks like Facebook and Instagram have been instrumental in their initial success. They easily reached thousands of their followers daily. Their posts easily went viral and grew their audience.

Then, Facebook (and later Instagram) introduced an algorithm that changed the way posts are shown on users’ news feeds. Companies that used to easily reach all 5,000 of their followers suddenly only reached 2% of that total!

In other words: platforms you’re using care about themselves first. In Facebook’s case, many companies started relying on Facebook ads to replace the reach and impact they had organically. As a result, Facebook’s US advertising revenue has tripled since 2014.

With that in mind, even paid advertising (on any platform!) is still not something you own as any updates may mean you have to spend more money to get the same results.

You don’t own any of the platforms where you’re ‘renting’ space along with millions of other users. Your website is the place where you have the ultimate say and can fully control the experience a visitor goes through—and turn them into a lead and a customer down the line.

On top of that, it gives you the benefit of collecting and analyzing your website traffic so you can learn about people and companies interested in your products.

Now you might be thinking: ‘My traffic analysis only gives me numbers and percentages, how does this help me?’

The answer? Alongside Leadfeeder, your Google Analytics data is a sales rep’s dream come true.

Leadfeeder is a sales intelligence tool that monitors your website traffic and turns it into quality leads. It gives you the company information, details about their visit, powerful filtering options, and easy lead routing so you can always know the best-suited reps are working on each opportunity.

This is a goldmine because no matter how good your offers and lead magnets are, only a small percentage of your traffic will convert through your website CTAs. The majority will just vanish.

Here’s what makes Leadfeeder the lead generation software so useful:

• Automatic lead scoring. Your hottest, most interested leads (based on their visit history and other details) are placed at the top of your list. This way, your reps can focus on them straight away and drive a productive sales conversation. Talk about sales prioritization!
• Cross-channel campaign power-up. If your marketing team is running an AdWords campaign, your team can capitalize on it even more by filtering leads from it, along with their visit details. Knowing what message and call-to-action took your prospect to the website in the first place provides extra lead background.
• A shortened path to connection. Leadfeeder will show you if you’re connected on LinkedIn with someone who works at a company it identified on your website. This way, you can forget the awkwardness of a cold call and kick conversations off with ease. Read our cold calling scripts article for more tips on how to leverage common connections.

How to roll out new sales software to your team

Whether you’re just implementing a CRM software for the first time or you’re looking to upgrade it with integrations, additional features and power-ups, forming new habits around software can be difficult.

Your team might resist change at first and, even if it removes friction from their daily activities, they may be slow to fully adopt it and use it daily.

Here are our top tips to roll out new software in your sales team.

1. Keep an open line of communication

Your communication with the team might already be open and driven by trust. Whether or not that’s the case, when you come to your team with new software you want them to use, they might not immediately see the purpose of it or your intention behind it.

When it comes to new software for a team of any size, it’s bound to impact everyone’s daily habits and routines.

This means there’s a risk your sales team will think you want to track all of their daily activities and micro-manage them, which can clearly create some friction.

To avoid this kind of jumping to conclusions, announce the new software you want to implement and clearly outline the reasons you believe it will improve the process. For example, you may want to improve the follow-up process of your team, so the new sales software will help with timely reminders and notes.

After you’ve announced this change, make sure each rep can easily ask for clarifications, share their thoughts, and offer suggestions. An open feedback channel is gold.

2. Decide and announce the time and frequency recommended for the new software

Make expectations obvious and reasonable. If you don’t, some of your reps might update it daily, while others may wait for a spare moment every week or two. As a result, you’ll have incorrect data and the software won’t serve its purpose.

These expectations can be as simple as: end of the day, weekly on Friday, or daily before the work-in-progress meeting. The more frequently the tool is used (without creating unnecessary admin work), the more accurate the data in it will be as it reduces the chance for something being forgotten.

3. Establish that using the new sales software isn’t optional

Just like the point above, it’s important to convey to your reps that using the new software isn’t optional or something they can opt out of doing.

Of course, the best way to do this isn’t to be forceful and punish those that aren’t following the usage frequency. Instead, make sure your reps know the advantages they’ll experience from using the software.

For example, if they log their activities such as emails, email lead generation, calls, follow-ups and proposals, they will see how each of those impacted their results at the end of the month—and use it to improve in the following month.

Again, keep an open, ongoing communication loop and identify which parts of their new habits require support or adjustment.

4. Share the information available from the software

After some time using the software has passed, you’ll be able to share new findings and provide deeper insight into your team’s process and results than ever before.

Once you do, make it obvious. Show how the software has increased productivity, reduced the sales cycle, or converted more leads. This will also help you show your sales reps that what they do daily genuinely matters and makes a difference for the entire team, which will lift up your team’s morale, too!

5. Agree on and announce the exact date of new software implementation

As with everything above, be transparent about when the new software will be implemented. If you plan on doing a trial period first, let your team know how long the trial will be.

Announce a clear timeline so that your reps can familiarize themselves with the tool’s features, capabilities and workflows. This will also allow them to seek technical and usability support if they need it—in a timely manner.

Over time, using a sales software should turn into an automated behavior, a habit that doesn’t drain your team’s willpower or energy. It becomes a tool that speeds up and streamlines everything they do on a daily basis.

The time to prioritize your sales opportunities is now

To make lead generation software worth its while, it has to feed into your entire sales process. It won’t make an impact you desire if it’s all you rely on to make your sales team productive and hit targets.

You need a tool that helps your team track leads, manage their pipeline, and take timely action on the hottest leads.

Because if a lead was hot months ago, but you only followed up now, you’re probably late.

A powerful CRM is the ideal way for you and your team to keep track of incoming leads and make meaningful moves to take those leads through each of the pipeline stages.

However, CRMs can make life in a sales team more complicated than it was. They might…

• Add more admin work because they don’t integrate with other key tools you use
• Require a massive time and money investment into training
• Create anxiety because you have to keep inputting tasks and reminders manually (and always worry you’ll forget to do so)

This setup doesn’t help your team. In fact, it probably creates friction and frustration; your team might also resist adopting such software, even if you followed all the steps for rolling it out effectively.

DentalLabSupport is different. It’s built for minimum input and maximum output so that your sales team can focus on doing what they do best.

This means less time spent on admin and more time for productive sales conversations.

How is this possible? Here’s how.

DentalLabSupport does the heavy lifting for you. Because it syncs with your email inbox and calendar, automates alerts and uses templates, it removes the hours your team spends on admin. This also means your reps will get reminders to follow up with hot leads and never let a great sales opportunity again slip away.

DentalLabSupport keeps you organized and in control. When your dental lab lead generation software sends a new lead to your dashboard, your lead tracking better be in place. Track how your team is doing and provide real-time feedback on important deals. DentalLabSupport dashboards are visual (with simple drag-and-drop function to move deals in your pipeline!), intuitive, and fully customizable.

DentalLabSupport is driven by an activity-based dental lab selling philosophy, using activity prompts, reminders, and a simple interface to focus your team on the actions they control instead of stressing about the outcomes they can’t.

Ready to generate leads for your dental lab that turn into closed deals in a heartbeat? Start your 14-day free trial to find out why thousands of sales teams prioritize their sales opportunities with DentalLabSupport.com.

Call 888-715-9099 to supercharge your dental lab.

TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES TO POWER UP YOUR PIPELINE

Dental Lab Marketing - Lead Generation

When it comes to lead generation, quality leads can be very important for your dental lab. 

Your team closes deals faster and with more energy when they’re dealing with quality sales leads. But when they’re working with poor leads, they lose motivation and end up in a vicious cycle of overworking to find leads, only to discover they’re not qualified at all and having to start again.

With the right dental lab lead generation strategies and tools in place, you can ensure your sales team always focuses their time and energy in the right place and with the right leads.

Sales lead generation drives the whole sales funnel 

Sales lead generation is the key element of a healthy sales pipeline—especially its earliest and widest part: the top of the sales funnel.

A sales pipeline that’s filled to the brim means that there’s plenty of leads to work on, making it easier to deal with sales quotas and expectations.

However, potential issues come up when the leads entering the pipeline aren’t of great quality. If that’s the case, it can set your sales team’s success for several reasons:

• Leads that only look good, but turn out to be a poor fit for your service, could give your sales team false confidence
• Your sales reps will spend valuable time chasing these leads only to discover they were never going to buy in the first place
• Your team won’t have time to focus on quality leads, which will dilute their close rate

As a result, sales targets won’t get hit, morale can crash and, the worst-case scenario, your team won’t bring in the revenue the company needs them to.

At first, you may not see a problem with lead generation. Instead, you’ll see a drop in performance, a couple of missed targets and a longer-than-usual sales cycle.

If your sales results start frequently dropping below the usual results even though nothing about your sales pipeline or process changed, make sure to review your sales lead generation.

Because no matter how good your sales process is, it won’t turn bad leads into good ones—and you often won’t know they’re bad until you’ve spent hours on them.

You can always recognize a healthy dental lab sales pipeline when:

• A solid mix of leads enters the funnel
• Deals move through at a steady rate
• A predictable number of deals are won

If this becomes less of a case even though your sales activities and process haven’t changed, it’s time to reconsider where your leads are coming from and the criteria your team is using to qualify them.

The ideal lead checklist: which leads are worth your time?

When your sales reps notice patterns in their best leads, a checklist will help them look for similar patterns in newly generated leads.

Start with this checklist and expand it based on your individual situation, such as industry or company size you’re selling to. If your lead checks the following boxes, they are worth the effort!

Basic criteria:

☐ Prospect matches ideal customer persona

☐ Business challenge aligns with solution

☐You have access to the decision maker(s)

Bonus criteria:

☐ They have come from a customer referral

☐ They are an existing customer

☐ You have had previous touchpoints

When you know what your ideal lead looks like, you can easily prioritize your leads and optimize your time, which will lead to an enhanced sales performance.

Based on this checklist, here are some areas to further deconstruct in your search for the perfect lead.

What do your best customers look like?

Look at your existing customers and identify any commonalities they have. Ideally, look for those customers that present obvious success traits due to your product, such as a link between the time they’ve spent using it and their growth rate.

Evaluate information about them such as:

• Industry
• Company size
• Number of employees
• Annual revenue
• Decision maker(s) and main point(s) of contact with your sales team
• Geography
• Features they’ve needed and used the most

What does the path to purchase look like for them?

What are the elements that led to closed deals? What has influenced your lead’s purchase decision? Answering these questions will help you define a list of indicators of best leads.

Look for the following patterns in your past successful leads:

• Attitude towards change
• Factors that influence decisions
• Pattern of consideration and decision-making
• Length of buying cycle
• Impact of internal influencers
• Typical roadblocks and objections
• Year-on-year growth

Do they pass the BANT pre-qualification?

BANT isn’t the be-all-end-all way to define whether a lead will be ideal, but it will help your sales reps anticipate objections, questions, the potential deal size, and their bandwidth.

Maybe most important of all, it will help your team prioritize leads and focus their efforts where they will result in positive returns right now.

The BANT checklist is based on:

• Budget: The size of the business, annual turnover or what your prospect is currently spending on a solution
• Authority: This is focused on the lead’s level of influence. Are the decisions made by a committee or a single head of department/company?
• Need: Is your prospect similar to any of your existing customers? What are their main goals and challenges?
• Timing: Prospect’s typical buying cycle and potential urgency of their need

The sales lead generation techniques

With all of the details on what a perfect lead looks like, what does good sales lead generation looks like?

All lead generation can be sorted into two large categories: manual and automated. As with most things, they both come with advantages and downsides.

Manual sales lead generation makes the most of your sales reps’ expert research skills. It allows them to put their vast industry knowledge into practice.

The downside? It could cost your team hours to find even a few leads that seem like good ones to invest their time into. And even with all of their lead generation talents, some of these leads may turn out to be a complete waste of time.

Sales automated lead generation clearly tackles the time-intensive element of manual lead generation. It enables your sales reps to come into work knowing there will be leads waiting for them.

However, automated lead generation still requires human touch once it’s time to have conversations with these leads. If the automation system prioritizes the number of leads rather than their quality, it can trap your team into a seemingly full pipeline that takes forever to qualify.

Which path is the best one to make your sales team most efficient?

The answer is a healthy mix of both. 

With a clever approach to automated lead generation, you can ensure only the highest quality leads reach your team.

They can then invest their time, energy, and sharp negotiation and closing skills to turn hot leads into happy customers.

Eight sales lead generation techniques 

Qualified website traffic

Let’s start with the obvious: people who visit your website are likely to have some interest in what you have to say.

Your website traffic is arguably the most untapped source of highly qualified leads for your sales team.

Why?

Because even though some people will make the effort to sign up for your free trial, ask for a demo, or download a resource, they only make up a tiny percentage of visitors to your website.

The rest, no matter how interested they might be, simply leave and possibly never come back.

Does this make everyone that visits your website a qualified lead?

Definitely not.

Those that visited a single page and left after 10 seconds probably weren’t as interested as someone who spent 25 minutes reading your blog posts or comparing your pricing plans.

In other words, although many of your visitors don’t leave a trace, such as filling out a contact form, they still reveal their interests and current pain points with their behavior on your website.

The solution? Stop seeing your website visitors as just people who stumbled upon you. Their actions are saying something, and you better listen.

Our tool of choice for sales lead generation from website traffic is Leadfeeder.

To generate leads from your website traffic, all you need is good old Google Analytics along with Leadfeeder—a tool that matches your traffic with company information.

With Leadfeeder, you can see a feed of companies whose employees that have visited your website.

Leadfeeder also pulls company information that’s available online, such as:

• Company size by number of employees
• City and country
• Industry
• Website

You’ll also see the source of that visit (such as Google search), the number of pages visited, and the length of the session.

This means you can create custom feeds and filters to only see leads that have visited specific pages (so you know what they’re looking for), those that spent a long time on your website (so you know who’s really interested in your brand), or those in specific locations and/or industries.

With DentalLabSupport lead generation service, you will always have a steady stream of new leads. DentalLabSupport also provides a Sales & Marketing CRM called LabCell CRM, a sales software developed exclusively for dental laboratories which is included with your service. In short, you can have a hyper-qualified list of leads sent right into your LabCell CRM dashboard without any extra work and by simply plugging Leadfeeder into your analytics and setting up the right filters.

For more information, please contact us at 1.888.715.9099 or info@dentallabsupport.com, visit us www.DentalLabSupport.com.

Why Choose DentalLabSupport.com

How can a dental lab compete today without a professional presence? The fact is, either you’re visible, or you’re invisible. We’ve become a visual society that demands instant access to information. This is why it's imperative to keep your savvy customers in mind when developing your company and dental lab branding.

Some dental lab owners will tell you that they just don’t have the time, resources, or budget to invest in marketing materials, and they plan to continue as they always have. But in today's economy and technology-driven age, your business cannot afford NOT to change with the times.

While word-of-mouth used to be the best form of marketing, times have changed drastically. Technology has reshaped the way we do business in the dental lab industry. Many of your customers are focusing on vendors who offer website interaction, a social media presence, and professional videos and marketing materials.

In order to compete with dental labs that offer the same quality of products and services, it is imperative that your lab demonstrates a strong professional presence. This forces dental professionals to change or risk becoming extinct.

Using an outdated website and/or poorly designed marketing materials will only give your competition a marketing advantage. Worst of all, the absence of a strong professional presence, business brand identity, and most importantly, an online business, makes you just plain … invisible.

You still have the choice to take charge of your destiny
DentalLabSupport.com, an exclusive sales & marketing agency for labs can help to bridge the gap between the professional side of dentistry and the digital age of marketing by offering creative media and online business solutions to the dental lab industry, from concept to completion.

Understanding the needs of busy dental labs, DentalLabSupport.com believes that each project should be approached differently and customized to match the client’s needs. By working with a professional company like DentalLabSupport.com, a dental lab can create concepts that translate across multiple types of platforms, such as traditional marketing media, online business websites, videos, social media networks, photography, graphic design, motion graphics, company identity branding, trade show banners, events graphics, and more. 

Companies such as DentalLabSupport.com work to find real solutions that help your dental lab be as successful as possible.

For more information about dental lab marketing, contact DentalLabSupport.com or call 888.715.9099 for a free consultation. 

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

We decided to put together a list of what we consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations for your dental lab. This list has yielded wins for a number of our clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your dental labs site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that  we have consistently seen make a positive impact in dental laboratory SEO's ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

• Jobs/recruiting
• Events
• Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

• Follow Google’s recommendations on SD
• Test things out 
• Check your competitor's page’s structured data

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the dental lab industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

• How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?
• Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

• Likelihood of these pages to better compete
• Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At DentalLabSupport, our clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. We have tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client's case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

Here is an example we made up:

Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii - [brand name]”

Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 - [brand name]”

We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

• Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag
• Adding emojis to the title tag

The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

5. Obtain backlinks

One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

• Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?
• Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.
• Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like DentalLabSupport.com to help you create a visually enticing piece

Wrapping it up

Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

For more information about Dental Lab SEO contact DentalLabSupport.com for a free consultation. Call 1.888.715.9099 today!

How advanced features like call recording prove ROI

In our quest for bigger and better sources of marketing data, it’s all too easy to get stuck on the analytics treadmill and ignore the information that’s you’ve already collected. Fortunately, when you use advanced call tracking software to analyze your campaigns, the information you need to achieve superior ROI is often right at your fingertips.

And one of the DentalLabSupport's features that best demonstrates how marketing tech can empower you to work smarter, not harder, is Call Recording. With our call recording features activated for your account, you’ll be able to play back recordings of every single call that comes in to your tracking numbers.

This is a great way to get an at-a-glance view of how your phone team is performing, but the usefulness of this feature far exceeds surface-level analytics.

Don’t let a single call slip through the cracks

During our many case studies, we heard a lot about how powerful call recording can be when used in conjunction with our DLS call tagging system.

With our comprehensive tagging system, you can quickly and easily categorize calls — like new leads, repeat callers, and missed calls —  and then identify those that should be reviewed for deeper analysis.

Proper categorization of inbound calls is a powerful way to prove the value of the work your agency does for clients. For example, with a thoughtful tagging and analysis scheme for your data, combined with a careful review of the corresponding call recordings, you can demonstrate how your campaigns have resulted in a steady increase in calls that deliver qualified leads for your client. Or, perhaps your advice on efficiency has helped a client pare down the number of missed calls per month, resulting in fewer frustrated voicemails from prospects.

In both cases, this can be a powerful demonstration of the value — and the ROI boost — your work is delivering for your client. And even better, much of this tagging work can be automated when used in concert with our suite of Conversation Intelligence automation tools.

Identifying and filling skill gaps

Beyond tagging, call recordings are also a supremely useful resource by themselves. Your agency might not have considered that call coaching could be a selling point for clients, but we’ve seen plenty of testimony from DentalLabSupport users that suggests otherwise.

With call recording enabled for the client’s account, you can instantly achieve a frontline view of how your dental lab's phone team is performing. By reviewing recordings of inbound & outbound calls, you’ll be the first to know whether the client’s team is sticking to the script and performing well, or whether there are skill gaps that are causing prospects to drop out of the sales funnel.

Let’s say that your dental laboratory is getting a healthy number of inbound calls, but you’ve crunched the numbers and it seems like prospects just aren’t converting at the rate they should. This is a perfect time to dive into the call recordings and see whether your phone team is having trouble sticking to the script, or effectively conveying their product’s value to callers.

By listening to call recordings, your dental laboratory can then take a direct hand in shaping how the call team is performing. Perhaps the sales script needs some tweaking, in order to better reflect the search keywords that are driving the most calls. If many callers are searching for a specific feature before calling, but the call recording then reveals that the feature isn’t part of the sales team’s usual script, you’ve just identified a key gap that needs to be filled.

Taking a comprehensive, hands-on approach when it comes to call recording will do more than just help your dental labs's bottom line — it provides real proof that your dental lab is driving results.

Here at DentalLabSupport.com we’re constantly developing innovative new tools like Account Center, which helps your dental labs marketing team manage multiple clients with simplicity and ease.

Building client partnerships that last

A careful and considered use of marketing technology can give you a real competitive edge and set you apart from other dental laboratories, who are always looking to entice clients away from you (IE, the competition). With advanced call tracking and analytics in your arsenal, you’ll be well-equipped not just to deliver real value, but also to prove the value of your marketing efforts in a way that establishes trust, and builds relationships that last.

Interested in seeing the benefits call tracking can bring to your dental lab? request a personalized demo of DentalLabSupport.com Sales & Marketing Platform. Call 888-715-9099 or info@dentallabsupport.com