See, the Keyword Codex, brought to you courtesy of the 2023 Dental Digital Marketing Index (DDMI), is like a secret codebook. It's a list of 103 keywords, cherry-picked from a mountain of about 3,000 terms. These are the words that folks are using when they're looking for dental services. They're our roadmap, our guide to understanding what the people want and how they go about getting it.
But hold up. What's so special about these keywords, you ask? Why not just throw a dart at a dictionary and call it a day? Well, my friends, because not all words are created equal. When you start looking into the way folks use certain keywords, you start to see patterns. You can glean insights into what services are in high demand and how people choose their dental providers. It's like being a fly on the wall in the minds of potential customers.
Now, I ain't saying that organic search is the be-all, end-all of digital marketing. But if we were stuck on a deserted island and could only pick one thing to help us understand an ideal dental practice’s marketing efforts, it'd be organic search. That unbranded search, it's like a prospector striking gold.
Every day, we use search engines more times than there are stars in the sky, well, not really but close enough. And each of those searches has a reason, a purpose, what the marketing folks call 'search intent'. It generally falls into one of four categories: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional.
Informational, that's when you're just looking to answer a question like, "How tall is Mount Everest?" Navigational is when you're hunting for a specific website, like finding your way to "Joe's Barbecue Pit website". Commercial, that's when you're window shopping, thinking about stuff like "Vintage Mustangs".
But here's the big kahuna, the one we're really interested in: transactional. These are the searches from folks with a problem they want to solve, like "emergency dentist near me". These people are ready to pull out their wallets. They've identified their problem and they're just looking for the solution. And let me tell you, it's a heck of a lot easier to sell a life preserver to a man who's already decided he's drowning.
