New look for find-a-dentist service as visitor numbers continue to grow

Your Dentist has been publishing Australia's only comprehensive find-a-dentist service on the internet for over a decade now. Located at www.dentist.com.au, it endeavours to list every dental practice and practitioner in Australia and can be searched on 24 hours a day by any member of the public who is looking for a dentist.

The current version of the website has been in operation for several years now and despite receiving in excess of a million visitors a year (according to the latest data from Google), it is looking more than a little tired.

"We've been developing the new site for the past 12 months and incorporating many new features into a brand new look," said Joseph Allbeury, publisher of the website and also Auxiliary magazine. "Technology has come a long way since we last revamped the site. In the new version, we've fully integrated Google mapping for every practice listed which allows visitors to search on any suburb in Australia and find the closest practices.

"In the past, we only returned practices in the suburb that was searched on and many practices requested to be listed in more than one location, which we couldn't do. Now this is no longer an issue because we're finding the closest 20 practices every time."

Mr Allbeury said another major improvement with the new site is that practitioners can now log in and update their own information whenever it changes.

"We're constantly receiving requests to update the information in the find-a-dentist service because dentists know how well it works. This is quite administratively onerous for us so we've invested in developing a system so that you can do it yourself."

Your Dentist has over 30,000 pages of information catalogued on Google and similar numbers on other major search engines. New Google webmaster tools show that Your Dentist appears 800,000 times a month in Google searches and is subsequently clicked on to visit the site 60,000 times a month (i.e. 720,000 visitors a year). With Google having 60% of the market, Mr Allbeury estimates that the site would receive over a million visitors a year. Being listed on the website, which is free, results in patients calling your practice and booking treatment.

"Everyone wants to know the numbers on how many people are using the find-a-dentist service and the new version delivers this en masse. When you login to update your details, you can also see how many times your individual practice is appearing in searches, how many times people click to view your listing (which is required to see your telephone number) and how many times they then click through onto your website if it is listed."

Mr Allbeury said that they endeavour to list every practice in Australia on the website as the site is only useful if it takes a comprehensive approach.

"The website is so successful because it's a very useful tool. You want a dentist, you visit the site, you type in your suburb (or other criteria in the Advaned Search), click search and you get what you need. It's that simple. Everyone is listed because it's free of charge.

"As always, we still offer paid options to increase your prominence in searches that help fund ongoing development. We've spent six figures on the new version to date and 'upgrading' to a paid option allows us to continue to develop new features.

"When you login to change your details, you can upgrade at any time which also allows you to enter considerably more information including your email and website addresses, special offers and photos. It is very cost-effective, particularly when compared with using packages from other directories.

"In building the new version of the site, we've essentially incorporated everything we've learnt from over 10 years of publishing a directory of dentists on the internet and combined this with the latest technologies available on the web."