For dentists, making their offices available online is a must if they want to attract new people. With good web design and useful material, you can get new patients and keep the ones you already have. If you don’t make your dental website and material search engine-friendly, though, these clever marketing moves will go unnoticed.
Here comes dentistry SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO for dentists is important for getting new people and keeping the ones you already have, no matter how long you’ve been in the business.
What is dental SEO?
For dentists, search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving their online profiles so that they appear higher in free search engine results. It’s a way for dentists to reach new patients through marketing.
Why does SEO for dentists matter?
If you’re a doctor, SEO might not be very important to you. SEO isn’t something you should think about when you’re helping people treat their teeth. But the truth is that SEO can be just as important for your business’s online exposure as brushing your teeth every day.
It has been shown that 69% of clicks go to the first five search results. If your practice’s website gets this high ranking, it will get more visitors, more qualified leads, more trustworthiness, high web authority, and finally, more patients.
When you do SEO or search engine optimization, you still need to know where and how to reach your target audience. People pay attention when you pay attention to their needs as a dentist. This attention makes you rank higher, which brings you even more attention, and so on.
Essential SEO strategies for dentists
Learn how to get started with dental SEO for your practice with the SEO strategies below:
Research relevant keywords
You can use Google Trends, Ahrefs, and Semrush, as well as other paid and free keyword research tools, to find search queries that are important to your dental practice and target market. You can then use these queries in the content of your website.
Most of the time, your dental SEO plan will focus on keywords that get a lot of searches but aren’t very competitive. These are usually long-tail, which means they have three to four words and are aimed at a more specific search purpose.
Short-tail keywords are one or two words long. You can use them, but it’s usually harder to get to the top of search results for them. Also, these shorter terms cover more ground, which may make them less useful and lead to lower-quality traffic.
Produce helpful, unique SEO content
Various companies, like Google, want useful information. To decide how to rank the pages.
As you write material, knowledge and experience are used. To give people unique information. This way, SEO content writing makes the work different and gives value to people.
Claim your Google Business Profile listing
Dentists work by seeing patients in person, so a Google Business Profile is very important.
A Google Business Profile helps people find out about a business’s phone number, address, and hours. It shows up in regional or branded search results. This listing also lets people read reviews and frequently asked questions (FAQs), as well as see pictures, services, and other things.
Create link acquisition opportunities
A backlink is an important part of dental SEO because it shows when one site links to another. As part of your dental SEO plan, it’s important to make it easy for people to link to your site.
Build a user-friendly page experience
The page experience is made up of several parts. Very often, a page needs both a web designer and a web writer to fully exploit it. A website maker such as Squarespace will usually have ready-to-use templates with these features.
But if you don’t use a website builder, you might want to work with an SEO web design company. SEO.com is one option. Because they know both search engine optimization and web design, they can make sure that your new site follows important SEO best practices.
Update to Mobile Optimized Website
Most people who use Google do so on their phones. Google’s ranking systems still look at the desktop version of a website’s material to decide if it’s relevant, though. This can go wrong when the mobile site doesn’t have as much information as the desktop site. There needs to be mobile optimization because the site was created with mobile users in mind from the start.
This can change how it looks for them. Mobile-friendly websites make things as easy as possible to use on small screens and are the best way to improve your SEO. When you go from one page on your site to another, that’s called an internal link. One example would be a blog post about dental implants that leads to your page about your service. Why are links on the same page so important?
Search engine spiders need to be able to access a crawlable link structure in order to find all of a website’s pages. This is a way for spiders to look around a website’s structure. A link can lead to a new page, which can then be searched. A big mistake that many websites make is hiding or burying their main menu links so that search engines can’t see them.
In search engine listings, this makes it less likely that people will find them. Also, just because you have a website doesn’t mean Google knows what kind of people you want to attract. Internal links fix the issue by setting up your links in a way that tells Google which services are most important to your business.
What determines dental SEO pricing?
What do you pay for dental SEO services will rely on things like
- How big is your business and how many locations does it have?
- The size of your SEO plan
- You chose to hire an agent.
- The service and location of the agency you chose
- Your SEO goals
- How well your SEO is doing right now (for example, how strong your backlink profile is)
How to Do Dental SEO Marketing?
The basics of SEO are the same whether you’re working for a doctor or another company. But dental offices should put some methods ahead of others. Especially when it comes to local SEO (that is, getting found by people in your area). Ten tips to help you do well:
Update Your Information on Google Business Profile
You can take care of your Google Business profile for free with a Google Business profile. Your listing can rank better in local results (or the local pack) if you give full and correct information about your dental practice:
A well-done business profile also makes sure that potential patients can find the information they need. To give you an example, your profile should show up when people look for the name of your practice. So, it’s very important that it has the right phone number, etc.
List Your Practice in Reputable Online Directories
Patients will be able to find your dental practice more easily if you list it in reliable online directories. When you search for “best dentist near me,” for example, ZocDoc and Yelp come up high:
Google can also check your information with online sources that list your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). And know how important you are. This might help you get a better spot in area search results. If it makes sense, put your dentist’s office in the directories that are reputable.
- Review and book sites
- Business listings in your area
- Dental groups and projects
- Healthcare and insurance companies
Encourage Patients to Leave Reviews
You can move up in local search results if your dentist’s office has a lot of good reviews on Google. And the more questions you expect to get, the better.
Although you shouldn’t pay people to leave good reviews, you can ask them to be honest on your Google Business profile.
Here are some things you can do:
- If the patient agrees, send an email asking for a review after every meeting. Make sure you give a straight link to your page on Google Reviews.
- Put up handouts (like posters) that ask patients to give feedback. Google can help you with a free marketing kit that is made just for you.
- Ask the person at the front desk of your dentist’s office to say something about reviews as they say goodbye. They can even set up a tablet that customers can use to write reviews right then and there.
Demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
Google wants to rank sites that have a lot of “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”
This is especially true when it comes to “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) things like dentistry, which can be very bad for users’ health. Here are some quick tips that will help the SEO of your doctor’s webpage:
Show off the credentials of your business, such as board certifications. Let people know about your doctors and what they can do. Put out good work that shows how much you know about the subject.
Perform Keyword Research and Local Keyword Research
Keyword study is the process of finding search engine queries that people are likely to be interested in. Find out what people put into search engines when they’re looking for things like an emergency dentist in your area. This is called local keyword research.
When dentistry practices do SEO, both of these steps are important. By adding buzzwords to your website’s content and Business Profile, you can make them rank higher in related search results, which will get more people to click on them.
Optimize Your Webpages with On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of making changes to a webpage so it ranks higher for relevant keywords and gets more people to do what you want them to do, like make an appointment.
These are some great tips:
- Add your main term (the one you want to rank for) to the title tag, meta description (which shows up in search results), H1 tag (your page’s main heading), and first paragraph of code.
- Use important keywords naturally throughout your body text.
- To help Google understand what’s on your page, use semantic HTML.
- Make links on your site that go from one page to another that are related.
Use Structured Data on Your Website
If your site uses organized data, also known as schema markup, it can get rich snippets, which are better search results on Google. Which may get more clicks than regular results.
Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO is the process of making your site faster and safer while also improving its technical aspects so that it ranks higher in search engines and gives users a better experience. When you work on SEO for dentists, the result should be more people and appointments.
Do a technical SEO audit to find out what’s wrong with your site. The site audit tool from Semrush makes it simple. After following the setup steps, go to the “Issues” report. To get a list of mistakes, alerts, and notes. This could mean:
- Structured information is not valid
- Title tags are not present
- Security licenses that have expired
- Pages that load slowly
- Links that don’t work
Build Backlinks from High-Quality Websites
When other sites link to yours, this is called a backlink. Some types are seen by Google as votes of confidence, which means they can help your SEO ranks.
Plus, they can send people to your site through other sites. Backlinks to your site may happen on their own, but you can also try building links.
Measure Your Dental SEO Metrics
Get some key data together before you start dental SEO. That way, you can see what you’re doing well and what you could do better, and track your progress over time. And change your SEO plan as the needs of your business change.
To begin, set up Google Search Console and Search Console. With these free tools, you can keep an eye on things like
Organic traffic is the number of people who visit a website because of free search engine results.
The conversion rate is the number of people who actually do what you want them to do.
Keywords for ranking: Check out the keywords that bring people to your website, along with your average ranking place and click-through rate (CTR).
Conclusion
You should know that this post is not the only way to do dental SEO. Instead, it looks at the most important things that have made a real difference for the dentists I’ve worked with over the past few years. It’s not possible to give a set answer for local SEO for doctors.
You need to try out different plans and see which ones work best for you. Each dentist’s office has different needs and will use different criteria to judge how well your SEO work is doing. Make sure you talk too much, promise too little, and give too much. As a dental salesperson, you should not expect dentists to understand the value you bring as a dentist. You need to show them!
Vijay Sood is a seasoned digital marketer with a passion for driving online growth and innovation. With a robust background in developing and executing comprehensive digital strategies, Vijay excels in leveraging SEO, content marketing, and social media to boost brand visibility and engagement. His expertise lies in transforming data-driven insights into actionable marketing campaigns, helping businesses achieve their digital objectives.