Are you tired of being buried on the second or third search engine results pages? In the digital age, a strong dental search engine optimization strategy is vital to attracting new patients to your clinic. Luckily, with the proper knowledge, creating a prosperous dental SEO campaign is easier than it may first sound.
In this article, our digital marketing agency will show you some of the proven search engine optimization strategies you can use to bring a steady stream of new patients to your dental practice. You’ll learn tips and tricks to improve your website’s search engine ranking and optimize dental SEO marketing to drive business growth. So let’s start exploring the opportunity-rich world of dental SEO!
Table Of Contents:
- How important is SEO for dentistry websites?
- How to grab the #1 spot on the SERP
- Experienced Dental SEO Agency is Here To Help
How important is SEO for dentistry websites?
With the rise of the internet, the ways in which potential patients choose dental practices have drastically changed. Entirely relying on word-of-mouth dental marketing is no longer a sustainable way to expand your business. People primarily use search engines to learn about dental services or find good dental practices.
Hiring professional web design services and web development experts to create a high-quality website for your dental practice is the first step to digital marketing success. However, many businesses find out that having a visually appealing and functional website is insufficient to grab desired rankings in search engines. And that’s where dental SEO services come to the spotlight.
It sometimes takes up to a year of constant dental SEO efforts for noticeable results to kick in. Still, search engine optimization is one of the most beneficial digital marketing techniques for dental practices long-term. Here are just some of the ways in which dental SEO marketing can help you:
Improve your visibility in search engines cost-effectively:
Dental SEO is not the only way to attract traffic to your website, with various forms of search engine marketing, such as PPC advertising. Still, it is the most effective way to increase traffic without paying each time someone visits your website. Combining dental SEO with social media marketing and various content marketing strategies allows you to obtain a steady stream of potential patients on your dental practice website.
Enhance user experience:
Search engine optimization includes a variety of techniques, and results are usually gratifying when it comes to user experience. For example, as site speed and SEO are closely related, you’ll need to tweak technical aspects of your dental practice website. But this won’t only help you rank better in search engines; it will also allow your users to explore your pages without interruptions.
Build credibility and trust with your target audience:
Content quality is one of the key factors Google and other popular search engines consider when ranking websites. By investing efforts into educating your potential patients through engaging website content, you can significantly improve your search result rankings over time. However, this will also help you build trust with your target audience and earn credibility online.
Get insight into your competitors’ dental marketing strategies:
Dental SEO requires you to keep track of competitors’ strategies. Professional dental marketing services can help you identify keywords other dental practices are targeting, places they’re obtaining backlinks from, their website’s technical performance, and much more. This will allow you to effectively adjust your dental marketing efforts and target potential patients.
How to grab the #1 spot on the SERP
Now that we understand the benefits of dental SEO, it’s time to show you a few proven strategies for grabbing the number one spot on the search engine results pages. No matter if you’re a general dentist or you operate strictly within a narrow niche, by investing in these dental SEO strategies, you can effectively grow your dental practice:
Focusing on local SEO will help you efficiently obtain new patients
The main goal of dental SEO marketing is to bring new patients to your clinic’s physical location. And since local SEO helps you target potential patients near your location, it’s one of the most effective ways to reach that goal. As its name suggests, local SEO is about optimizing your clinic’s online presence to reach the local community better.
But how is this better than targeting a global internet community with dental SEO efforts? Well, let’s face the truth – it’s hard to persuade potential patients to drive across the country so that they can undergo your dental treatments. The best chances of growing your dental practice lie in targeting nearby people who can enjoy your services with minimum investments from their side. It’s not a surprise that many people include the keyword “near me” in their search queries when looking for dental services.
Although you probably won’t be the only dental clinic in your area utilizing the power of local SEO, you can minimize the number of competitors with the right local search optimization strategy. Grabbing the first spot in SERPs can be difficult when competing with nearly 200,000 dental businesses that operate in the USA. But grabbing this spot will be much easier for local search queries. Here’s what your local SEO package should include:
Targeting location-specific keywords:
Start by identifying the specific cities or neighborhoods that your dental practice serves. For example, if your clinic operates within Chicago, you can target keywords such as “dentist in Evanston” or “teeth whitening in Naperville.” Make sure to check metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and similar.
After you’re done with your keyword research, start optimizing your website and its content to include location-specific keywords that you’ve found. Write blog posts and service pages where you’ll include these keywords, and make sure to update your website’s meta tags. But don’t write content just for the sake of including local keywords. Avoid keyword stuffing, as search algorithms see it as a red flag. Every piece of content on your dental practice website needs to be engaging and provide valuable information to your target audience. And don’t forget to keep an eye on how your website content is performing for these keywords, as this will allow you to adjust your local search optimization strategy and get the most out of high-performing keywords.
Improving your Google My Business Account
Claiming and verifying your Google My Business account is insufficient for your local dental SEO to shine. You must fill out all the information and include as much detail as possible. Ensure to include business hours, services you provide, areas you serve, insurance you accept, and a helpful description of your dental practice. Keep regularly posting to your account to increase the chances of your dental clinic appearing high in the Google My Business listing.
Collecting Google Reviews will bring you more patients
Reviews can play a huge role when it’s time to decide between local dental practices, and they’re also a factor in Google Maps ranking algorithm. If you have more positive reviews than your main competitors, you’ll start receiving more calls from potential patients. Most people want to play it safe when choosing a dentist. So make sure to craft a strong plan for collecting patients’ reviews when laying out your search engine optimization and social media marketing strategies.
Add Schema markup
Schema markup is a type of code you can add to your dental website to help search engines better understand your content. It can also boost your local SEO rankings by allowing you to provide additional information about your business to Google and other search engines.
To add schema markup, create a code snippet incorporating the information you want to include. Then add it in the header of your dental clinic website. You must ensure your schema markup is accurate and up-to-date to avoid potential SEO penalties.
Creating High-Quality Content is Key to dominating SERPs For Dentists
Regularly creating high-quality content will boost your rankings in search engine results pages and, perhaps even more important, help you demonstrate your clinic’s expertise on specific subjects. But what is considered to be “high-quality content”? Ask yourself the following questions before publishing videos, blog posts, service pages, or any other piece of content on your website:
- Is it helpful?
- Does it satisfy search intents?
- How engaging is it?
- Is it 100 percent accurate?
- Is it comprehensive?
- Does it demonstrate our first-hand experience?
- Is it optimized for readability?
- Will potential patients learn anything new by consuming it?
Creating strong content marketing strategies is especially important for dental clinics that provide very specific services not many people are well-informed about. For example, if you’re an orthodontist, create in-depth content that will bring your area of expertise closer to potential patients who don’t know much knowledge about dental medicine. Upon exploring your website, people should be able to differentiate you from regular dentists.
But whatever your field of expertise is, make sure to avoid jargon and use a style everyone can understand. This will make your content more engaging and help you better satisfy search intents. The goal isn’t to sound smart but to help people find solutions to their problems. If you manage to do this, search engines will reward you with higher rankings.
There’s another benefit of regularly creating high-quality content on your website. It will support your social media marketing efforts. You’ll always have a fresh supply of engaging topics you can discuss with your target audience across social media platforms and manage to bring them back to your website more easily.
Technical SEO for dental practices
By working on the technical side of search engine optimization, you can make your website easily accessible to search engines. Search engines use crawlers to quickly navigate your website to find out more about its context and usability for end users.
If crawlers realize your website is slow, it won’t end up well for your rankings in search engine results pages. Google aims to provide its users with the best possible browsing experience. And by investing in technical dentist SEO, you can send positive signals to algorithms and, eventually, earn better rankings. But before we start exploring technical SEO for dental practices, we want you to remember one thing. It is a long-term game that requires you to keep an eye on your website’s performance constantly. This way, you can avoid many potential problems, such as SEO spam, duplicate content, etc.
The following areas are essential when it comes to technical SEO:
Site structure:
A well-designed site structure will help you avoid many potential crawling and indexing errors down the road. And since site structure impacts all the technical dental SEO efforts you’ll make on your website, you need to pay close attention when creating site structure. We’ll get to that part, but first, let’s quickly explain the site structure.
Site structure is essentially the way in which you organize the pages of your website. Ideally, all your pages will be closely connected, with just a few links separating them. This will significantly help search engines as they start crawling your dental practice website.
You should have a clear plan for creating a site structure. Consider different ways to connect your pages with internal links, and aim for a so-called “flat” site structure. And avoid having pages without any internal link pointing to them, as this can cause various indexing issues.
URL structure:
URL structures for dental practice websites need a logical flow and be user-friendly. It is a good idea to put your pages under different categories in order to help search engines better understand their context. By organizing content into logical categories, you can make your URLs more readable. For example, you can have a “services” category with subcategories for “teeth whitening” and “dental implants.”
Also, make sure to include focus keywords in each page’s URL, and make them as descriptive as possible. Just by reading an URL, people should have an idea about the content on the page. For example, a page about teeth whitening services could have a URL like “[yourclinicname].com/teeth-whitening-services.” You might have noticed that we’re using hyphens (“-“) to separate words in this URL example. This is the best practice you should also follow, as it makes it easier for search engines to understand your URLs.
Page Speed:
Loading times of your web pages can significantly influence your search engine rankings, especially after the Core Web Vitals update. While achieving high page speeds won’t bring you to the top of SERPs on its own, it will at least help you prevent losing hard-earned spots. And it will also reduce bounce rates, as potential patients won’t get frustrated by having to wait too long before getting a chance to explore your dental practice. But what can you do to improve page speed?
Start by minifying your code. Check your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files and analyze them to find unnecessary characters, lines, spacings, and similar. This will reduce your web page size and make it faster loading. If you don’t have coding knowledge, experts from our dental SEO company can help.
Also, you might need to reduce image file sizes. Images are large resource consumers, and you’d be surprised to find out how much a large number of images can slow down your dental practice website. Luckily, professional dental SEO services can help you reduce image file sizes without sacrificing image quality.
And if you’ve installed too many plugins you don’t use anymore, remove them. Some plugins are not regularly maintained. Therefore, they can also slow down your loading times.
Mobile-friendliness:
Potential patients increasingly use mobile devices when searching for dental services, and Google takes mobile-friendliness of websites when forming SERPs for search queries. If your dental practice website doesn’t provide an equally amazing experience on desktop and mobile devices, you might never be able to shine in dental SEO.
Besides securing fast-loading pages, you must also pay close attention to text readability, mobile navigation, button positions and sizes, and more. Hiring a professional web design company to create a mobile responsive web design for your dental practice is a good starting point.
Create a strong link-building strategy
One effective way to build backlinks is to create high-quality, engaging content that other websites within your industry will want to link to. Infographics are especially powerful for this purpose, as they can convey complex messages in a simple way. And if you have enough resources, you can conduct research and boil it down into interesting statistics others can use to make strong points in their articles.
Another practical tip for building backlinks is to reach out to authoritative websites within your niche and ask if they’d be willing to link to your content or allow you to submit a guest post. If you identify broken links on their websites, you can offer similar content as a better alternative.
And don’t avoid submitting your content to directories or other websites that accept submissions. For example, if you have a blog post about a new dental procedure, try publishing it on a dental industry news website.
Online communities, such as forums and social media groups, can also be a great place to share your knowledge and experience with others and provide them with links that lead to your website. Remember, creativity is your number one asset when acquiring high-quality backlinks for your dental practice website. Just make sure to avoid black hat SEO strategies that can get you in trouble.
Experienced Dental SEO Agency is Here To Help
Do you need help crafting a perfect search engine optimization strategy for your dental practice? Our Chicago SEO firm would be glad to assist you.
With years of experience in the dental SEO industry, we have the resources and expertise required to rank your website high in search engines for the most valuable keywords. From creating an SEO-friendly website build to using advanced link-building strategies, we’ll ensure that each action brings you closer to your goals.
So let’s partner up on this exciting dental SEO journey. Don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation call with Alpha Efficiency, so we can get to know each other better. Our experts will create a detailed plan to get you to the desired destination upon discussing your needs.
