Skip ahead
In 2021 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) trands keep growing and enhancing in every service type, including dental services. Practicing dentists are loaded up with every-day tasks such as ensuring that current patients are getting treated properly, along with office management, and administration. Additionally, they have to implement a proper dental SEO because potential patients have been looking for such services online for years by now, so competition on the web has already become tough in this niche. We are going to investigate what is dental website SEO, why it is so important in 2021, and how it helps attract new customers and keep them.
What Is SEO for Dentists?
SEO for dental practices is a strategy that includes many tasks, each bringing value to your dental business. Dental SEO marketing helps bring in new patients to your practice by employing your online presence optimization. On-page SEO is held to optimize your website and make it more meaningful, navigational, and user-friendly. Off-page SEO aims at attracting more quality traffic to your website. As a result, you will see an increase in your offering’s visibility for search engines and your potential patients.
You might have done some of the above already and maybe saw no tangible results. While other dentists with low-quality websites are still ahead in the competition, it is quite understandable if you feel confused and frustrated about the situation.
With only 24 hours in a day, it is easy to get overwhelmed by combining so many tasks in your to-do list daily. That is why our SEO experts at Direct Line Development have created this ultimate guide with dental SEO tips for you.
Remember that your website is not an illustration of your dental business. It is your marketing tool today, and SEO for dental practices can help it function better, bringing you more revenue.
Why Is SEO Important for Dentists?
Dental SEO matters for both newbies and experienced practices. Even if you already have a long record of loyal patients, you still want to attract new ones. Today, nearly 20% of new leads for dentists come through dental SEO marketing. It means that if you are not implementing any dental SEO (or your existing SEO is not done correctly), you are losing 20% of new leads every month. Check out the benefits that a skilled dental SEO specialist can bring to your practice:
- Your website will boast a better ranking in SERP (Search Engine Result Page) compared to your local competitors. With the vast majority of users only clicking the first 10 lines in SERPs, it is a crucial factor for marketing.
- Potential patients will have more information about your offerings both on the website and from local listings.
- It will be easy to find your dental business online.
- Smart keyword research will result in more relevant queries (such as “dental advice”, “dental services”, or “emergency dental services”, etc) leading directly to your website.
- A dental SEO expert will update you regularly on your project status with thorough analytical reports that would feature 100% in-depth insight into your dental website SEO progress.
- Your website will receive more quality, targeted traffic.
- Local SEO for dental offices helps to achieve better online visibility in your service area.
- Thoughtful SEO can enable you to evaluate various factors of your business, such as advertising campaign results, ROI, etc.
What Does Dental SEO Include?
Dental website SEO is a carefully drawn out strategy that demands step-by-step practices, including website auditing, proper keyword research, local dental SEO, SEO marketing, and more.
Every step holds equal importance in increasing site value, traffic, and potential patients. Take note of the vital steps that dental SEO demands:
1. Dental Website Auditing
Your dental SEO specialist will conduct a thorough website audit, covering a complete analysis of all the important factors that influence your website’s visibility level when potential customers search for dentists.
You may have come across many online ‘do-it-yourself’ tools that promise you a complete audit for your dental website in a few minutes. The next thing you know is that in exchange for your email, you have a very analytical looking report that holds little to no value. This simply provides a basic outline, only about 5% of a real 100% in-depth website audit, as carried out by our dental SEO specialist.
What can you expect from a good website audit?
The answer is the utmost attention to detail. There are no minor issues for a dental SEO expert. Every aspect of the website design, functioning, and content has to be checked and optimized if necessary. SEO specialists care about website speed, traffic, structure, texts, and so on to create and implement a winning SEO strategy for your dental practice.
Improving user experience is a must for thoughtful dental SEO marketing. We check every website page for loading speed and content structure, make sure that proper keywords are used in the texts, all the links work correctly, etc.
Apart from that, it is vital to update the social media accounts of your dental practice and local directory listings data. The information has to be accurate at all times (your contact data and working hours especially), and we make sure to place your dental practice in every notable directory.
2. Proper Keyword Research
Not only will we conduct a customer-based question and query analysis, in our dental SEO process, we’ll also ensure your website has content that targets those queries, keeps in touch with your site visitors, and ranks your website first in search engines.
Keywords are the defining factor of your dental practice visibility on the Internet and drive your every decision. With websites offering Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered unique keyword research in no time, you might find it tempting to go the robot way. However, there are probably thousands or even millions of individuals opting for the same path. And that is where the uniqueness ends.
We’ll perform in-depth keyword research by analysing millions of search engine queries, including long-tail keywords and words that ensure maximum site conversion.
We’ll focus on effective keyword research practices that look deep into Google data, understand the intention of your target audience, create metadata, and come up with efficient content strategies to ultimately rank your page at the top of Google search result pages. We invest in multiple tools to serve your dental SEO marketing and strategies requirements in a professional manner - that is why our services align evenly with your potential patients as well.
3. Local SEO for Dental Offices
Local businesses often face difficulties in improving rankings with so many competitors and ever-changing Google ranking algorithms. Local dental SEO helps to achieve better visibility on SERPs for local queries. For example, you can use a “near me” tail for your landing pages. Since people tend to search online for businesses that are near them, you want to match such queries and appear on the Google first page. Otherwise, you can lose potential customers.
Combined with the understanding of ranking algorithm updates, dental SEO marketing brings more value when implemented by an SEO expert. We understand the importance of knowing the niche and local dental market. That is why our strategy of local SEO for dental practices boasts flexibility for businesses. Our team pays attention to on-page and off-page SEO, digital marketing, and every possible user experience improvement within dental website SEO. Additionally, we keep our clients updated with regular reports and walk them through the processes so that they are confident about their project status.
4. Link Building
Link building in dental SEO refers to how your dental website obtains hyperlinks from another website, where a hyperlink helps site visitors in navigation between two pages. Search engines like Google utilise these links for crawling purposes – a process in which web crawlers are sent out to websites where:
- New sites are discovered;
- Alterations or updates to existing sites are noted; and
- Any dead or redundant links are found.
Search engine crawlers collect all the link information and bring it to servers to set up the search engine index for a website. It contains all the SEO data, including dental-related keywords and backlinks, website updates, and optimizations. Based on this information, search engines then decide which websites to put higher in SERP for a given query.
The more high-quality niche websites link to your website, the better is your ranking. Quality links not only communicate your website content to the search engines but also bring quality, targeted traffic. Subsequently, you can get more leads and sales online.
Our expert link building team takes time to find the most reliable websites and notable directories to place links to your dental website. We use the latest link building techniques and keep in mind the possible changes in Google search algorithms to ensure a strong backlink profile for your dental website.
5. Backlink Analysis
Links or backlinks are not only important for your website; they are critical. Now the question is: Why is a dental SEO backlink analysis so important for your dental business?
Remember when we said Google sends out web crawlers to note everything on your dental website, including dead links? This is where backlink analysis comes into play. If your website contains spammy links, Google will not top rank your website in its SERPs and apply penalties as well.
Your dental SEO specialist will identify any low-quality or dead links, keeping your site’s reputation and ensuring that your site’s authority is maintained. A dental website’s backlinks causing the most damage include the paid ones. Manual action penalties are applied to them, and it is recommended to disown these backlinks.
Our SEO experts will similarly identify any other spammy links that might be currently causing damage to your dental website. We’ll carry out a complete analysis of your backlinks by looking deep into your total number of backlinks, referring domains, and top pages. We’ll also provide you with an effective link building strategy and insights into your dental website (and your competitors’ websites as well), bringing you new ideas and successful angles to look at.
6. Technical SEO Audit
Check out the steps that our experienced dental SEO specialist will take to run an efficient SEO audit for your website:
- A crawl report will be submitted to you with details about your site’s errors;
- HTTPS status codes will be checked and reported to you;
- XML sitemap formatting and protocols will be checked;
- Site load time metrics will be done;
- Your site will be checked for mobile-friendliness; and
- Robots.txt files will be identified.
These are only a few of the critical steps required in a complete technical SEO audit for dental websites. Our dental SEO specialist’s primary mission is to provide a thorough technical SEO audit for your online dentist business.
7. Content Creation
Website content is simply everything your potential patient sees on your pages. All the texts, images, videos, charts, and tables are content. When you create or optimize it, you should ask yourself what your visitors want to get from it and how you can use it for dental SEO purposes. Adding several keywords to the text is not enough anymore.
Based on proper keyword research and the latest web development techniques, our dental SEO expert will take time to create concise, informational, and appealing content that would guide your visitors within your website pages. Positive user experience and clear answers to their questions will make them feel like they are a part of your community, which will help to convert them into customers. Quality content not only helps your dental business rank higher on SERP but also works as a go-to source of conversion and patients’ trust.
Growth of New Clients for Dentists
For your dentistry business to grow in a real sense, you need to have 30-60 new patients coming in every month through dental SEO. Attracting new clients is critical for a dental business to stay successful. You need to list down your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in order to create a strong dental SEO marketing strategy.
Identify the differences you offer, as compared to your competitors. Leverage them to make a remarkable presence felt in your current and potential patients. Identify any aspects that don't sit well with your patients - remove/replace them. Ensure good treatment is provided so that clients leave positive reviews on your website; more than 50% of your new patients will first check your service reviews. We’ll combine these factors in your dental SEO service to boost local SEO, Google search result rank, revenue, and online presence.
Organic or Paid Traffic
As a dentist looking for dental SEO tips, you should know that over 80% of your website’s customers use Google when searching for online general or emergency dental services. As a dental practitioner, you are an inbound marketer who has two sources for traffic – organic traffic or paid traffic.
Material by SEO
Whenever a user searches a topic on Google, the first few ads related to the topic are seen. Organic searches are the results displayed below the ads. Paid searches are the results displayed by the ads. See our article on the right about Pay-Per-Click and SEO and the table below for better differentiation between the two types of traffic:
| ORGANIC TRAFFIC | PAID TRAFFIC |
|---|---|
| Uses search results for generating traffic | Uses advertisements for bringing in traffic |
| Optimisations and metrics are overwhelming to align with returns on investments. | Since advertisements are automated, they are easily traceable. |
| Traffic generated organically is constantly active, bringing in new site visitors. | Paid traffic is deactivated once the funds run out or CPCs increase. |
| Considering benefits in the long-term, SEO offers three times as many leads as ad traffic. | Paid search enables increased short- term traffic. |
| Organic search is more affordable as compared to paid search and provides evergreen traffic to your website. | Paid searches are expensive and require heavy changes as the market and competition change. |
| Organic searches demand proper planning, skills, and adjustments as search engines change their algorithms. However, this ensures a solid foundation for your website. | Paid searches can be implemented with ease, demands low technical knowledge, and less human power. However, the results are short-lived. |
Your Site Is Your Assistant
Dental SEO marketing includes how your website is structured and optimised. This will be solely responsible for attracting new patients. SEO,form-filling, regular subscriptions to users, collecting contact details, making appointments, providing learning material, keeping you updated - your website will do it all for you. And our dental SEO specialists will enable your website to become a great assistant.
Try Our Professional Dental SEO Service
Based on our professional experience, we would recommend that for your dental website SEO, you should opt for SEO, marketing, and PPC together. A foundation for an evergreen dental business will be laid, with a steady stream of high-quality leads and constant revenue.
We thrive day-in and day-out in providing dental SEO services to dentists, and we would love to do it for you as well. Direct Line Development is the solution to all your dental website worries. So stop fretting over where to get the perfect dental SEO service or whether this service is right or not - because you’re losing patients by the minute. We’ll begin immediately, so contact us right now or email us at office@directlinedev.com.
Comments
I`m a dantist and I try to promote my site myself. Thank you for the article. You write about such important things in simple terms. Super!
Great tips! will help us a bunch. And thanks for focusing on local SEO, I didn't know about the "near me" trick
It is pretty useful information. I'm going to check it on practice
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing such specific information.
Thank you so much! You laid out every dental SEO aspect in simple words - it will help me a bunch in promoting my website.
This is such an informative article for every business owner! I didn't realize how important link building is - good to know about its effect on website promotion.
This is a great article. I believe it could help any dental practice to get a better understanding of the specifics of the SEO in this particular niche and why it's important for their business. The dental industry is very competitive and articles like this one are very useful for anyone who wants their business to appear high on Google.
Thank you so much! It's a great article! As a dental business owner, it was very interesting for me to read how I can improve the positions of my website!
Thank you for such a detailed tutorial! You’ve made everything so clear, and now I’m on my way to use these tips for my dental practice!
Thanks for sharing such a specific information & more Seo ideas in your site.
<a href="https://maduraidentists.com/dentist-in-madurai/">Dentist!</a>