The dental industry has always been relevant and booming, with new offices popping up on Google searches and old, well-established clinics taking charge. This means that, as a dental clinic owner, you’ll face more competition than ever. However, in today’s digital age, you have a lot of options to boost your growth and surpass your competitors in real-time, and the best of those options is dental clinic SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) for dentists is a failsafe marketing strategy that improves your clinic’s visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs) and helps increase your online reach. Dental business SEO can be difficult because it targets customers who are looking for dental services in real-time instead of a generic audience. In other words, your SEO audience is similar to your walk-in customers who are looking for dental services to help them out in their time of need.
When you invest in SEO, you appear at the top of the search, generating tons of free traffic to your website and helping your customers find you conveniently.
That said, there’s a lot that goes into optimization. All elements of SEO have to work together to improve visibility and achieve the best results. If you are not sure how to do that or don’t have the time, consider hiring a Dental Marketing Pro. Our team of SEO experts with specialization in dental websites knows the ins and outs of the dental industry and data-driven online marketing. From measuring and tracking your website’s SEO results to visibly increasing your service’s online traffic, we ensure that your efforts are paying off.
Take your website to new heights of growth by getting in touch with us today. Schedule a free consultation now!
Table of Contents
- What is Dental SEO?
- Key Ranking Factors for Dental Websites
- Benefits of Dental SEO
- Dental SEO: Step-by-Step Guide
- Optimize Your Dental GMB Listing
- Dental SEO Keyword Research
- On-Page SEO: Optimizing Your Dental Website’s Content
- Technical SEO Optimization
- Off-Page SEO Optimization: Building Backlinks to Your Dental Website
- Measure and Track Your SEO Results
- Conclusion
Understanding SEO and How It Works
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a digital marketing strategy that revolves around the understanding of how search engines, mainly Google, function. At its core, SEO aims to enhance the website’s visibility and relevance, helping it appear at the top pages of the search engine results pages.
It involves high-quality site audits and keyword research, which provides us with terms or phrases that users commonly search for on a search engine. These keywords are strategically placed inside the content, which optimizes various on-page elements, like content, meta tags, and headers.
However, we cannot randomly place keywords inside the content without any background knowledge of how our content is going to rank. Our aim is to incorporate highly accurate and rankable keywords into content to optimize your website. We don’t rely on fluff. High-quality content, that is informative, engaging, and accurate, is the cornerstone of SEO.
Besides on-page optimization, another key element of SEO is off-page link building. This involves building links from reputable sources to increase your website’s authority and credibility, as well as visibility on SERPs.
Moreover, technical SEO aspects, such as crawlability, site architecture, and mobile optimization are crucial for a search engine to comprehend and index your website’s content accordingly.
What is Dental SEO?
While SEO is practically applicable to any business or industry, it takes specialization, experience, and technical knowledge to build your brand as an industry-leading name. This is where dental SEO comes in. As a dental practice, you need to ensure that you are not getting a cookie-cutter approach to SEO. You need a comprehensive, tailored approach that suits your business or clinic.
Dental SEO refers to the specifically tailored application of SEO strategies to businesses in the dental industry. This includes clinics, hospitals, offices, and general practitioners. The primary goal of dental SEO is to improve your website’s visibility, attract purchase-intended traffic, and ultimately increase inquiries and conversions.
As a dental practice, your audience may be searching for the following terms on a search engine:
- “dentist’s office near me”
- “dental services”
- “dental practice”
- “affordable dentures”
- “children dental care”
- “cosmetic dental treatment”
Your existing website may not be tailored to utilize these keywords to your benefit. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There can be a thousand more keywords of different kinds having different search volumes that we need to utilize to your practice’s advantage. That is a typical image of how data-driven dental SEO looks like.
With Dental Marketing Pro at your side, you can focus on expanding your services, catering to your patients better, and improving your logistics while leaving all the technicalities of increasing your traffic to us.
Consult our SEO expert today and learn more about how we can transform the growth of your dental business exponentially.
Key Ranking Factors for Dental Websites
According to Brian Dean, an internationally recognized entrepreneur and SEO expert, there are over 200 factors that Google takes into account to rank your website. Some of these factors are accurate, some are controversial, and others are debatable. To help you understand better, we have broken them down into three broad categories:
1. On-Page SEO
On-page or on-site SEO is a strategy that involves optimizing the web pages and content for both search engines and visitors of your dental website. This includes optimizing title tags, description tags, heading tags, CTAs, internal links, URLs, and body content.
Some other factors that we keep in mind while optimizing your web pages are table of contents, content length, content quality, and brand signals. All these factors contribute to your website’s ranking.
For instance, in the dental industry, one of the most popular search terms in Oklahoma is “dentists in OK near me,” and to incorporate this keyword into a title tag, we create a meta title that looks like this:
“Dental Services Oklahoma | Dentist Near You”
2. Off-page SEO
Off-page or off-site SEO refers to actions that are taken outside of your dental website that impact your rankings on a search engine. Off-page SEO also determines how people discover your business and content. It brings attention and authority to your site by building your business’s PR outside its website.
Off-page SEO is a comprehensive recipe that can help you meet your goals of visibility, crawling, indexing, traffic, and conversions. It’s like a vote of confidence for your website.
3. Technical SEO
On-page and off-page SEO are not sufficient in themselves. For ideal optimization, technical SEO has to be there as well. Technical SEO ensures that your dental website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines.
Technical SEO involves optimizing your website’s speed, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability. It also requires ensuring that your website is up-to-date with all technicalities, including javascript, XML sitemaps, site architecture, URL structure, structured data, thin content, duplicate content, hreflang, canonical tags, 404 pages, and 301 redirects.
At Dental Marketing Pro, we take into account all on-page, off-page, and technical SEO factors to cover all bases.
Schedule a consultation with a Marketing Pro today.
Benefits of Dental SEO
The average profit margin for dental practices is 30% to 40%, and increasing these margins requires re-evaluating your business from its very roots. However, you can increase your profitability by playing with volume instead of making hardcore efforts to increase the margin rate. SEO is the perfect way to do that.
Here are a few benefits that SEO will provide for your dental practice:
1. Increased Website Traffic
One of the biggest challenges for every business is to find new customers. For a dental practice, it would be to find new patients. SEO helps you rank higher on Google, and that means people find you easily and you cash in every opportunity through maximum traffic.
Reportedly, going from the first page to the second increases the website’s traffic by 143%. With the right SEO efforts, you could rank on top. Imagine the traffic then!
2. Improved Trust and Credibility
The credibility of a dental clinic relies on its references, reviews, and credentials of the dentist. However, another factor that plays a good role in determining that credibility is ranking. The higher you rank, the more trust users put in you. In fact, search engines will also favor your website more if you are organically ranking higher.
Moreover, credibility is not to be taken lightly. It’s part of the EAT framework of SEO, which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. In a medical field like dental, this framework becomes more crucial than ever.
3. Lower Advertising Costs
If you look apart from SEO, you see advertising options that include traditional TV ads, print ads, out-of-home strategies, BTL promotions, and maybe SEM or paid Google ads. All these options cost a lot more than SEO.
However, getting ranked on the first page isn’t easy. It requires putting in innumerable hours and considerable effort, along with industry knowledge and SEO expertise. That’s why you need an SEO expert by your side. And you can get one at a fraction of the cost.
Get in touch with Dental Marketing Pro today and plan out your dental clinic’s dream optimization.
Dental SEO: Step-by-Step Guide
As specialists in dental SEO, we have it in our bylaws to conduct a thorough analysis of your site and examine your existing traffic before setting reasonable goals to increase your profitability. This allows us to track your website’s progress throughout the time we are optimizing it. But we do that with intricately crafted steps, which are as follows:
1. Check Your Current SEO Results
The first step to a good SEO campaign is to conduct an audit of your current website. This will help you understand what’s working right and what’s not working for your dental clinic, and then you can take the appropriate approach.
2. Check Your Website’s Traffic
To check your website’s current traffic, you can use Google Analytics, a free tool by Google. This tool also tells you where your traffic is coming from and what keywords are landing visitors on your page.
3. Check Your Website’s Ranking
To check where your website ranks on Google, you can use tools like Google Search Console, Mox, or UberSuggest. These tools allow you to see where your website is ranking for various “dental service” keywords.
4. Check Your Website’s Conversion Rate
You can check your website’s conversion rate on Google Analytics or any other similar tool. This also allows you to see how many visitors are taking the desired action on your website. This desired action can be phone calls and appointment forms.
Once you’ve checked your website’s current results, you can set goals to increase these rates through optimization.
Optimize Your Dental GMB Listing
If you haven’t already, set up and verify a Google My Business profile. Your GMB profile is the first thing that a potential customer sees when they search for your dental service on Google. Therefore, this profile needs to be accurate and up-to-date.
Besides the profile, it’s important to take complete advantage of every GMB feature available for successful optimization. Here are a few things to include in your GMB profile:
1. GMB Setup & Verification
If you don’t already have one, create a Google account for your business. This account needs to be different from your personal account. Through your Google account, create a Google Business Profile.
2. Include Key Business Information
This includes your hours of operation, address, phone number, and other vital information about your dental service. When this information is readily available on Google, not only it helps with the optimization but it also makes your business more credible and accessible to potential customers. Also, this information needs to be accurate and up-to-date.
3. Using Your GMB Name
Using your GMB name is one of the most crucial aspects of your GMB profile. Your name is the first thing that your potential customers will see when they search for you on Google. Therefore, it can make or break your GMB profile.
So, what makes a good GMB name? Well, there are two things to consider:
- Location: If you are a dental clinic, consider including your location in the GMB name. This will help people who are searching for dental services in your area find you easily.
- Keywords: The second important thing is keywords. Include keywords that people are likely to type on Google when they are looking for a dental service. This will help you show up on Google “Map Pack” when people are looking for dental services.
For instance, your GMB profile name could be “Dental Service in Washington,” which includes both the location, “Washington,” and the primary keyword, “dental service”. As a result, people in Washington looking for dental services will find you easily.
4. Choosing the Right GMB Category
Your business category is what Google takes into account to understand what kind of business you are. Therefore, the right category is crucial. If you offer dental services, use categories like “Dentist” or “Dental Clinic.” Here is a detailed guide on how to find the right GMB categories for your dental clinic.
5. Including Keywords in Your Business Description
Your business description gives the overview of your business to Google as well as your potential customer, which makes it really important. When writing your dental practice’s description, it’s important to be accurate, relevant, and up-to-date.
However, another thing that needs to be a part of your business description is the right keywords related to your industry. This helps your business show up in SERPs when people are looking for services that you offer.
6. Adding Photos and Videos to Your Listing
A photo is worth a thousand words, and a video is even more. Adding a photo or video is a great way to optimize your GMB listing and show your visitors what your dental service really does and stands for.
7. Encouraging Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are a kind of third-party endorsement for your dental practice. It shows your potential customers that your dental service is reputable, credible, and reliable. So, always encourage your customers to leave your dental clinic a review on Google. You can also offer incentives in exchange for reviews, such as promos, discounts, and so on.
8. Monitoring and Responding to Customer Feedback
Always remember: feedback is a two-way street. When feedback, either positive or negative, pops up on your business profile, it’s always better to respond to it. For that, you really need to monitor your feedback constantly. This shows your customers that you listen to them and are interested in what they like and dislike.
9. Regularly Updating Your Listing Information
In the end, keep updating your listing with accurate information regularly. Your business hours, contact information, description, photos, and everything else that changes about your business has to look that way on your Google profile. This tells Google that you are growing and your potential customers find accurate information about your practice.
Consult a GMB expert from a Dental Marketing Pro today and learn how we can revolutionize your business with a properly optimized GMB profile.
Dental SEO Keyword Research
Keyword research is the core part of every SEO campaign. Keyword research is a process of finding keywords that users are typing into the search bar when they are looking for services similar to yours. While tools are there to help you, experience in specialized SEO is your starting point.
First, you need to brainstorm all the right keywords and key phrases that people generally use to look for a business in your industry. Once you have a list, you can get help from a reliable tool to narrow down your choices and use the most efficient collection of keywords to optimize your website.
Some tools that you can use to conduct keyword research for your dental SEO are:
1. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that helps you research potential keywords and gives you ideas for new keywords to target.
2. Keywordtool.io
This keyword research tool allows you to generate a list of potential keywords to target based on a seed keyword that you provide. For instance, if you enter “dental service” on Keywordtool.io, it will give you a long list of keywords related to dental services.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another keyword research tool that helps you find keywords related to your business for on-page and off-page optimization.
4. SEMRush
SEMRush, one of the most popular keyword research tools, provides various data points on each keyword that it suggests for your business to target, helping you narrow down your list of potential keywords.
On-Page SEO: Optimizing Your Dental Website’s Content
On-page SEO is a strategy to optimize your dental clinic website’s individual pages in order to rank them higher on search results and get relevant traffic. A good on-page SEO strategy for your dental clinic requires you to take into account many factors. These factors help Google understand why it should rank you higher.
Content is the biggest part of the on-page SEO, so it’s important to utilize your keywords through the text to optimize the content. Here are some tips to help you do that:
1. URL Structures
Your URLs need to be short, descriptive, and include your target keyword. For instance, for a dental service based in Los Angeles, the URL for their dental service page should be:
www.example.com/dental-service-los-angeles.
2. Metadata
Metadata is one of the most crucial parts of your on-site SEO strategy. This metadata includes the title tag, meta description, and header tags on each page of your website.
3. Title Tag
The title tag is a title that you see as a clickable link when you see a search result on Google. Title tags are unique for each page of your website and should not exceed 60 characters. A good title tag accurately reflects the content found on the page and must include relevant keywords that your potential users may search when looking for services similar to yours.
4. Meta Description
Meta descriptions are short descriptions right below the title tags on SERPs. Your meta description should be no longer than 155 characters and must include the target keyword. Since meta descriptions are displayed on SERPs, it’s important to keep them engaging, accurate, and relevant for your audience. They should get clicks!
5. Header Tags
Header tags refer to the headings and subheadings on each page. Header tags (H tags) range from Heading 1 (H1) to Heading 6 (H6), H1 being the most important.
6. Content
The content on your dental website should be high-quality, well-written, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. Needless to say, it must include the relevant keywords and the variations of it. In addition to the text content, you can also include pictures, videos, and infographics on your website.
7. Images
Whenever you add an image to your website, it’s important to add the description of the image with the relevant keywords in the “alt text” field of the image. This helps your images show up on Google Images when your potential customer searches for a targeted keyword.
8. Internal Linking
Internal linking is a process of linking other pages of your website through your content. As a dental service, it’s important for your website for two reasons. One, it helps Google understand your website better and crawl it more effectively. Two, your visitors easily navigate information and find what they are looking for.
Technical SEO Optimization
Technical SEO optimization involves optimizing the technical aspects of your website so that it becomes more credible and ranks higher on Google SERPs. This includes:
1. Website Speed
Website speed refers to the speed at which your website loads. It’s an important ranking factor for Google, so there should be no compromise in the speed. You can use a few techniques to improve your site’s speed, which is:
- Reducing image sizes
- Utilizing the lazy-load feature
- Using a caching plugin
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) if your dental service is operating in multiple locations.
2. Mobile-Friendliness
Mobile-friendliness is a way to ensure that your website runs on mobile as well as it runs on desktop. It’s also a crucial ranking factor because most people use search engines on their phones. Responsive UX/UI, smaller images, and shorter forms are great ways to ensure the mobile-friendliness of your dental website.
3. Schema Markup
Schema markup is a code that you can add to your website to help Google understand your website or its specific page better. Schema markup is usually in the form of structured data and it’s important because it can improve your website’s click-through rate (CTR) from the SERPs by making your listing more appealing in the results.
There are a bunch of various types of schema markup you can use, but a few common ones for dental service websites include:
- Local Business schema
- Service schema
- Organization schema
Off-Page SEO Optimization: Building Backlinks to Your Dental Website
One of the most crucial aspects of off-page SEO is link-building. Link building is a process of creating backlinks to your dental website from other, well-rated websites. Backlinks show Google that your website is popular, relevant, and credible because other websites are referring to it. As a result, the right link-building strategy can significantly improve your website’s ranking.
One way to go about link building is to write articles (guest posts) and submit your website to directories, but that’s a white-hat strategy. A black-hat strategy is a little more different than that. It involves buying or exchanging links and exploiting search engine guidelines to benefit your website.
Best Link-Building Techniques For Dental Websites
There are many different link-building techniques, some being more effective than others, depending on how you utilize each. However, some of the effective ones are as follows:
1. Directory Submission
There are many online directories that list dental websites. If you submit your website to these directories, you can get backlinks to your website from a website that is related to your industry.
2. Guest Posts
Guest posts are a form of blog posts that you, as a guest, write on someone else’s website or blog. The host website allows you to place a link or more in the blog post that leads the readers to your website. However, for guest posts, it’s important to abide by the editorial guidelines of the host website.
3. Link Exchange
Link exchange is a strategy where two website owners agree to place links to each other’s websites on their own sites. This can be a great way for your dental website to get backlinks from other dental-related sites.
4. Creating High-Quality Linkable Content
High-quality, linkable content refers to content that is so interesting, relevant, and authentic that it gets backlinks naturally. If your content is performing well in terms of virality, you can also offer it as a guest post to the other site with a strategic link placement inside the content.
For high-quality, specialized on-page, off-page, and technical SEO optimization of your dental service, consult Dental Marketing Pro.
Measure and Track Your SEO Results
As you are investing in the optimization of your website in order to rank it higher on result pages, it’s important to keep tracking the SEO results. Constant measuring and monitoring allow you to know what’s working and what’s not. As a result, you always know when to choose a different strategy if things are not going your way.
But how do you do that? Well, here are a few tools you can use to measure and track your dental website’s SEO results:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service that you can use to track the incoming traffic to your website and see how effective your SEO efforts are.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service by Google that allows website owners to check indexing status, search queries, and crawling errors of their website in order to optimize its visibility. It helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website’s presence in SERPs.
3. Rank Tracker
A rank tracker is a software that you can use to track your dental website’s position in search engines. With the help of this tool, you can see how well your website is ranking for the targeted keywords.
Conclusion
The world is becoming more and more digitized as we speak. In this pivotal age, it’s more important than ever for dentists to have a strong online presence. Investing in digital is also necessary to stay in business because all your competition is doing it and you don’t want to let them eat your share.
While a website is a great way to build a strong and credible online presence, it can’t do much alone. It has to be optimized in the right way to really bear the fruit. And that’s all what this guide was about.
Search engine optimization is really powerful if you know what you are doing. It can not only rank your website at the top, but it generates exponentially increasing traffic (thus, revenue) without requiring you to invest too much money in advertising.
At SEO Services for Dentists, we plan detailed, targeted, and specialized dental seo services to help dental clinics increase their reach and cater to a wider audience. Feel free to get in touch with us for a free consultation and learn more about how we do that.