Dental SEO is a strategy that improves your website to make your practice appear closer to the top of the search results page. Rather than pay for ads, you focus on optimizing your content and site to organically attract more traffic from Google.
And more traffic means more patients.
We’ll discuss the importance of SEO for dentists and explore different techniques you can use to improve your dental SEO.
Related: What Are Google SERPs?
Why Does Your Dental Practice Need to Focus On SEO?
Dental SEO — more specifically, local SEO — is a way to enhance your practice’s online presence in a location-specific way. You know how when most people search for something, they tack on “near me” at the end? Focusing on SEO helps bring them to your website and practice.
If you want your dental practice to pop up first when someone searches for a new dentist, improving your local SEO is the best way to improve your business’s online visibility.
This way, while you still have to compete with other local practices, you don’t have to compete for the top search results spot with the entire internet.
The goal is to optimize your website, convincing search engines to give you more virtual real estate to help patients find your practice. This real estate includes business listings high up in the search results, blog posts ranking in the top spots, and winning Google’s SERP features.
There are three ways to improve your dental SEO:
- On-page SEO entails optimizing your website’s content to ensure it aligns with the terms your potential patients search for often.
- Off-page SEO is how Google confirms your info and gets it out there to people looking for a dentist.
- Technical SEO makes it simple for search engines to read your website, making it more likely for your pages to rank higher.
Unhappy with your ranking on Google’s search results page? Book a meeting with our dental SEO experts to get your page to the top!
1. On-Page Dental SEO
Your dental practice’s website needs on-page SEO for its pages to rank on Google; this means optimizing your content for search engines and potential patients. You can draw in more organic traffic to your site by posting well-researched, unique, and useful blogs that focus on the right keywords.
However, finding the right keywords for your practice and area is a massive challenge — Not to mention the difficulty of using them correctly.
Consistently keeping up with posting great content that targets the most useful keywords is one of the top ways to increase your site’s search result rankings.
We recommend working with a dental SEO content agency to ensure you get optimized content that targets the right keywords, people, and location.
Related: Top On-Page SEO Ranking Factors
2. Off-Page Dental SEO
Your off-page SEO is as crucial as your on-page strategy for bringing in new patients. Google wants to see your NAP: Name, Address, and Phone number.
This information is simple but key to appearing in the search engine’s results. In fact, you likely provided that info through your Google Business Profile — A key way for you to show up when someone looks for a dentist near them. This profile is what powers Google’s local business listings.
Great, but why does this matter for your dental practice?
Online directories — Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. — feature your business’s NAP. However, anyone can list that information, making it not uncommon for it to be incorrect.
Google browses the internet to look for local businesses to show up when someone searches for, say, a dental practice. When it does, it looks at the business’s NAP info from all sources, meaning it could list wrong info from one of those directories.
Now you see why it’s essential to keep your NAP information up to date everywhere, not just on your Google Business Profile.
You can also use that profile to add keywords to your services section; this is an excellent way to improve your dental SEO since you’re only competing with other local businesses for those keywords.
Other ways to improve your off-page SEO include:
- Backlinks: These are when another website links back to yours — they signal to Google that your site is worth visiting. If you can get high-quality websites to link to yours, you’ll develop more trust with Google.
- Reviews: 98% of consumers read local reviews — And 87% of them use those reviews to determine whether they want to try out a local business. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Google takes those reviews into account, too.
- Social Media: Other than leading to backlinks, a social media presence improves your SEO by giving you additional pages and listings that will show up on Google’s search results.
Related: How to Get Powerful Backlinks
3. Technical Dental SEO
Google “crawls” your website like a speedy virtual spider. The search engine looks through your internal links and navigates your sitemaps to determine how fast it loads, how simple it is to use, and what services you provide.
Slow websites with unoptimized content don’t look too good when Google comes crawling.
So what sites does Google prefer? Ones with fast-loading pages that are easy to navigate. Here’s what matters for technical dental SEO:
- Loading times
- Site architecture
- Visual disruptions
- Code cleanliness
- Mobile-friendliness
- Structured HTML
- Initial response times
Some easy ways to improve your technical SEO include adding meta descriptions, title tags, etc., to your content — something that we include with all of our SEO content!
Get More Patients Using SEO for Dentists
Now that you understand why dental SEO is crucial for dental practices and have an idea about how the strategy works, it’s time to implement some SEO techniques.
But optimizing your online presence and ranking high in the search results takes time and someone who knows SEO.
So instead of worrying about SEO, focus on what you do best: Providing your patients with excellent care. Let us handle the SEO stuff.
At Content Dog, our team of dental SEO experts have years of experience — We have the know-how to help keep your practice ahead of its competition and ensure that new patients can find you easily.
Want to learn more? Book a free meeting with our dental SEO specialists.
Last Updated on June 5, 2023 by Hilda Wong