Dental SEO: How to rank your dental practice?
How To Use Dental SEO To Generate More
Leads?
Choose Dental Practice Search Terms
Keep User Intent in Mind
Optimize Your Dental Clinic for Local SEO
Develop a Dental Content Marketing Strategy
Dental SEO Is Also about User Experience
Get Online Reviews on Your Dental Clinic Website
Earn links
Do you want to increase your visibility in search results and reach new patients for your dental practice? SEO for dental offices is something you need to look at.
Dental SEO is when a dental practice optimizes their rankings and presence for major search engines, such as Google. So, when a patient is searching for a dentist or other dental-related procedures, your office can be found by them.
If a dental practice wants to be found at the top of search results and have online visibility, then dental SEO has become a requirement for success. Patients who don’t already have a relationship with a practice will just turn to Google in order to find their new dentist.
While SEO for small businesses may not be high on the list of priorities, know that your competitors are likely already investing in search engine optimization and getting local patients before these people even know you exist.
Working with a dental SEO agency, such as Leadstream, can help make sure that you get ahead of your competitors and users are turning to you for dental needs.
Choose Dental Practice Search Terms
- SEO has changed a lot over the years, but keywords are still the most important part of a successful SEO for dental offices strategy.People use keywords to find the information they need using search engines. This means it’s necessary to choose the right keywords to make sure your target audience will find you.
To do this, it helps to put yourself in your potential patients’ thoughts.
What words you would type in when you are looking to find a dentist? Most people will use the words “dentist near me” or search for a dentist in their city.
However, there are a lot of keywords that you must highlight on your website if it’s services that you provide, including: “dental implants”, “emergency dentist”, “endodontist”, “pediatric dentist” or even “dental bridge”.
A keyword research tool, such as Mangools or SEMrush, can help you find the right keywords.
These tools give you information about keywords, including how often users search them, competition for the keywords, click-through rates, and more.
So, are you targeting your key terms?
Keep User Intent in Mind
With SEO becoming more advanced, search engines have also evolved. Keeping user intent in mind, they now provide the best possible results for any request.
It’s not enough to just sprinkle keywords into your existing content and think that you will rank for them. People are going to use different keywords depending on what they are searching for.
For example, a user may Google “how to keep teeth white” and will want to find informational content on how to whiten his or her teeth and the teeth whitening process.
On the other side, users searching for “dentists and teeth whitening” may be ready to start spending money on teeth whitening treatments and will want information on a dentist that can provide this service.
They may want to know why you are the right dentist for this procedure.
Optimize Your Dental Clinic for Local SEO
Dental practices are local businesses. So, it is important to optimize for Local SEO.
When Google introduced zero-click searches, it may have made local SEO even more important.
These zero-click searches are known as the local pack, and if you get your practice in there, then you will have more exposure.
In order to optimize for Local SEO, it’s important to get your practice on Google My Business (GMB).
Once you have created a GMB presence, you will need to optimize your Google My Business with the correct location information, contact information, and relevant posts for your audience.
You also want to incorporate some geographical specific keywords within your content. It helps your dental SEO to use dental directories.
Not only do directories help you gain more exposure across the web but there is also high relevancy factor for dental directories to help give your website more authority and visibility for the Google search.
Learn More About: Optimize Your Google My Business
Develop a Dental Content Marketing Strategy
You used to be able to get away with just having content on your website that had your keywords in it and you would have great rankings. This doesn’t work anymore.
As the user experience becomes more important, the search engines want you to have quality content on your website. Quality content means it’s trustworthy, authoritative, and shows off your expertise.
You need to create content that is relevant to the dentistry industry and also reflects these factors to improve your SEO.
Know your audience
In order to make sure that you have a good strategy and are creating quality content, you need to understand readers.
Many internet users and online consumers say they make purchasing decisions after reading recommendations on a blog.
Providing your readers with educational content helps improve your bottom line.
When developing your strategy, ask questions about what kind of content people are looking for. What information would be of value to them? Map out the journey to finding a dentist and then create content that supports different steps in the journey and make sure the reader will find it engaging.
Write longer and high value article
Using long form content can be a great way to work on the user experience of your website and improve your SEO.
Long form content tends to get more links than short content.
The type of content that gets the most social media shares, organic traffic, and links is usually over 2,500 words. This doesn’t mean that you should just ramble on to meet this word count.
The length of the content also depends on the topic. You need to make sure that you are still providing educational and quality content.
Long form content should be easy to read and you should break it into sections. Using the names of dental procedures and keywords as headers and sub headers helps break up content and works for SEO.
People go to search engines to ask questions about dental procedures or to find a dentist, especially near them. Using dental procedures as headers can help your page be better optimized.
Optimize for Voice Search
Voice search is becoming one of the most common way that people search on a mobile phone so it is important that your content takes this into account.
When optimizing for voice search, you should get into the mindset of people searching for dental services and the keywords they would say to make these searches.
This usually means longer form keywords that are more natural sounding since people usually abbreviate when typing out things.
For example, if someone is looking for fillings, they may type “fillings Denver,” but when using voice search, they would say “filling dental services near me” or “filling dental services in Denver.”
Use videos
Videos should also be an important part of your content strategy, as they have surpassed other forms of content that are on the internet.
Many people choose to watch a video rather than reading text and mobile users prefer video content since reading a lot of text is hard on small screens.
Not just any video content is going to work. You have to give your audience informative and high-quality video content.
You should also include a video description with keywords. Keep videos short and get to the point so you don’t lose the attention of your audience.
When coming up with a strategy, visit other dental-related blogs to help inspire you. You can also use Google trends to help you know what people want information on.
Dental SEO Is Also about User Experience
Even though keywords are important, SEO isn’t just about keywords anymore. It is also about the user experience.
Google hasn’t said what elements it uses when it comes to user experience to rank web pages, but SEO experts think that signals such as time users spend on the site and click-through rates are part of the algorithm.
There are plenty of different elements that improve the user experience and the readability of the page. You can review some of these elements using an SEO checker to help you determine the strength of your page and then give you areas that you need to improve on. Your website needs to be aesthetically pleasing but also easy to navigate. A beautiful dental website that is hard to navigate won’t help you much with SEO and can turn users away when they can’t find what they are looking for.
Optimize your images
Images help capture attention and can be a good way to improve the user experience on your site.
They help keep users engaged long enough to deliver your message and help bring your content to life.
When you optimize your images, it also helps improve your SEO efforts. Images are an important part of SEO strategy that many people forget, this is named “Image SEO”.
Use high-quality images that are also relevant to content and customize the label and file name to describe the photo.
Use alt text to highlight the identity of the image. This text is helpful for describing what your image is about and improves your SEO, especially if you can include relevant keywords.
Alt text is also used to help those who are visually impaired.
Learn more about: Image SEO and how to optimize them for the web
A Mobile friendly website
To be user friendly, your dental office website also needs to be mobile friendly.
Google is becoming exclusively mobile focused with the roll out of mobile-first indexing since 2019.
This changed the way that websites were ranked.
Now Google primarily looks at mobile versions of websites instead of the desktop version. If you want to make any changes to your website, then you need to make sure these changes are mobile friendly.
You are able to check how mobile friendly your website is with Google’s free tools, and get more information about how you can further improve your website when you use the tool.
One UX SEO best practice is to optimize your site speed to improve user friendliness. One way you can do this is by utilizing Google PageSpeed Insights to see recommendations on things you can do.
It can be as simple as some image compressions, or more complicated things such as changing how the server interacts with requests.
Search Console also give plenty of information on page experience with their Mobile Usability’s report and the Core Web Vitals’s report.
Learn more about: UX SEO best practice
Get Online Reviews on Your Dental Clinic Website
The majority of customers will read reviews online before they decide to purchase services, but also to learn more about the quality of the dental office.
Reviews are just like word-of-mouth advertising. People will trust reviews from other customers, which will influence their decision to choose or not your practice.
Plus, reviews are now a important ranking factor in Google since 2020, especially for local businesses.
In order to better your chances of getting evaluation, make it easy for the patients to give them.
Include the opportunity to leave a review or rate services on their receipt, invoice or next appointment card.
You can also send a follow-up email. Many patients will be happy to leave a review of their experience.
Ask them to mention which services they received (Invisalign, teeth whitening, surgery, dental crown,…) or mention it in your respond.
Reviews are also an important part of your Local SEO and dental marketing. Getting reviews on Google My Business is an important part of optimizing your profile for the best success.
If you don’t know how to set a rating widget on your website, you can send directly a link to your GMB’s reviews page.
Earn links
Links are the backbone of any good SEO strategy. The quality and the number of links to your website impacts how high the site ranks in search results.
To get and maintain rankings, you need links. There are different ways you can get links.
Creating high-quality content is also important for getting backlinks. With this high-quality content, you can then reach out to industry leaders and other bloggers and ask if they will share this content.
Backlinks help boost your SEO ratings and help establish you as an authority on the field. They are an endorsement for the content that you publish, which is why they are also an important part of SEO.
Beside content, using citations can be a great way to improve your local search ranking and get links.
A citation strategy helps your brand be mentioned on different general or specialized directories over the internet, which:
- Make you easy to find
- Help you target a larger audience
- Help your link building strategy (always include a link to your website)
- Built trust and authority
Learn How Leadstream Can Help With Your Dental SEO Strategy
It can be hard to manage SEO dental marketing on your own. Working with a dental SEO agency, such as Leadstream, can help improve your SEO efforts while you focus on dentistry and your patients.
Dental SEO services include an in-depth SEO strategy to help improve rankings and get you noticed by Google and other search engines. Contact us today.
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