By: Pankaj Sakariya

October 28, 2020

A Comprehensive Guide for Dentist SEO

Irrespective of the nature of your business, search engine optimization is the need of the hour for all. Whether you have a local shop in a street in Melbourne or you are a dentist with a fully-fledged dental clinic, you need to have a highly-functional SEO strategy to reach out and lure your potential local customers. 

Gone are the days when people have no resources to select the best service provider in the locality. They used the trial and error method to find the best service provider in the area. For example, they used to visit one dentist and if they are not satisfied with the services, they will go to another one and then another until they find the best one for their particular needs and expectations. 

Now, they have the internet to find the best dentist in their areas and it has raised the competition a bit. It is the reason dentist SEO is the term that you will come across so many times. 

What is Dental SEO?

Before we dive into SEO for dentists, we need to understand what is SEO. An SEO strategy is all about tactics you can implement to increase your business’s online presence. There is a wide range of SEO techniques you can use to make your brand authoritative in the digital sphere. It will not just help you to rank your website in search engine rank positions, but also improve your brand recognition and awareness. 

From website optimization to content writing and publication to guest blogging to content marketing to local SEO optimization, there are many SEO tactics you will use to attract more local customers to visit your website and ultimately to your clinic. 

Many dentists are a little confused about why they need to go for an SEO strategy. Here are some quick industry-specific facts that you need to know. 

• – As per the online study report, more than 64% of all the traffic comes from organic search results.
• – Another study points out that 89.4% of dentists want to improve their marketing efforts.  
• – Another study also states that 94% of dental patients read online reviews before hiring a dentist. 

Don’t you find these facts fascinating? The behavioural patterns of the consumers have evolved with time and you need to change your marketing strategies accordingly. Hire a dedicated dentist SEO service provider who can help you out in designing and implementing a tailor-made and result-driven SEO strategy for your business. 

Benefits of Dental SEO Services

Improve your Website Ranking in Local Searches 

As per the report, 75% of all users will not visit the 2nd page of search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. In addition to that, 60% of all clicks generally go to the top 3 links. What do these statistics suggest? 

Websites that rank at the topmost positions will generate more traffic, which will lead to more conversions and revenues. Even a drop of a few ranks can make a significant difference to your traffic and revenues. It shows why SEO marketing for dentists is highly crucial. 

Attract Local Customers to Reach Out to You 

You can call dentist SEO an inbound marketing technique which starts when a potential customer decides to search for a local dental service provider. It means that when they are in the need of dental service, they can find your website.

When a potential customer searches with the keyword “Dentist Near Me”, your website would not appear in the results if you have not an active dentist SEO plan. 

On the other hand, if you have optimized your website well and the “Google My Business” page with details such as contact information, map, directions, clinic hours and reviews, there are high chances that you will see more patients at your clinic. 

Improve user Experience by Optimising your Website 

There are more than two hundred different variables Google consider while ranking a website. Some of the most important variables are original, engaging and informative content, site speed, mobile functionality and other SEO factors. If you want to improve your rank on Google and other search engines, you need to optimise your website fully. 

The website optimisation also will improve the user experience and visitors will likely engage productively on your website. When a user enjoys time on a website, he/ she will surely recommend it to their connections. It will bring more word of mouth visitors to your website. However, you need to have a website that loads fast, highly optimised and can educate users with good and informative content. 

Get Found in the Crowded Market 

The number of dentists is increasing in Australia and you must be finding it tough to get more patients to your clinic. The competition is tough and you need to think out-of-the-box to get more customers to your clinic. A comprehensive Dentist SEO program is the best strategy to improve your brand visibility. 

A website that is highly optimised for local dentist SEO will surely give you a benefit of good visibility in local searches. 

Strengthen your Credibility in the Area 

Online reviews are one of the main parameters Google considers while ranking websites. Such reviews can be found on online directories such as Yelp and Canpages. Users prefer brands that have earned good positive reviews and it also builds trust among the people. Your dentist SEO strategy should also include local directory listings and reviews that can help you to get more traffic on your website. 

A Step by Step Guide for Local Dentist SEO

So now you know what is dentist SEO and why you should go for it. Now, we will discuss how to do local SEO for dentists step by step. Stay tuned! Let’s take your business in an ideal position with Google. 

Create Google My Business Page

The first and foremost thing to do is to create the Google My Business page to boost local traffic. Here, you need to provide all crucial information of your business such as business name, clinic hours, clinic and service images, reviews, your clinic’s map, address and website URL. 

Google’s search engine will get all the information from here to index your website. Now that you have created a page, you will need to enter the following details. 

• – Write down a long description of your business that includes your website link too. 
• – Choose the correct categories for your business. 
• – Add professional photos of your business such as clinic photos, informative photos related to different dental services you offer. 
• – Add a local phone number. 
• – Add your business address which is consistent with your website address and local directories. 
• – Add your operation hours.
• – Encourage your users to write genuine reviews for your services. 

Schema Structured Data

Schema or structured data helps describe search engines about your website content. Schema Markup code is a type of HTML markup that informs search engines about your business and content type. 

With the help of schema, web bots can easily understand the content type and your business accurately. Remember, Google web bots crawl millions of websites at the same time and schema tells Google that you are into dental practice in a particular location, let’s say Melbourne. 

In the absence of Schema, crawlers have to figure out by themselves. Schema is very crucial for local businesses as they give additional geographic information to the crawlers such as opening hours, phone number, location and city. 

It will ensure that your business appears precisely on Google search results. 

You need to hire a professional company offering SEO marketing for dentists. They will set up schema markup for your website. 

On-Page SEO

Now, let’s understand how to optimize the content on your website. Having a Google-friendly website is very vital to get higher rankings. Here is a list of the things you need to do:

Create a Google Webmaster Tools Account

This account will help you to monitor your website status in the search rankings. You can check out which keywords are ranking, search terms rankings for each article, position and other vital information. 

Install the SEO Plugin for the WordPress Website

Hire a high-quality WordPress development services provider if you use a WordPress platform. Now, install the Yoast SEO, All in One SEO or any other plugin to change your title, meta tags and add geographical keywords for all pages. 

Compress Images to Improve the Website Loading Time

Users don’t like it when the website takes too much time to load. Generally, larger images slow down the loading time and offer a poor experience to users. It also hurts your SEO efforts. You can cut down your website image sizes by using tools such as TinyJPG. 

Have a Mobile Responsive Website

Google has announced that mobile-friendly websites are more likely to rank higher than static websites. Almost half of the total searches are performed by mobile devices and if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are missing out on that chunk. Hire a designer and ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. 

Start Blogging Regularly

Regularly updated and maintained websites have higher chances to rank on Google as Google’s algorithms favours such websites. Starting a blog is the perfect thing to do. Blogging can help you to get consistent traffic on your website and it will be a positive ranking signal for Google. 

Embed a Google Map onto your Contact Page

What if a user has decided to visit your clinic? He will be interested to know where you are located and an embedded map offers the exact location details to the users. It will improve compatibility. 

Citations

So far, we have covered Google My Business, Schema and On-Page SEO. Now, we will discuss how to improve your current ranking on Google. 

When you make a general SEO plan, you will likely rely on link building strategy by receiving backlinks from high-authority websites. However, when it comes to local dentist SEO, the strategy is slightly different. Here, you need to focus to get backlinks from local high authority websites. 

A citation is nothing but your website’s online listing which includes your business name, address and phone number (NAP). For citations, you need to focus on local business directories.

• – You can ask for such local online directories to your professional network or friends. They might come up with good suggestions. 
• – You can also check out Moz’s top list of citation sources for dentists. 
• – Moz’s open site explorer can help you to see backlinks your competitors have. 

Online Reviews

Local reviews directly affect your Google rankings. If you have some good 5-star reviews for your business, your business will get first place on SERPs in no time. Your main focus should be to get as many positive reviews as possible from your genuine users. 

The best way is to request your current and past patients to visit your Google My Business page and drop a positive review for your business. You can combine this request with a free consultation offer or some gift card. You can also offer a free oral consultation to patients. Come up with enticing offers to encourage patients to write a review on your page.

Furthermore, you can train your employees to request a review from patients once they are done with the treatment. 

Local Link Building

When it comes to local link building for dentist SEO, there are various ways to do that. If Google finds out that popular local websites are pointing to your website, it will be considered as a legitimate resource. How to get such recommendations?

Here is a List of Suggestions for You:

• – Approach to local industry experts for potential partnerships, sponsorships and co-promotions.
• – Pitch an interesting subject to the local press or line up several interviews with popular local media organisations. 
• – Approach to local businesses to build partnerships to get listings on their websites. For example, you can offer some discounts to local members of the community centre. 
• – Keep a sharp eye on your competitors to identify and encash opportunities they have discovered. 

Final Thoughts 

You can hire dental SEO services online by scrutinizing plenty of options you have. Hire a dedicated SEO service provider company that has a team of local SEO experts and has worked for dentists. 

Remember, this is a long journey and you need to evolve with time to amend your local dentist SEO strategy as per the updates and the response you get from your efforts. Expecting results overnight is not a good thing as SEO is a long-term process and will offer rewards in a long run.