In 2024, a dental business that is not on the Internet needs a root canal done for itself. It’s missing out on so many potential customers and exposure by simply not appearing on the internet when people search for terms like Dentists near me. Having a digital marketing strategy for your dental practice is very important in today’s world. Not only will you attract potential customers and patients, but you’ll unlock so many ways to make more money through your dental practice. And all that it requires is having a solid strategy and an online presence.
This blog post will tell you how to set up your dental business online. You’ll learn how to make a strategy to rank your dental website #1 on Google and other search engines like Bing. And we’ll shed some light on how to effectively promote your dental business through SEO and other digital marketing methods.
What is SEO for Dentists?
Dentist SEO includes practices that help a dentist’s website rank up higher in search engines. SEO for dentists helps improve their site’s visibility and organic reach by using keyword research, content creation, local listing, and more. Local SEO aka local listing is important for dentists who only want to target consumers located nearby. All these things add up to make search engine marketing for dentists possible.
Dental SEO begins with using web crawlers to find your website and list it. As a result, your website’s chances of being found improve. When you put useful content with SEO keywords on your dental site, people can easily find your site. It appears before them as they search for relevant queries and keywords on the search engine. And as we said above, local SEO also helps it. You must optimize your Google Business profile for that.
Steps to Dental SEO
When a user searches for any dental query, search engines like Google look at three important things to decide which result to put up first. It looks at how well the information on a page matches what a user just searched. After that, it looks at which dentist is closest to the user. And then it looks at how prominent the dentist is. Using these filters, a search engine gives you different types of search results for your query. Some of them are rich snippets, some are typical text results and some are sponsored ones.
- Perform On-Page and Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the first thing done to any website that we optimize for SEO. So when it comes to a dental website you should start from On-page SEO. On-page SEO deals with whatever your dental website would show to the users. Search engines also look at On-page SEO to decide how relevant your website is.
Talking about keywords, they are both long tail and short tail. Sometimes you might need to use a keyword like How to Take Care of Your Teeth After a Root Canal. These types of keywords are long-tail and they are used typically in blog sections of a dental website.
- Use Long Tail and Short Tail Keywords
On the other hand, your website will include keywords like teeth cleaning, dental implants, dental bridges, and teeth whitening. These are the service-related keywords people search for when they want treatment. The other type of keyword is informational. Some informational keywords also have a transactional intent. For instance, if a user searches for The Best Way to Straighten Teeth, he might get ready to receive treatment right after he finishes reading your blog.
- Where to Put Keywords in the Content?
All of these keywords are naturally and strategically placed in the website content and blogs to make the website prominent in the eyes of search engines. Whether it’s written text, Image alt descriptions, or headings like H1, H2, and H3s, you can place keywords in all of them. But make sure they make proper sense and don’t look forced at all. Also, experts suggest avoiding headings like “Services,” “About Us,” or “Contact Us” as they have become outdated and don’t work anymore.
These things add up to on-page SEO tactics. Now let’s talk about what includes Off-page SEO and how to optimize for it.
- Interlinking
Interlinks are the links that connect your website pages together. These kinds of links are everywhere. You find them on service pages, home pages, blog pages, etc. Your landing page might have a list of services you provide. But to get into the details, you will click on a service, which will take you to a page where that service is described in detail. Interlinking is an important part of SEO as it guides users to other helpful content out there on your website. Search engine spiders and crawlers also look at your website’s interlinking to decide where to rank your website on SERPs.
- Outbound links
Opposite to interlinks and internal links, we’ve got outbound links or external links. These are the links on your website that take your reader to some other website. Most commonly, people use these outbound links for backlinking purposes. Backlinking is a part of off-page SEO. When other reputed sites have links to your website, Google sees your website as authoritative. As a result, your ranking in the search results gets better, and your DA (domain authority) also increases.
- Optimize Google My Business Profile
Let’s talk about the local SEO guide for dentists. Note that besides your website, the best place for your dental practice’s location and contact info is your Google Business Profile. Claim your listing at business.google.com if you haven’t already. A complete profile boosts your local SEO, helping people find your practice easily online. Optimize your site and online listings, ensure your practice is in local directories, and encourage patient reviews to make it easy for people to find and contact you for appointments.
After you’re done with your website’s on-page and off-page SEO, it’s time to get your hands on Local SEO. Because a dentist always practices in a physical situation, local SEO is a must. People need to know where that dentist practices. His clinic address and other details like its opening and closing hours. This information becomes available to customers when we do local SEO of the clinic.
So what you gotta do is claim your listing at business.google.com. When you make a profile on Google My Business (GMB), you make your practice available in local directories. As a result, you make it easier for people to find and contact you for appointments.
- How to Use Local Listing?
Make sure customers can easily find and reach your dental practice by updating your local business listing. You can use it to keep your office hours, post photos, monitor reviews, and write a profile of your practice. This is important for keeping your hours up-to-date for holidays and sharing news about your practice. Ensure that your dental website displays the correct name, address, and phone number on every page, and has a contact page with this information, a map, and a contact form. Having a Google Business Profile is crucial for dentists who rely on in-person visits. It appears in local search results and helps people find your phone number, address, hours, reviews, photos, and services.
- How to Let Google Identify Your Location?
Remember to keep the same information for your dental practice’s name, address, and phone number consistent across all listings. This will help improve your online presence and allow Google to identify your location accurately. Use the same format and details for all your listings. For example, if your name includes “DDS,” make sure to use it consistently. Also, choose one specific way to list your address, such as “North Second St.” or “N. 2nd St.,” and use that format consistently across all platforms.
- Produce Helpful SEO Content
Nothing is more important than helpful content if you want to rank high on Google. It contains all the things such as website text, headings, photographs, and videos. Your articles, photos, and videos should answer common questions patients ask. If your content is valuable insights and is fun and easy to read, you’re good to go. These are the base things that if done right, keywords and other SEO factors will appear to be helpful.
Each and every written piece on your dental blog must contain value. Offer unique and helpful information based on your experience and expertise. After that, incorporate keywords in Title tags, metadata, and overall content. This approach helps you stand out from the competition and offer maximized value to your readers.
Dental Keyword Research Tools
To avoid doing the technical stuff that comes along with keyword research on tools, you can use the Google Search autofill function to get SEO keywords. Google suggests keywords that people already search for. Whenever you type a query, it shows you ten options based on common searches. This way, you can discover SEO keywords you might not have thought of. There are both free and paid ways to find keywords online. Google Trends and Keywords Everywhere are free ones, while Ahrefs and Semrush are advanced tools that come with a fee. These tools assist you in choosing the right keywords for your website.
How to Pick Up Keywords?
If you want to shortlist the best keywords, we suggest using paid tools like SEMRUSH and Ahref. They tell you some important keyword metrics, such as monthly search volume, average cost-per-click (CPC), and competitiveness. If your dental website is new and has less DA (domain authority), focus on keywords with higher search volumes and lower competition, often long-tail keywords with three to four words, because shorter keywords would be already taken by websites that were there before yours.
They also have a high difficulty level that makes them difficult to rank for. But if your website is also old and has enough DA to combat the already giant websites, you can go for shorter keywords with high keyword difficulty and search volume as well.
Once you have your keywords, create content such as text, photos, drawings, or videos that include these keywords. Focus on one or two keywords per page to make the content clear and easy to understand. Avoid forcing keywords into the text unnaturally, as this can result in search engine penalties.
Content Marketing with a Dental Blog
When you have gathered all the important details about your services, location, staff, and contact information, it’s a good idea to update your website with a blog regularly. Blogs benefit dental SEO marketing because search engines prefer fresh and relevant content. They are also great for content marketing, which means creating content that is easy to find in searches and linked by other websites. Sharing your blog on social media and having other websites link back to your content, known as link-building, can improve your SEO. While it takes time, getting links from authoritative websites can increase your website traffic. For the best results, consider hiring dental SEO services to manage your blog and content marketing.
Use Schema for Structured Data
To incorporate location information into your website, you need to add structured data using JavaScript from Schema.org. You or your web developer can handle this. Structured data is important for helping search engines understand your website, which gives you an edge in dental SEO. By including details like your address, city, ZIP code, phone number, coordinates, photos, and hours directly in your code, search engines can easily find and use this information in search results.
This makes it possible for search results to show more than just a headline, web address, and description. They can also display the dental services you offer, links to your social media, and customer reviews. This helps improve your ranking and boosts your online presence.
Focus on Improving the UX of the Website
UX means user experience. User experience is one of the most indirect ranking factors in SEO for dentists. A search engine will look at your dental website to see how good its user interface is. According to this, search engines will decide if a product should be ranked high or not. UX typically involves doing stuff like making simple and clear designs that are easy to understand. This means that users can easily navigate your website without confusion. It also means that all the links, whether internal or external, on your website should be working. They must not show errors like Link not found, page not found, 404, etc. Consistent branding, such as the same logo and complimenting color scheme throughout the website and social media pages, is also necessary.
Consistent branding is a part of UX. It depicts the quality of any business and brand. If your website’s branding and color scheme aren’t consistent, people might think that this company can’t even get its branding straight. How would I know they know what they do? So make sure you fix it. Finally, the most important thing for SEO user experience is having some sort of easy-to-use tools on your website. It could include tools like dental implant calculators, PDFs, downloadables of helpful research, and more. The more actions people perform on your website, the better it is for SEO. And tools can allow people to click here and there on your website, helping with actions.
Ask Patients to Review You Online
Ask yourself. Won’t you want to hear reviews about a doctor or dentist before you trust him or her with your hard-earned money? Everyone wants to know whether they’re investing in the right place or not. That’s why SEO marketing for dentists adds testimonials and reviews. These testimonials are also available on GMB in the form of reviews. People read these reviews before deciding to do business with a company. And they’d want to do the same when it comes to visiting a dental clinic.
So the other thing you would want to do in search engine optimization for dentists is get more positive reviews and testimonials. However, negative reviews can make your feedback appear more authentic and provide an opportunity for you to address and improve any issues. You can get reviews in text form, images, and videos. Whatever is feasible for you and your customers, you can do. Getting video testimonials on websites performs better whereas text reviews suit GMB profiles.
Track Your Dental SEO
You want to keep track of how visitors find your website. There are several ways they can find you such as through search engines or social media. Knowing this information helps you understand how well your marketing strategies are working. Some other things that you should track are phone calls, form submissions, and appointment bookings. This will help you know which pages are most successful in getting people to take action.
There are many free and paid tools out there for this purpose. If you want to use a reliable free tool then Google Analytics is the option. You can start by getting a free account on Google Analytics and adding a small piece of code to your website. Once set up, you can see useful information like how many people visit your website, where they are located, and which pages they look at. Google Analytics also lets you see how people move through your website and how they interact with it. This information can help you focus on improving the most popular pages to attract more potential patients.
Dental SEO Cost
SEO for dentists typically ranges between $1500 to $5000 a month. Hourly charges range from $100 to $300/ hour. How much an agency charges you depends on the size of your practice, how much traffic you want to get on your website, and how much work your website would need before that.
When it comes to Dubai, the cost of dental SEO also varies based on factors such as competition, needed services, and the reputation of the SEO agency. Typically, SEO services cost from 1000 to 5000 AED for keyword research, 2000 to 10,000 AED for on-page and local SEO, 2000 to 20,000 AED for content marketing, and 1000 to 10,000 AED for mobile and website speed optimization. These investments help dental clinics improve their online visibility, attract more patients, and ensure a solid return on investment.
Conclusion
Dental practices need to focus on digital marketing, including search engine optimization (SEO), to succeed. To maintain a high ranking on Google and other search engines, dentists should regularly update their website content with relevant keywords. It’s important to use analytics to track the search terms potential patients use to find dental services. Accurate website information is crucial, and adding new and helpful content regularly is essential to remain visible to search engines and attract potential patients.
If you implement all these dental SEO strategies, you can improve your online presence and get more people to visit your website and social media. This will ultimately help you achieve hiring ranking on SERPs and eventually secure the #1 position in Google search in 2024.
Key Takeaways
- If your dental clinic has no social media or website in 2024, you are missing out on a lot of revenue and customers already. You need a foolproof search engine optimization strategy to attain the #1 position in Google search results.
- Dental SEO begins with keyword research and adds creating content with keywords in it. Then you improve your local listing and GMB profile. Local listings help you target customers nearby who want to visit your clinic, but before that, they want to see your online profile on GMB.
- Create useful, easy-to-understand content to answer common questions from patients. Make a proper blog section on your website. It helps with website ranking a lot. Be sure to update your dental blog with relevant posts regularly. This will keep the content fresh and help attract more visitors.
- Integrate both long-tail and short-tail keywords in your content. Although typically shorter keywords are difficult to rank for, you can use them if your site has good DA and already ranks at a good position. Teeth Cleaning is an example of a short-tail keyword.
Also Read: What is Parasite SEO? A Complete Guide
FAQs
What is dental SEO?
Dental SEO is the process of making your dental practice appear higher in search engine results. SEO is about getting to the top spot on a search engine result page (SERP) without paying for an ad.
Why are backlinks important for dental SEO?
Increased Visibility: Backlinks can drive organic traffic to your dental website. When users click on a link from another site to visit yours, it not only provides potential patients with valuable information but also tells search engines that your site is relevant to user queries.
What is the difference between dental SEO and local dental SEO?
SEO’s primary purpose is to boost your site’s visibility in online search results related to your practice. While traditional SEO increases your visibility on a wider scale, local SEO marketing focuses on increasing your rankings in local SERPs to attract nearby patients to your clinic.