Are you looking to leverage digital advertising to drive more patients to your practice?
If that’s the case, then you definitely need to seriously consider SEO as a means to do this.
The Importance Of Dental SEO Marketing
There are many different types of online marketing initiatives you can employ in order to generate leads for your dental office.
There’s social media marketing (SMM) like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising like Google Ads, email marketing using an existing email list, and much more.
But search engine optimization is a beast of it’s own.
When used properly, it can be the most lucrative online marketing channel for your dentistry by a long shot.
Organic Search
Firstly, SEO allows your practice to show up in organic search results.
These are the results that appear directly the paid ad positions in Google.
It’s important to note that most people don’t click and actually skip the paid ad positions, as they know businesses are being paid to be there.
They want the organic results – AKA the earned positions.
If your website appears here, you have a high likelihood of being clicked and visited by interested searchers.
Google Maps
SEO can also put you in the Google Maps results.
For example, if someone searches “dentist near me”, a Google Maps results of their area shows up.
In these results, there’s usually 3 websites that appear.
If you’re one of these websites, you gain incredible visibility in front of searchers looking for directions to a dentist right now.
How Can SEO Help My Dental Practice?
Now that we know the importance of SEO marketing – it allows you to show up in both the organic search results and Google Maps results in front of high-quality prospects) – let’s discuss how exactly this helps your dental practice.
Increase Your Online Visibility
At the most basic level, SEO helps improve the online presence and visibility of your practice.
But the importance of this visibility is that it is targeted towards high-intent searchers.
This means that you’re not getting more visibility in front of just anybody – rather, you’re getting visibility in front of people that actually want and need and are actively looking for your services.
More Online Traffic And Foot Traffic
SEO leads to both more online visitors on your dental website and more foot traffic to your physical office.
The more visitors organic rankings push to your website, the more people that will actually show up to your office in the real world.
Become A Local Authority
By appearing for many different types of keywords in your local area, the more you will be seen as an authority in your city.
Think about it – if a prospect types in various different searches to find a new dentist, and your website is the one that keeps coming up, chances are that they’ll take notice and put your practice as their #1 option.
Drive New Patients To Your Practice
Ultimately, this visibility, authoritativeness, and real world visits equates to more new patients for your practice.
The goal of SEO is to increase your top line – your revenue will naturally increase as you reap these SEO benefits over time.
The SEO Process For Dentists
There is a typical process when it comes to performing dentist SEO.
Keep in mind that although this process is typical, each step is 100% customized to your specific dental website.
1. Competitive Analysis And SEO Audit
This is where you audit your website’s current SEO metrics and determine the strengths and weaknesses in your current strategy.
Along with this, we compared this to all of your top competitors to see what they’re doing differently and how we can replicate their success.
We also look for weaknesses in your competitors’ strategy.
By doing this, we can surpass their rankings by matching what they’re doing right, and improving upon what they are doing wrong.
2. Keyword Selection
The keywords you decide to target for your dental SEO campaign is also extremely important to your success.
We perform deep keyword research to determine what are the best terms to target that will generate the best and most highest quality traffic possible to your website.
Some common keywords that are great for local dentists to target in general are:
“dentist near me”
“dentist office near me”
“best dentist near me”
“dental office”
“dentist + city”
“city + dentist”
“city + dental clinic”
“emergency dentist”
“emergency dental clinic”
“invisalign + your city”
“your city + invisalign”
3. Strategy Development
Once we discover the strengths and weaknesses of your own website plus your competitors’ websites, along with the precise keywords that would be best for you to target, we then develop a strategy to actually rank for these keywords.
This will be a 12-month strategy that we believe will be best to get you the results you’re looking for.
After 12 months, we then develop a new strategy based on what you want to accomplish next.
4. Implementation
Over the next 12 months, we then implement this outlined strategy.
What we implement each month will be defined in the monthly deliverables we outline at the very beginning of the campaign.
5. Tracking And Reporting
Each month, we send a monthly report of everything that has been done as well as the results of our optimizations.
This includes website traffic, keyword rankings, total leads generated, etc.
With these reports, it will be easy to see the general upwards trajectory of our campaign, as our numbers will be increasing and improving every single month.
How To Use On-site SEO To Optimize Your Dental Website
Now that we know the process for setting up, implementing, and tracking a dental SEO campaign, let’s discuss how we actually perform search engine optimization on a dental website.
Before we get into it, here is a video of Brian Dean from Backlinko discussing how to do dental SEO properly:
Now, we will break this up into both onsite and offsite SEO strategies.
Note that the following are simply examples of some of the optimizations we will perform – there are many, many more optimizations that will be performed month over month.
Site Loading Speed
Website loading speed is a huge search engine ranking factor.
A slow website can be detrimental to your rankings.
This is because people’s attention spans are extremely short nowadays.
Meaning, they simply don’t have time to wait for a website to load for a few seconds.
If your dentist website takes more than a few seconds to load, users will simply click back to the search engine results page (SERP) and click a competitor’s website instead.
Over time, this will cause your rankings to drop off the first page of Google.
Design
When users land on your website, you want your site to give off a professional vibe.
An old, outdated website will give the impression that the operation you run is also old and outdated.
You want to show your potential patients that you’re a company they can trust with their business.
Professionalism is a huge trait you need in order to establish this trust.
Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
What do you want your visitors to do while they’re on your website?
Book an appointment, request a free consultation, refer a friend?
Whatever action it is that you want your website to ultimately incite needs to be as clear as possible to your visitors.
This way, you increase the chances that your visitors will actually take these actions.
Security
Website security is another important aspect of your dental website.
Google wants to send its users to websites that are secure and free from cyber attacks, hacks, vulnerabilities, etc.
Ensuring your site is equipped with the “ protocol is of utmost importance.
Google Analytics And Google Search Console
The ability to track your user metrics and site traffic is paramount to measuring your key performance indicators (KPIs) and the overall success of your SEO campaign.
Both Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free tools you can install on your website today to accomplish this.
There are many both benefits to both tools, and you can read about the precise benefits of Google Analytics here.
User Metrics
Making data-backed decisions will help optimize your dental SEO campaign.
By installing the tools mentioned above, you will be able to see your exact numbers and metrics that are needed to make these decisions.
By identifying your key pages, user dwell time, landing page conversions, and more, you can then use this information to make SEO decisions that will help improve your overall site performance.
How To Use Off-site SEO To Optimize Your Dental Website
Now let’s discuss the optimizations you can make off of your actual website to improve the rankings of your dental keywords.
Citations
Citations are mentions of your website’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) around the web.
They signal to Google that you are indeed local to your specific area.
This will allow you to rank for dental keywords for users searching in and around your target service location.
You can learn more about Google My Business citations here.
Backlinks From Dental Websites
Backlinks are links on other websites pointing back to your own website.
The relevance of your backlinks helps Google identify what niche you are in.
By building backlinks and getting other dental websites to link back to your website, the more Google will understand that dentistry is the industry you are in.
Thus, allowing you to rank for more dental keywords.
Local Backlinks
Local backlinks are similar to citations in the sense that they help communicate to Google where you are located.
They are simply links on other local websites pointing back to your website.
For example: if you are doing SEO in Toronto for your Toronto-based dental practice, having links point to your website from other Toronto-based websites will help you rank higher in Toronto.
These could be links from Toronto news sites, publications, press releases, and more.
Social Media
Social shares indirectly help with your SEO efforts.
Social shares are the number of times your website gets engagement and shares on social media channels such Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
They help drive traffic to your website, thereby giving Google more data about your user metrics.
This, combined with the fact that this engagement shows Google that you are a legitimate business will help your dentistry SEO rankings overall.
Frequently Asked Questions
Below are some commonly asked questions about our SEO services from dentists and dental professionals.
1. What’s The Differences Between SEO For The Dental Industry As Opposed To Other Industries?
Dental industry SEO is typically much more competitive than other local service-based industries.
This is because the revenue dentists make is generally much higher than other less specialized industries.
Because of this, dentists need much more time and attention put on their website.
To be successful, there needs to be serious deep research, analysis, and continual optimization in order to achieve your desired rankings.
Active Business Growth provides this required attention to detail.
2. How Much Will A Monthly Dental Website SEO Campaign Cost?
Around $1,500 per month is a good ballpark estimation for dental SEO services.
Although, this can vary immensely based on website metrics, location, and level of competition in your local area.
3. How Long Does SEO Take?
This will again depend on the factors mentioned above.
Typically, within 3-6 months you will begin to see solid upward movements in your target keywords.
From months 6-12, these keywords should start popping up to the first page.
And from months 12+, continual optimization will be needed on a monthly basis to slowly push your way up to position #1 and stay there for the long term.
SEO is an investment in your practice.
A worthy investment when done right.
4. How Do You Track Campaign Success?
We use tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Mangools, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Hotjar, and more to track your campaign over time.
With these combined tools, we have the ability to track almost anything and everything you wish.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can use these tools to your advantage to increase your rankings for the long term.
SEO For Dentists: Bringing Your Practice Local Patients Through Online Marketing
If you’re looking to generate more leads online to your practice, leveraging dental SEO marketing is the best way to do this.
By building backlinks and optimizing your on-page content, you will have the opportunity to appear in both organic search results and Google Maps.
By doing this, your practice will gain more visibility.
Ultimately, more traffic, leads, and patients will come your way as a result.
