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 its 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 below 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
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 “https://” 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 make informed decisions to improve your campaign.