SEO for Dentists
If you own a dental practice, odds are you have considered search engine optimization as a strategy that may help drive leads to your website. Truth is, all dental practices need a solid SEO Strategy. Search Engine Optimization can help Dentists because it can help them attract new patients from online searches. Search Engine Optimization is not just about achieving high search results rankings. The best dental practices are ranking high AND converting leads into sales. They know that there is a lot more involved than just tweaking their website content so it’s optimized for search engines.
Dental SEO Services
Table of Contents
- What is dental SEO
- Why do Dentists need SEO
- How can I get my dental practice to rank higher on search engines like Google?
- The best ways to improve your dental website ranking
- What type of content works best for dental SEO
- How to get links to your dental website
- The best tools to help you outrank your competitors
- The best ways to stay ahead of the curve in dental SEO
- Our Dental SEO Strategy
- Blue Fox Advertising | a Dental SEO Company
What is Dental SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a marketing strategy that helps websites rank higher in the natural (unpaid) search results. Basically, it boils down to doing lots of small things to improve your website and link popularity so you get a boost from Google’s algorithms. By ranking well organically in search engines like Google, your dental practice will have a much better chance at attracting new patients who are looking for dental services online.
SEO is important for dental practices because it can help them rank higher in Google searches. When people are searching for dental services online, they will be more likely to find your website if you have a strong SEO strategy in place. This means that you will be able to attract more patients from online searches, which can help grow your dental practice.
There are many ways to improve your SEO ranking, and the best way to start is by understanding how Google’s algorithms work. The best way to do this is by using the best services available, such as those offered by Blue Fox Advertising. Our team of experts understands how to help your dental website rank higher in the search engine results pages, so you can focus on what is most important to you.
Why Do Dentists Need SEO?
Many dentists will argue that they don’t need SEO because they grow their practice solely using word of mouth. I hate to break it to you, but word of mouth is not a marketing strategy. It may have gotten your dental practice to where it is today, but it won’t help you scale to the next level.
To explain why dentists need SEO, let’s look at the example of a dental practice in Chicago. The search term “dentist in Chicago” has a monthly search volume of 6,600. This means that every single month, the dental practices on the first page of Google get 6,600 eyes on their business. More eyes on your business mean more traffic to your website which means more patients walking through your doors.
If you are looking for SEO services, Blue Fox Advertising provides best-in-class dental SEO. Contact us today if you want to improve your ranking on Google and grow your practice!
How Can I Get My Dental Practice to Rank Higher on Google?
When it comes down to it, most companies have a few options to develop a strategy.
- Do it yourself
- Hire an in-house SEO team
- Hire an agency
Regardless of WHO implements your SEO strategy the WHAT (what type of work needs to be done) will remain pretty consistent. SEO consists of three main components:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
The holy trinity of SEO is vital to helping you rank. Work will need to be done on all three of these components in order to rank well in the search results. One cannot be done without the other – for example, you could have extremely well-written content, but if your dental practice website isn’t structured properly, search engines may have a hard time reading the content. On the other hand, you may have a site that is structured perfectly and has excellent content, but if your off-page SEO work is sub-par, your website will not rank well.
Google analytics needs all three components of the holy trinity in order to help your site rank well. With some great keyword research, we can help your site become better seen on Google and help you rank better in your local area.
Technical SEO
When it comes to technical SEO for your dental search engine optimization strategy you’ll want to make sure your website has the following:
- SSL
- Mobile friendly
- Fast page speed
- Crawlable by search engines
- XML site map
- Free of broken links
- Free of duplicate content
On-page SEO for Dentists
This has everything to do with the content (you guessed it) on your website. As a dental practice, you’ll want to write well-structured content that includes keywords such as:
- dentist in [city]
- dental practice in [city]
- best dentist in [city]
- etc.
If you are a specialist practitioner such as a pediatric dentist, you would want to include keywords such as:
- pediatric dentist [city]
- pediatric dentistry
- pediatric dentist near me
- etc.
For best results, make sure to do keyword research so that you are using the best dental SEO keywords possible.
Off-page SEO for Dentists
This has to do with the work that happens (you guessed it again) off of your website. All websites on the internet have what is called an Authority Score or Domain Authority. This is a score ranging from 0-100 that tells how trustworthy a website is. Domain Authority is primarily determined by the number of other websites that link back to your websites – these links are called backlinks, and each backlink is like a signal telling Google that your site is trustworthy.
To acquire these backlinks you can and should do all of the following:
- Guest post to other websites (just make sure they include a do-follow link)
- Create quality pieces of content
- Build relationships online with authoritative blogs
- Use business directories such as Yelp, yellow pages, etc.
SEO for dentists is important if you want your dental practice to rank higher on Google. There are three main components of SEO – technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. You’ll need to work on all three components in order to rank well. Technical SEO consists of making sure your website has the necessary features, such as an SSL and mobile-friendly design. On-page SEO consists of writing well-structured content with keywords that are relevant to your dental practice. Off-page SEO consists of acquiring backlinks from other websites. This will tell Google that your website is trustworthy.
SEO for dentists can be done best by in-house teams, agencies, or do-it-yourself. Regardless of WHO does the work, you need to have all three components present in order to rank higher.
Contact us today so we can help you out with your search engine optimization and getting your dental practice ranking on Google.
The Best Ways to Improve Your Dental Website Ranking
There is no denying that dental practices need to be online in order to best serve their patients. But with so many dentists vying for visibility on search engines, there is a question of how best to ensure your site ranks high in the Google search results.
On-page Optimization is Key
It can be said that the best on-page optimization for a dentist’s site takes care of 80% of the work required to rank higher. So, what does this mean? This essentially means making sure your website has the right keywords that people are ranking for, making sure that your business name is linked to a location, and having content that is relatable and important for what people are looking for.
What Type of Content Works Best For Dental SEO
What type of content is best for your website? This may be a controversial question, but the best answer is that it depends on what you do. For instance, if you are a dentist who specializes in teeth whitening procedures or even wisdom teeth extraction, this would mean that people looking for these things would be best served by having content about
Creating content that is relatable not only to the business and what you offer but also on a level of human relatability as well. Family life, activities that you like to do, food that you enjoy, or a local restaurant that you enjoyed going to last weekend. Things like this not only make you more relatable but also allow you to have a better relationship with your future clients.
How to Get Links to Your Dental Website
Links are an essential part of best SEO practices and having links from another website to your own can send a signal to Google that you should be rewarded for your work. Having said this, the best practice is to create high-quality content on your site first and let other sites link naturally as they reference something you write about.
However, if you want to get links writing articles and reaching out to publications is a quicker way to get those links. Just know that by doing so you are usually going to be paying for those links as typically you have to wait for someone to publish a link to your page without paying for it.
The Best Tools to Help You Outrank Your Competitors
One of the best tools to help with your SEO is Yoast. This tool helps you understand best practices when it comes to posting content and making sure that everything about your website is in order for best rankings. One of the best features of this plugin is helping you highlight key terms in posts, which can be helpful with getting Google’s preferred lists and helping you rank. Google will recognize these terms and the more they are in your article the better you’ll rank for “Best Dental Practice in …”
We can help you get set up with Yoast when we get started on your SEO for your dental practice.
A great free analytic tool that you can use is Google Analytics. There are no limitations for its usage, but queries that are sending you organic traffic are hidden. It is quite possibly the most powerful free analytics tool available, Google Analytics tracks pretty much every bit of traffic you can imagine on your website—where it comes from, which page is receiving it, and so on. While it’s not purely for SEO, it’s still a helpful tool to track if you’re getting traffic from organic search.
Google Search Console is best for monitoring indexing status, crawling errors, and messages about your site. You can set up alerts with Google Search Console to let you know when something is wrong with your website, this includes notifications if your site goes down or an error is preventing Google from crawling your page.
The best dentist SEO services are the ones that also have an XML Sitemap. This is another great tool to use. Simply enter your site’s URL and some optional parameters, and XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap that you can upload to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This will help with Google analyzing your website better and help you rank faster.
The last tool that we recommend is Ahref’s. An incredibly versatile tool that can help you with several aspects of SEO. It offers free usage on some of its things but the paid version is definitely worth it. It has a great site explorer and rank tracker. It also offers extensive reports on the best keywords for your website, best link sources, and best sites to create links from. With this, you can see where you need work the most and what the best way is to go about getting higher ranks for your best dental practice in [LOCATION].
Our Dental SEO Strategy
Our best strategy for dental SEO is to create content that best serves our clients and prospects. Everything above that we have mentioned would be all that we would implement to start with optimizing your SEO. Work on your technical, on-page, and off-page SEO.
Professional Images
One of our biggest recommendations we tell all our clients is to get original professional images on their website. Search engines like Google prefer and will reward sites that have original images on their website. We optimize those images with title tags for the page and a meta description to further help google know what those images are and classify the page they are on.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is another thing we do for our SEO dental strategy, when you write a blog post or have a page but another page or blog post comes up make sure to make that a link to that page. This not only helps with building those links but helps keep people on your website longer which in turn shows google that the content on your website is worth ranking higher than where it is.
Page Speed & Mobile Optimization
Page speed and mobile optimization are two very big aspects of what we focus on throughout the entire process. Optimizing images and videos is something we work hard at making sure they don’t slow down your page speed. While we would love to create beautiful websites similar to apple for all our clients the UX design features can really slow down a website, which is why our clients love our simple, clean, and easy-to-navigate websites that load quickly. We can still create a phenomenal website without crazy and fancy design features.
Comprehensive Content
Writing comprehensive content is very important when it comes to the content on your dental website. Not just in the blog portions but throughout your site as well. There are areas that can very easily have a little more comprehensive content for people looking for more info than what they can skim. Look at your website and see where you can give some more information and help you rank better with Google as well. Your about us page, your services pages, your team page, etc. All of these are great places to start with some more comprehensive content.
One of the smaller things we do that can help your page rank on the first page of google without paying for it is by having your content structured in a way that you get that page featured as an answer box on the first page. Do you know the ones that give you all the information really quick in a bullet, numbered, list format? If your content is structured the right way this is a great way to show the search engines like Google that you have important comprehensive content on your dental website but also have little snippets to get the information quickly to those who are searching for it.
Now of course you can apply all of these strategies yourself and build your website yourself. If you go that route we commend you because we know how much work and time is needed to get it there. If you would like more information about how we can help get you going with SEO for your Dental Practice Website then reach out today we would love to save you time and money by helping your dental practice website rank higher faster.
The Best Ways to Stay Ahead of The Curve In Dental SEO
As best practices change with SEO, it is best to stay ahead of the curve by being aware of the best trends. At the same time, it is best not to be too concerned about ranking number one but instead focus on ensuring that your website is doing its best in terms of converting visitors.
For instance, having a blog on your site can help you gain visitors and traction to your website. But if those blogs don’t give them the information they are looking for (aka clickbait), or they don’t lead them to a call to action they will either click off your site or never take action. Blogs are great, but the purpose behind them is to give the information needed and get them to make a decision or say yes so that they actually get some leads.
A best practice would be to make sure that you are creating engaging content that will keep the audience on your site. This means making sure that they can stay on your site longer or have a better experience so that they want to come back again. If you have people coming and going from your website without converting, then best practices go out the window.
Consider what you want the user’s experience to be like when they get there. What do you want them to see first? What do you want them to click on? Think about it from their point of view and then go from there. We know that it sounds simple but to really help create the best content you have to understand what your clients and potential visitors want or are looking for.
So, what are some things that would be helpful to potential clients that could help you gain traffic to your website? Some suggestions that we would recommend are Relatability, Best Practices, Recommended Products, & Location. The best dental SEO services are the ones that also take into consideration how best to best serve your clients.
5-Star Dental SEO Company
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Blue Fox Advertising | a Dental SEO Company
At Blue Fox, we specialize in search engine optimization and know what needs to happen to help get your Dental services organically ranking high with google analytics, keyword research, and such to help with your dental SEO. Reach out to us today for help with getting your Dental Practice ranking on the first page of Google!