Dental SEO services involves improving the online visibility of dental offices to attract more traffic from search engine users. Follow these 10 steps to reach a relevant and consistent clientele for most dental practices.
In the following article, we will go through 10 key steps to effectively improve your dental or medical website’s SEO and local referencing.
Optimize your Google My Business profile for dentists and obtain patient reviews
Optimizing the Google My Business page is a small dental SEO idea that has a huge impact. By optimizing your Google My Business profile, you can almost immediately attract more patients.
Do you know that map of local listings that shows up when someone searches by location? That’s Google’s “Local Pack,” and the information it contains is pulled from various Google My Business local pages.
The Local Pack listing alone accounts for about 44% of clicks by Google users, primarily regarding traffic to the business name and link to the website.
If you haven’t done so already, make sure to claim your Google My Business page.
To optimize it, fill out the following form:
1) Your business categories
2) Your main phone number
3) Description of your business
4) Your business hours
5) Your address or service area
6)Your reviews section (more information on reviews a little later)
Patient reviews are an indicator of trust for potential patients. You can collect more reviews via email and SMS, but you’ll need to build a group of loyal patients to gather their honest feedback. For example, after each consultation, you can automate sending an email or SMS to request an honest review from your patients. Additionally, you can also place a sign in your waiting room to encourage your patients to give their feedback.
Produce valuable content using relevant keywords for a dental sphere
You cannot generate search traffic without quality content. By writing useful content using the keywords your target audience is searching for, you will attract them to your site. Identify the keywords for which your competitors are ranked, but not you. This will help you write useful content for your patients and optimize it for local searches. Get a detailed view of the number of people searching with a keyword each month and find potential topics for dentist offices you can write for your content.
HTML tag optimization for dental SEO
Optimize your page structure using the right HTML tags. Use relevant dental keywords in meta tags and titles to boost your SEO. Describe images using alt tags to improve accessibility. The hierarchy of information on a page can be indicated using h1 to h6 tags.
Create links between pages on your website.
Links between your web pages can help your visitors and search engines easily find your content. Pages that receive a lot of traffic and are ranked for relevant keywords can share their authority with your other pages. Link subtopics from main pages and, most importantly, identify pages that are not connected to other pages on your site.
Optimize your local SEO by creating citations in relevant dental directories
Search engines scan the entire web to ensure that your name, address, and phone number are consistent everywhere. Incorrect information on online directories can harm your local ranking.
Manual method: You can correct your information by updating it in each directory.
List management: Automate the updating of all your information at the same time.
Take care of the mobile version and user-friendly architecture of your dental website
The world of internet users has changed. Fewer and fewer people are using their PCs and laptops to conduct their searches. Instead, they are turning to their mobile phones to conduct local searches and other key searches.
One of the best strategies you can use to improve your ranking and generate traffic to your website is to have it optimized for mobile phones. The reason why you make the effort to have your website mobile-friendly is that in 2019, search engines created a mobile-first indexing system.
This system changed the way all search engines do their ranking work. They moved from searching for PC-ready websites to searching for mobile-ready websites.
This is a key area you need to work on because it is no longer enough to be PC-ready. This trend is because people are finding that they need all sorts of services when they are not at their desks or in front of their personal computers.
Organize your site so that the most important pages are easily accessible from the navigation bar. Limit the depth of pages to three subfolders to improve the patient’s experience.
Poor site architecture can lead to a loss of traffic and exploration budget.
Create videos related to dentistry and allocate resources toward video promotion
If you look at the top dental social media profiles I shared above, you’ll notice that they all integrate an extremely valuable type of media: videos.
Consumers love videos. They love them so much that a video is 50 times more likely to rank organically in search results than text pages.
You’re in a leading industry to use video because virtually everything you do involves a visual element. Are you creating hour-long crowns with cutting-edge 3D technology? Take a snapshot. Do you have patients who love your work? Have them filmed for a testimonial.
Here are some videos your dental practice should leverage:
1) Welcome videos on the website: No one wants to visit a sketchy dental office, so create a welcome video and introduce your facility beforehand.
2) Doctor profile videos: Profile videos are a great way to increase trust in your dentists and dental hygienists.
3) Patient review videos: Over the past two years, videos with the word “review” in the title have been viewed for over 50,000 years on mobile phones alone. By having testimonials and reviews from previous patients, you’re not only building confidence in your abilities, but also in your staff.
4) Procedure and treatment overview videos: If you perform dental operations, create videos that provide an overview of the procedure and its aftermath.
5) Educational videos on common questions or dental conditions: “Should I use activated charcoal to whiten my teeth?” “How long does Invisalign take?” “How do I know if I have a cavity?”. Answering these kinds of questions through videos is a straightforward task. By populating your website with this type of content, you’ll not only be seen as an authority but also dispel any confusion about your services.
Create backlinks with sites related to dentistry
Backlinks are a sign of trust from one website to another. A good balance of backlinks can improve your website rankings.
Produce relevant content that can receive natural links and analyze each page to which your site has a backlink: check if your content can be useful to its audience and if you can contact the site owner.
Add a healthcare schema
You can add Schema markup to your dental website to encourage the display of additional details when your site appears in search results.
Schema.org: This website provides a handy list of suggestions on how to add Schema markup to your website.
Optimizing your dental website for voice search
This is another new trend. With the invention of Siri and Alexa, the artificial intelligence options from Amazon and Apple, and Google Assistant on Android, people are using voice commands to perform their internet searches.
If your website is not optimized for this new trend, you risk missing out on some traffic and new patients. To do this, you will need to identify the voice keywords that potential patients will use to find a local dentist.
Your keyword searches will need to be tailored to this new way of searching for local dental practices.
Conclusion
Dental SEO optimization is crucial for dentists who want to expand their client base and reach a wider audience in a highly competitive industry. With the rise of technology and the internet, dental practices need to have a strong online presence, starting with a visually appealing and user-friendly website.
To improve your dental SEO, do not forget about the importance of website design and optimization, increasing visibility with an enhanced Google My Business listing, and other essential strategies that are indispensable in 2023.
