If your dental practice is brand new and just getting off the ground, or if your long-standing practice is struggling to attract new clients, online dental marketing may be one of the best places to improve the quality of your website. This guide explains the world of SEO for dentists who are looking to bring new clients into their practice.
These days, it’s not enough to just do physical marketing and word-of-mouth, as the digital world has become the main area people look for all kinds of services, and this especially includes dental practices. And that is where SEO comes into play!
There are all kinds of ways to advertise your practice and team, but your website can easily attract the eyes of others through search engine optimization, also known as SEO. This technique is an excellent way to improve your website, causing it to show up more often when people are looking for a new dentist or dental practice. Organic traffic via Google’s algorithm and a local search from social media may be able to generate some potential clients, but improving your social media game through an SEO strategy can increase website traffic.
This might seem like an unusual way to advertise if you’re new to digital marketing, but any website and business can be improved through strong SEO content marketing, guiding people to their website. For dentists and dental practices, there are tons of great tips that we can provide to improve your general SEO, as well as a few special tips that dentists and dental practices can use.
What Is SEO?
If you’re new to online marketing, it might help to have a general understanding of this complex subject. As mentioned earlier, what SEO stands for is search engine optimization, and it essentially involves writing your website’s content to help it appear more often when people look for it through search engines like Google or Bing.
This is accomplished by essentially using specific keywords you think your audience will search for online, putting them throughout the articles and landing pages of your website to help the algorithms on these sites to recommend it as a helpful answer. For Google searches, you can even track your success through various tools, and thanks to its huge user base it’s easy to attract new viewers to your site by experimenting with their tools
With more people visiting your website through these Google searches, you can attract audiences that you would never get from any type of advertising and physical marketing. People finding your business or service on their own will make them less inclined to feel like they’re being advertised, and it makes for an organic way to attract new clients.
Why Use SEO For Dentists And Dental Practices
SEO is important for dental practices for the same reason as any business or service, since it’ll help you attract new clients and consumers. While you could potentially promote your practice’s website through purchasing advertisements, this can often be costly and much more variant in terms of success.
Paid online advertisements can also seem suspicious to some online users, making your practice seem less legitimate or helpful if it’s explicitly in a window marked for advertisements. As a result, improving dentist and dental practice SEO will let people find your website organically, making them more likely to explore your site and contact you for appointments and consultations.
A Dental SEO Strategy
Now that you know exactly what SEO can do for you, it’s time to start getting into the specific tips for improving SEO for dentists and dental practice websites. Many of these tips are great for any sort of service or business website, but we also have a few tips that are particularly successful for dental service websites.
Bringing a few of these dentist SEO tips to your site is sure to get more eyes on your dental practice’s website, as they’re excellent starting points as you begin building and improving your website. Each can contribute to your practice’s success and visibility, all without the costs that come with other forms of marketing.
1. Make Your Site Worth Searching For
No matter how successful your SEO is, you’ll want to make sure your website is worth clicking on to begin with. If your website is difficult to navigate or doesn’t provide clear information, this is going to result in people clicking on your website and immediately clicking away, since nobody using Google wants to take too long determining if a given website is worth their time.
There are all kinds of ways to do this that we’ll mention later, since it’s possible to improve your site at the same time as improving SEO, but in short you want to make your website easier to explore. Your goal isn’t to trick people into coming to your website, but instead help them find it more efficiently, so make sure your client can easily find out what your dental practice has to offer, your usual prices, contact information, and anything else you think a new client might want to know. This includes doing keyword research relating to dental SEO, so you know what to include in a blog post or title tag so that your website traffic can increase in Google’s algorithm.
2. Check Mobile Phone Compatibility
In a similar vein to the tip listed above, it’s important to know that people searching for any content will be looking at least as much on their desktop and laptop computers as they will on their smartphones. If a potential client is looking for a quick answer, they’ll very likely be looking it up on their mobile device instead of sitting at a computer, so you’ll want to make sure your site is just as easy to navigate on both big and small screens.
Many website designing tools will make your site compatible with mobile devices, but this might not always work, so when designing a dental practice site, you should make sure to see how it looks on your phone too. If it’s physically challenging to scroll through the site, or hard to find specific pages that list important information, it’s more likely that your potential client will leave your site before learning about your practice.
3. Find Effective Keyword Phrases
With the general tips for maximizing your SEO potential out of the way, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of how you find the right SEO keywords for your site. You’ll absolutely want to find phrases and words that are extremely common, and you’ll especially want to look into what types of questions and word combinations your potential clients might use to find your site.
For example, if your dental practice is located in Vancouver, BC, users could potentially search with the phrase “dental office Vancouver” if they’re especially general, or “dental office downtown Vancouver” if they’re looking for specific areas. If your main goal is to attract new clients, using the keywords you expect of your potential clients will guarantee their sighting of your website.
4. Create A Google Site Map
There are many places where your website can be found on the internet, but the vast majority of online searches generally occur on Google. This means you’ll want to primarily cater to this company’s search system, and doing this involves setting up a Google Search Console to ensure you’re able to track how well your site is doing on the platform.
This will give you a great new tool for tracking your information, but it will also help you build a digital marketing plan that gets results. With this, it’s going to be far easier to implement new keywords and see which ones aren’t working, and helps prevent your digital marketing strategies from becoming guesswork.
5. Use Keyword Tools & Work With Digital Marketing Agencies
Finding keywords is something you can get help with through working with digital marketing agencies like Canopy Media, who specialize in finding the best SEO practices and online marketing strategies to help attract the clients you want. Strong SEO is incredibly challenging if you’re new to online marketing, and Canopy Media is able to help make your website easy to find and worth searching for, with especially great experience in online dental patient marketing.
If you want to search for your own keywords, sites like Google Trends and Wordtracker can help you find what successful phrases and related searches you can build your content around. Simply try putting in sample words and Google searches you want to lead to your site, and you should be able to find similar examples and great suggestions on what you can include to improve your SEO.
6. Make Keyword Blog Content
As much as it’s important for your landing and contact pages to have some keywords, there’s definitely not a lot of space to put specific keywords and phrases if you want your site to be brief and readable. This is where blog content can be especially effective, as it can help you attract readers to your site through keywords answering specific questions about dentists and dental health. As a result, you’ll be casting a much wider net and attracting far more viewers.
That said, you’ll want to make sure you include links where readers can contact you for information about your services, as well as links to the rest of your main site. You’re doing a great service by making blog content that helps educate and inform people, but this content should primarily work to lift the rest of your site up, and accomplish the goals of your practice’s marketing further.
7. Include Calls To Action
Even outside of blog content, having easy ways to contact your site is extremely important when attracting viewers through SEO. These are commonly called Calls to Action, as the idea is that you’re including phrases and links that directly encourage viewers to interact with the site, guiding them to the information and resources that encourage them to make an appointment or ask further questions.
This can be as simple as linking to a contact page, usually by suggesting they ask you more about your practice and the services you provide. You can also include links to other areas of your website to help them learn more before contacting you, keeping them in a cycle of browsing your site’s content instead of just clicking away out of disinterest.
8. Spread Out Your Site’s Content
One key factor in using SEO keywords is that they won’t function nearly as well if you keep them bunched together. Search engines will check how often keywords are used and how often they appear throughout the entirety of a site, so you should make sure your important keywords aren’t just in a single area.
This will also help with your site’s readability, especially for mobile viewers. Dividing your content into shorter paragraphs or sections make it easier for readers to sift through your website for the information they’re looking for, meaning they won’t be struggling if they’re looking for something specific and won’t leave your site out of confusion or frustration.
9. Try Paid Search Campaigns
If you don’t want to fill your site with unnecessary content, there are definitely paid ways to lift your site higher on Google searches. This is through paid advertisements, usually through Google Ads and Facebook Ads which simply put your website’s link towards the top of a search if it’s similar enough to a given set of keywords.
This is a great way to get the most out of keywords if you don’t have much regular traffic on your site. Google searches tend to place certain sites higher based on both keywords and average viewership, so if you’re especially low or just starting out, some paid search campaigns will likely get you running much faster than simple SEO improvements.
10. Compare Your Site With Other Dental Practices
Dental practices aren’t necessarily direct competitors, but you still have to make sure you aren’t too wildly different or separate from similar businesses or services. This means you’ll want to check what dentistry keywords are used on other websites, both in your area and even in separate cities, so that you know what other companies have found to be successful.
People looking for a new dental practice or dentist will always have their own personal comparisons, but you want to make sure they can view your site alongside others in your Google searches. If your keywords are too different from other practices, then you won’t show up alongside similar practices, and they may not even know that your practice exists as an alternative option.
11. Track And Measure Your Traffic
Lastly, it’s important to keep close watch over just how successful your site is as you work to improve your SEO. By using external tools like Similarweb or the previously-mentioned Google Search Console to analyze a given website, or through using your website’s management tools, you can identify how many people are visiting your site and how exactly they’re finding it, helping you ensure where your site is getting traffic from, and let you analyze what encouraged it.
Online marketing can be extremely complicated and surprisingly variant, especially if you’re trying to use SEO for dental practices and dental services. It can involve a lot of experimentation and exploration to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords and using them enough throughout your website, so always check regularly just how much traffic is coming to your site, as well as how your viewers and clients tend to find it.
Conclusion
Learning how to accomplish good SEO for dentists and dental practices can be difficult, but it’s hardly impossible if you know what you’re looking for. It just requires a little time and research, and following good SEO practices can easily result in a more readable website that clients will greatly appreciate.
With a site that’s worth looking for, it’s easy to find success regardless of your traffic from search engines, but it’s a great way to get far more eyes on your site. Your website is a bridge for viewers to become clients, and strong SEO will make it easier than ever for them to cross over and contact your practice.
