After the internet, the trend of browsing things has changed. Now, people check on the internet everything, whether it is available online or not. This enormous engagement over the internet encouraged the people to get their business online, causing gigantic competition. There are numerous websites of the same niche, and business owners strive to be most visible and reliable to their customers, and that’s where SEO comes in.
Search engine optimization is the thing that helps businesses to outgrow the competition and earn the most traffic or customers. SEO is an essential component of your online business success.
SEO takes care of everything, from inviting customers to the conversion of them. It covers all your possible prospects and pulls maximum business to you.
Hence, you are a dentist or any other business owner; SEO implies to everyone for getting more customers.
What is SEO for Dentists & Orthodontists?
As said, SEO is necessary for all businesses online or offline, including dentists and orthodontists. You don’t need a website to grab the SEO benefits; if you have a business and want to reach more customers, SEO has your back.
SEO for dentists with a website includes dental SEO audit, website optimization, technical optimization, content marketing, link building, etc., intended to get the top ranking and earn customers. Your Dental SEO will be divided into two parts On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. The on-page SEO improves your website for the best user experience while meeting your business goals.
Furthermore, Off-page SEO works on your authority and brand image to spread awareness and drive customers.
All these techniques obey the search engine guidelines and consider ranking factors to win both search engine rankings. Once you have the rankings, you’ll get the most of your potential customers.
In the other case, if you don’t have any website, you can still get local SEO for dentists. The local SEO for dentists makes you visible online and builds an engrossing image to entice customers to your clinic. The local SEO makes you appear on top positions in SERP and provide contact details and directions to help the customer to get you. Moreover, It encourages reviews and ratings to show your quality services and trust, so that people choose you over others.
Hence, Dental SEO establishes you online and improves your online rankings and reputation to achieve the ultimate goals, i.e., more patients.
Why does SEO for dentists matter? Or Top Reasons Dentists Should Invest in Local SEO
After the boom of the internet and online businesses, SEO becomes a must to get the top rankings in search results to get the most traffic.
SEO for dentists helps you build an enticing online presence to spread brand awareness and earn customers.
As dental services are limited by location, the clinic owners need to focus on the local SEO to get all the nearby customers.
The local SEO includes Google My Business and other prominent listings where most people search for the businesses. A survey says 97% of people search for nearby businesses online. Hence, you can get all potential patients if you have an online presence and ranking in search results.
When one searches for a dental clinic, your listing should be in prominent positions to get the customers, and local SEO can help you do so.
Local search engine optimization includes location-based content optimization, directory submissions so that one can easily find you.
Initially, these citations and location-based content increase your relevancy for dental searches in that area, and search engines show you on the top positions for those searches.
Moreover, the review and ratings on your listings depict firm brand value and increase brand trust and patients consequently.
Hence, the right SEO can boost your rankings and business, but any mistake can cost you a lot, and your online business can get penalized permanently.
Let’s discuss some SEO tips for dentists to get all your patients to your clinic and avoid any optimization mistakes.
Optimize Your Website
Your website is your digital representation; the better and engaging it is, the more it is beneficial. Your dentist website should have an exquisite interface to hold the users. Furthermore, your site should have engaging content that solves your patient’s pain points and encourages them to visit the store.
From the SEO perspective, there are many things that you should implement on your website to be the best and grab all your potential patients.
Let’s know all the SEO improvements for your dental website.
Effective Meta Title and Description
Meta tags are the code snippets that tell essential information about websites to the search engines. The meta title and meta description represent you in the search results.
These meta tags help you get both top ranking and maximum traffic. Consider the below tips to optimize your meta title and description.
Meta Title:
- Create Unique Title for Every Page
- Make it attractive (No clickbait)
- Match Search Intent
- Use Your Prominent Keyword
- Character limit (60-70)
Metal Description:
- Unique for each page
- Describe offering of the page
- Make it inviting
- Consider search intent
- Use target keywords
- Character limit (160)
Follow these standards to get the best results. However, if you don’t know how to do things, then hire a dental SEO service to do things correctly.
Optimize Your URL Structure
On different URLs, users behave differently, and you should use the best practice to get the best results. Firstly, users trust more on the human-readable URLs, instead of that which seems like any code.
You can define the URL structure while uploading the web page. You can also take advantage of it by using the target keyword in the URL. Moreover, try to make it compact and use hyphens to differentiate the words. Lastly, don’t leave any space in the URL because it will add some special characters and numbers in the URL, making it look spammy. Hence, make a short and readable URL to make all users click.
Website should load quickly
Search engines prefer quick loading websites, and if your website is taking longer than the standard time, i.e., 3 sec, then your rankings might degrade in SERP. As Google strives for the best user experience, search engines don’t see slow websites appropriate for users and drop your rankings. Hence, your slow loading website can reduce your traffic, which no one wants.
To optimize your website’s speed, compress your code, clear unnecessary spaces in code, use quality hosting, and employ image optimization. Furthermore, you can also use lazy load on your website, so users don’t go away.
Moreover, you can check your website speed and required improvements through free online tools like Pagespeed Insights and Pingdom.
Make Hierarchy
Headings and subheadings are a great way to divide your page content and make it easy to grasp. The heading tags (H1-H6) are used in the code to define the heading and subheadings. This content formatting helps the web spiders better understand the page content, and users also find it easy to read. Furthermore, you can use your business intent keywords in the heading tags, which can help you in rankings, and your page content could appear as featured snippets.
Hence, optimize your page appropriately and use the heading tags to make a hierarchy.
Employ Schema Markup
Schema markups allow crawlers to understand the content better. These markups are used to define the context of the content. You can use schema markup for Businesses, Events, People, Products, Recipes, Reviews, and Videos. Schema markups define the context of the content, and that content appears in the search results. You might have seen that when you search for any blog, it appears with the author’s name or any product with ratings.
This additional information impacts the user and encourages the clicks, which increases your CTR and rankings consequently. You can use Structured Data Markup Helper, a Google free tool to insert the markups in your website content.
Do Interlinking
Inter Linking is used to connect different pages of the website. Every page of the website should be connected with any page. As web crawlers travel from link to link to read and index the web and any un-linked page can remain un-indexed. Furthermore, interlinking reduces the bounce rate because users browse further through links, and you can also guide the user persona for conversion.
Hence, do interlink your dental website pages for a better user experience and easy crawlability.
Submit Sitemap
Your website isn’t visible to users till crawlers read your website and index it. So, the faster you’ll get indexed, the sooner you’ll be available to users.
Generally, crawlers naturally crawl the sites quickly, but you can catalyze the process with a sitemap. Sitemap holds the links of all your website pages, and you can submit that file to the Google Search Console for inviting the crawlers.
So, you can make your website crawl ASAP to reach all your potential audience. You can also update and submit the sitemap frequently to invite the crawlers to read your new pages. Furthermore, you can also add some crawler directives (Robots) to exclude some pages from crawling like your T&C, Transactional Pages, User Credentials, etc. There are some plugins available for CMS to generate the sitemap automatically. So, submit your sitemap and kick start your dental SEO quest.
That’s it. You should use all these dental website optimization tips to earn rankings and traffic.
Proper Keyword Research
The terms or phrases which users use while searching are keywords. Searchers use different keywords and variations to browse the data, and you can use these keywords in your content to show your relevancy to that query. Search engines measure your relevance and other rankings signals to decide your rank in search results. The better you optimize the keywords in title, description, URL, and site content, the better will be your relevancy.
You can use various keyword research tools to explore the best business keywords for you. Moreover, you can use Google for keyword research; just search your dentist’s services related terms and check the related search results at last. These are the keywords people also use to browse dental services. You can also filter the results by setting a location in the setting, which will give you the keywords for that particular area. So, research your industry and competitor and collect the best keywords for your business.
Additionally, During keyword optimization, you should make a balance of short and long-tail keywords to get substantial traffic and conversions. High search volume keywords are hard to rank but have massive traffic, where long-tail keywords have low search volume but have a high conversion rate. So, make an effective balance of your dental services keywords and mustn’t use keywords stuffing for better rankings.
Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique in which webmasters insert many keywords deliberately for ranking, and that content doesn’t pass any value to users.
Search engines have generated a better understanding of content and detect all the nefarious activities. So, stay legit and create keyword rich quality content for driving significant rankings and traffic consequently.
Hence for effective dental website SEO and tons of patients, you should do proper keyword research.
Local Business Directory Submission
People use directories to find businesses in a particular city. As dental clinics are local businesses and serve a specific area, directory submission can help you get more online exposure and drive customers to you.
Furthermore, search engines also read the web, and your consistent business details from various web directories improve your authority and rankings as well. Moreover, when users also see you on multiple platforms, it boosts the user’s trust and emphasizes the conversion actions.
The local SEO services for dentists list you on various reputed directories that users believe blindly and help you gain more patients. The directory submissions provide your contact details, working hours, map directions, and user reviews to invite nearby patients to you.
Here are some prominent directories for your dental business.
- Local.com
- Bing Places
- Chamberofcommerce.com
- Yelp
- Apple Maps
- Yellowpages.com
- Spoke.com
- Foursquare
Google My Business Listing
Google is the search engine with most of the active user base. Google doesn’t want its users to roam around for anything and allow businesses to list themselves on “Google My Business.” People these days use Google to search for a nearby business or in a particular city.
It’s evident that many businesses are getting substantial physical visits after listing on Google my business.
The GMB listing offers excellent value and customers to businesses, but for top rankings, you should list your business properly.
You should choose the right category and provide correct details with rich business keywords to rank in your area.
Once you are ranking in the top positions in search results, then be ready to host many patients.
Google My Business listing asks for reviews from users once they visit your clinic. So, provide the best service to get the best reviews & ratings and entice other patients.
Hence, make an impressive listing or get local SEO services for dentists to invite all potential patients to your clinic.
Encourage Reviews
Before choosing any service or product, people used to research these days. Your business listings help users know about you, but there are many other listings the same as you so, why users choose you to be your dentist.
All the business directories allow user reviews and ratings, which show the quality of your services. So, when someone searches for local business, he looks for the reviews and decides which one to choose.
Hence, positive and happy patient reviews can make all the patients come to you who are seeing your listing.
Now, for earning online reviews, give the best quality service and ask your patients to rate you online. Sometimes, Google automatically asks for reviews when one visits your business, so if your patients are happy, they will give the best ratings and reviews.
Hence, encourage your customers for reviews to influence the buyer persona and increase your patients.
As positive reviews are beneficial, negative reviews can devastate your business and online profile. If you find any negative review, then reply to it calmly and offer something like a free consultation to optimize that negative review. This way, you can deter your patients’ negative impact due to negative ratings and show your amazing customer service.
You should check your reviews and update your listing constantly for the best business outcomes. You can take the help of dental SEO services to do these things for you because it’s hard for a business owner to handle business and SEO at the same time.
Content Creation
Content is a powerful strategy for your dental SEO, and for all your business goals, the best content is a must. Content hosts your patients on your online platform; it invites, engages, and converts them. It’s your content that talks to your visitors and encourage them to choose you for upkeeping their dental health.
Along with pampering the visitors, content shows your relevance and authority to search engines and help you rank in the top prominent positions.
Hence, content benefits you in both ways, users, and rankings, but your content should be the best and must follow all the content guidelines.
There are various types of content for a website, and you should take care of each because every piece of content guides users towards conversion and clinic visits.
Firstly, your meta title and description should be good enough to rank and invite online users to your website. We’ve discussed the legit practices, follow them, and make all customers click and visit your website.
Furthermore, when users are on your website, your web pages content comes into the picture and interacts with visitors. Now, it depends on the content that visitors will stay or leave. Compelling website content makes users spend more time on the website and influences the buyer persona for conversion. The more users spend time on your website, the more you look trustable to the search engines and put you on higher rankings. So, your quality, rich content drives your patients and gives you top rankings, which is a total win-win situation.
You can make a specific page for each of your services and insert keyword-rich content to get the ranks and help your customers.
You should research the user persona so that you can understand the user’s problems. Once you know the user’s pain points, you can offer the solution in the content with the help of your services. As you are solving their problems, they’ll choose your services.
Moreover, web page content is for hosting your users looking for dental services. However, it’s not necessary your website visitors choose you; you must’ve to show your authority and expertise in the domain to enhance conversion chances.
Initially, you can show your certifications or awards for your significant expertise in the field. Further moving, you can make an ample impact on your potential visitors with some articles, infographics, and blogs.
You can take the common or sophisticated dental problem for your content and mention the probable solutions. As people are not experts, and first, they search about their situation with symptoms or non-technical terms. You can tackle these users by defining their problems and providing some cure. Moreover, you can also suggest some home remedies for instant relief and describe the situation when they should visit the doctor. As you are helping users instead of just promoting yourself, you are making bonds with the patients, and they’ll definitely choose your dental services.
You can also create some blogs and tips for common dental problems and health tips.
People these days prefer visuals, and you must support your blogs with some infographics and videos to engage your visitors.
All your industry content makes your robust profile in the industry, which will assure your quality and expertise to the users, and they should visit your clinic.
As quality content needs expertise and our top-notch dental SEO and content services can give you the required quality. We’ve industry-specific content writers that can forge high-quality content for your dental services. We can guarantee you the best quality content and the related result, i.e., more patients.
Answer Quora Questions
Quora is the platform where anyone can ask and answer anything. Now, many people put their queries there, and you can answer them. This way, you can show your knowledge and expertise. Moreover, you can mention some of your service or treatment for the cure. As search engines see you on quora through your website link, It will skyrocket your authority and boost your rankings.
And Higher rankings mean more patients.
You can also mention your blogs and infographics on your quora profile and the quora answers if they make any sense in the answer.
Hence, quora can boost your authority and encourage nearby people to visit you if they need an orthodontist.
Be Mobile Friendly
In 2019, there were 3986 million unique mobile internet users, which is quite huge. As all know, mobile phones are handy, and anyone can access the internet anywhere, making mobiles the most used device for browsing the internet. Almost everyone is on mobile, and you shouldn’t ignore this mobile audience.
As the mobile audience is vast, Google launched a Mobile-first indexing algorithm that prioritizes the mobile-compatible websites for indexing. Hence, you not just lose the plethora of customers but lose visibility in the search engine results pages.
Your website should have a responsive web design for being mobile-compatible. The responsive designs reorganize your website components on all the screens and ensure all look and work properly.
Along with the responsive-design, the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is also recommended for better performance on smartphones.
Mobile SEO for dentists can help you to do all these mobile things. So, take care of your mobile audience and be ready for their visit.
Consider Link Building
Links from other websites are Inbound Links or Backlinks. Backlinks are one ranking factor of search engines. Google considers these links as endorsements or votes to your quality and expertise. Hence, backlinks increase your authority and boost your rankings and traffic.
Now, sometimes webmasters naturally connect to you, which search engines prefer mostly. However, you can also use some link building techniques to earn links and elevate your ranks.
Before learning link building techniques, you should know some vital terminology of link building.
DA (Domain Authority): It shows your relevance for a specific industry. The domain authority increases with the backlinks. The backlinks from high DA websites give a significant hike to your DA, where links from low DA websites make negligible or no impact on your website DA. The more your website, the better you rank in SERP.
Link Equity: Backlinks pass some value to your domain authority, which is known as Link Equity.
Now, let’s dive into the link building techniques.
Guest Post Outreach
Many websites of your niche or blog websites cover your domain and allow guest posting. You can post your content on these websites and earn backlinks & several readers. You should initially filter some authoritative (High DA) websites for outreach and then know their guest posting guidelines. After learning the guidelines, research for relevant content topics for websites.
Now, create a formal guest post email template and outreach your content ideas. If someone shows interest, then create high-quality content with your link and submit.
Once the webmaster approves your content, he’ll publish your guest post, and you’ll get a backlink. Your guest blog also earns that website’s audience, and your backlink drives them to your website. So, you’ll get both links and traffic.
Here are some search operators for finding guest post websites for your dental website.
- inurl:guest-post “Health”
- inurl:write-for “health”)” submit guest post” + “health”
- “submit guest post” + “health”
- health blogs write for us
- health + “write for us”
- “submit guest post” + “fitness”
Resource Page Link Building
Resource page link building targets the websites, which have resource pages for helping their audience with some useful resources. These resource pages list the external website links, and you can earn backlinks from these pages.
For resource link building, find some industry websites which could list websites like yours in the resource pages. You should contact the website owner through the contact form or over email and tell him how you are useful to their audience, and he should list you.
You can also request service or content to be listed if it is relevant and make sense to the target website. Look for the relevancy and request the webmaster to put you on the resource page.
Here are some search commands for searching websites for resource page link building.
- Keyword inurl:resources
- Keyword “best resources”
- Keyword” useful resources”
- Keyword intitle:links
- Keyword “helpful links”
Use different variations of the keywords in the “Keywords” section of the command to find more websites.
Broken Link Building
Broken links are the links whose target or landing page is moved or deleted, and a 404 page is appearing. These 404 pages pass no value to the users and crawlers as well. Although 404 pages negatively impact rankings because these pages show you are ignoring the website maintenance.
So, what you have to do is find some websites which have broken links in the content. Now, research the content and create better content for the same page with your link and approach the webmaster. You can tell him that there are some broken links on your specific page, and you can cure it with my link.
You just need to offer what that link was serving and even better than that.
It’s an easy way to get a link because all webmasters have to do is replace the link with yours to eliminate the 404. So, consider the broken link building and improve your dental website SEO.
Link Reclamation
Sometimes, you earned some links, but later on, you changed some pages, and backlinks of those pages become broken and are showing 404. Now, reclaiming those links with your new page’s links is link reclamation.
You should monitor your backlinks, and if you find you’ve lost some links and are going to 404, then contact the particular webmaster and request him to replace the link. Moreover, you can also redirect the old page to the new page. However, you should know that too many redirects dilute the SEO, and you shouldn’t use too many redirects.
There is one more case where you need to claim your link or credit. Sometimes webmasters mention you on their website but don’t link to that, which pass no value to you. Hence, to claim your unlinked mentions, you need to find the mentions first. You can use tools like screaming frog and Ahrefs to find all unlinked mentions, and then you can contact the webmaster to link your mention with an appropriate link.
Don’t let go of your earned links and unlinked mentions, approach the webmasters, and claim your valuable backlinks.
These are some crucial link building techniques for dental SEO. If you don’t have time for all these, then our best dental SEO services can help you build a strong backlink profile.
Consider Social Channels
These days, people are spending substantial time on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc. People are most active on these mediums, and that’s why top brands these days are considering social media marketing for boosting business growth. Along with the innumerable customers, search engines also monitor your social profiles, and popular social business profiles get benefit from it.
Hence, you can escalate your authority through social media and drive all the social media audience to you. You can promote your dental services or any special events to your social profiles, and you’ll get a response, which isn’t possible without social media.
Furthermore, you can also promote your content over social media channels, getting impressive traffic to your content.
Social media platforms like Facebook also offer advertising services to approach your potential audience through social media. You can filter your audience through various demographics and approach them with relevant ads to convert them.
Social media ads have great ROI, and you can get significant returns on your ads. Hence, make your social media profiles of your dental services and stay active to become popular and reach more patients.
Role of Good Website Structure
Users won’t stay on your website if they face problems accessing your website. You should have easy website navigation so that users can check the intended pages effortlessly. The better your website structure, the better you perform in search rankings. Yes! In search ranking, because the lousy structure not just troubles the users, but crawlers also face issues to read the website, and your website might not get indexed entirely. The un-indexed pages don’t appear in search results, and you are out of the competition without even competing.
Hence, consider the best user website experience while deciding the website structure.
You should follow the latest trends for website development to create a website structure that is user and crawler friendly. You can make parent pages for main categories and then link other subpages to the parent pages. Make sure there are no unlinked pages because no one can access that and make it worthless.
Your website quality represents your quality, so make the best website for your dental services and impress your website visitors.
Monitor Your Competitors
Competitor analysis is a great way to learn where you are lacking and the area of improvement. There are various online tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, SpyFu, etc.
You can examine the competitor’s performance in rankings, keywords, paid ads, etc., so that you can improve yourself and beat the competition.
Furthermore, you can check your competitor’s backlink profile and the websites they are getting links from. You can also approach the same websites for link building. However, our goal is to beat the competition, and for that, only matching them is not sufficient. You have to plan some advanced SEO strategies to beat your competitors and become the market leader.
So, research your competitors, find the improvements required, add some of your insights, and outgrow your competition. Competitor analysis is an integral part of your dental website SEO, and you must consider it for getting more patients than competitors.
Approach Your Prospects (PPC For Dentists)
Waiting for the customers to search and find you is not the only way to get the patients; you also have to approach your customers to let them know about you and your services.
SEO is not the only way to appear on the top rankings, and you can use search engine marketing (Paid Ads) for showing your ads in search engines.
You might have noticed some results which are marked as “ad,” and the rest are not. The ad marked results are non-organic paid results, and non-ad marked results are organic results and free.
The paid ads come under performance marketing. Performance marketing gives complete control to the advertiser and gives you the most efficient marketing method. You only have to pay when the user completes your desired action on the ad.
Performance marketing offers better tracking, reduces campaign failure probability, and all your paid campaigns are ROI-focused. Hence, you can do your dental website marketing most efficiently.
There are many types of paid ads like search ads, display ads, video ads, shopping ads, etc. You use these ads according to your business objective.
You can choose the location, audience, and device to show your ad. Moreover, you’ve control over budget, and you set the limit for your ad. This much granular control, refined targeting, and budget control is only possible with search engine marketing. You can spread brand awareness, get traffic, and earn conversion with your dental SEO marketing.
The Google ads aim for serving the right thing to the right customer at the right time so that you can get the highest ROI on your ad spend.
However, your competitors are also considering the paid ads, and only the best ads would appear on the top of the search results. There are some standards on which search engines measure the ad quality, and the best ads appear on the top.
According to these standards, you should know the ad creation to get the best ranks and business outcomes. We can help you with your search engine marketing for your dentist’s website. Our digital marketing for dentists includes PPC (Pay Per Click) Services to make you win in the non-organic results.
Conclusion
These are some SEO tips for getting more patients to your dental clinic. You must follow these tips to grab all the benefits of digital marketing and SEO. If you want to learn more about your SEO, then talk to us. You can also take the help of our result-centric dental SEO services to get all your online patients. We know you must be busy with your business things. Don’t worry! We can handle SEO and marketing stuff.
Genuinely Digital is a reputed digital marketing agency for dentists. We have experienced professionals to design your SEO strategies for the best outcomes in a reasonable time. Call us to know about affordable dental SEO plans and custom SEO plans for your dental business.
So, focus on your business and hire us to send more patients to you.