Internet usage is increasing daily, and most people turn to search engines like Google and Bing to search for information they need to know. This is even when they want to search for dentists in their location.
Instead of referring to other people, patients use Internet to search using terms like “dentists near me” and get the list of all dentists they can find near their location. In such a situation, it is important for dentists to set up a website and rank in the search results to appear in front of the people who search for their services.
This is where you can use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make relevant changes to your website. This can make your website rank higher and make you more visible to your patients who need your services.
What is Dental SEO?
Dental SEO is the process of improving a website’s ranking and performance in search engines to increase the visibility of a dentist’s practice and bring relevant patients to their clinics.
It is a cost-effective method of bringing new patients to your doorstep. You don’t need to spend much on advertisements if you have already optimized your websites and appear in the search results when your patients search for you.
For example, when a patient who needs dental treatment is searching for a dentist on search engines like Google or Bing, they often use terms like “dentist near me,” “dental clinic near me,” etc. Implementing SEO strategies and optimizing your website to rank for them can get you organic traffic and quality leads for your services.
How Does SEO Work for Dentists?
Every time a user searches for something on Google, it goes through all the web pages related to the keyword and ranks those most relevant to the search query. SEO can help your websites rank for those queries and increase visibility and brand awareness for your services.
Most dentists have an online presence and are targeting people searching for their services online. SEO lets you rank for keywords that are relevant to your services and attract more patients than your competitors.
Most patients don’t look past the first page of the search results when looking for dentists. So, if you wish to use search engines to get more patients, you need to start implementing SEO strategies and rank on the first page to get more clicks and engagement.
Why Do Dentists Need SEO Services?
The most important reason dentists need to implement SEO strategies on their websites is to bring more patients for their clinics. But there are also other benefits they can get by using SEO.
Each day, the number of people who use Internet to search for something only increases. Be it a product, a service, or an answer they need for any questions, they use Internet to search for them. This is also the same for dental services.
As such, it is important for dentists to create a website and establish themselves in the online platform to reach the users who search for them online. Below are some benefits dentists can get from SEO services for their websites.
Improves organic traffic for websites
Instead of spending loads of money on advertising to get traffic, dentists can implement SEO strategies and optimize their websites to get more qualified organic traffic.
Unlike other marketing strategies that appear in front of customers whether they need the services or not, SEO ensures that websites appear in front of their target audience when they are looking for them. This increases organic traffic for websites and may also lead to conversions.
Stay ahead of your competition
Online marketing is growing day by day, and many businesses are starting to use the online platform to attract and retain customers. This is the same for dentists.
The Internet is a common ground for all practitioners, and the competition is very fierce. Implementing SEO strategies and making the necessary changes to the website can improve its performance and get more traffic than competitors and also competitors’ existing traffic.
Increase monthly leads and patient appointments
People who search for dentists are often those who require dental treatment for themselves or others. So, the chances of them visiting the dentist increase if they visit the website.
Through SEO, dentists can get more organic traffic for their websites and get more dental appointments.
Builds credibility and authority for the websites and services
In most cases, people believe that the websites that appear on the top 10 positions, that is, the first page of the search results, are most credible and trustworthy than those that appear on the second and third pages.
This is because search engines rank websites based on how relevant and helpful they are to the user’s search intent. So, when a dentist’s website ranks higher on the search results, the patients automatically believe that they provide the best services and are experts in their field.
What Are the SEO Strategies for Website Optimization for Dentists?
SEO is an elaborate process, and it takes time to show results. It aims to provide long-term results for the websites and gives the websites what it needs to rank higher in the search results.
Here are the steps to be followed when crafting an SEO strategy for a dentist’s website.
1. Understand the treatments provided by the dentist
Like any other medical practice, dentists also provide different services for their patients. Before creating an SEO strategy, it is important to analyze and sort out the number of services the dentist provides in their clinic.
Having an idea about the treatments provided by the dentist can help figure out the keywords that need to be targeted to attract the relevant audience. It also helps when creating content for the web pages.
Understanding the number of treatments provided by the dentist can also help determine the number of web pages they might need for their websites.
2. Create a website with a separate web page for each treatment
Once the treatments provided are sorted out, the next step is to create a website for the dentist. A website is important for any business trying to establish themselves online, because it is where the customers learn about them and the services they provide.
Creating a separate web page for each treatment can allow dentists to provide all the necessary information regarding each treatment. Users can learn about each treatment and decide whether the clinic provides treatment for their problems.
3. Set up a Google Business Profile
No matter what kind of business, they need a Google Business Profile to take their brand to their customers. Google Business Profile (GBP) is the updated version of Google My Business (GMB), through which dentists can let their audience know more about their clinic and the services they provide.
Getting listed on GBP allows dentists to increase their visibility and appear in front of their audience when they search for them on Google, Google Maps, and other services provided by Google.
Dentists should keep their GBP updated and provide all the necessary information about their services, including their clinic’s working hours, location, treatments provided, contact details, images, videos, patient reviews, and other details.
All these information are provided to make it easier for patients to learn about them and visit them for treatments.
4. Conduct an SEO Audit
SEO audits are an important part of optimizing your websites for great user experience. They are performed to help identify web pages that are performing well and those that need improvements.
SEO audits analyze various aspects of the web pages and identify areas that are lacking and need improvements to get them ranked in the search results.
Some aspects of the web page that undergo SEO audit are
- site speed,
- page loading speed,
- web page indexing,
- mobile friendliness,
- hosting features,
- responsiveness, etc.
SEO audits can be conducted using SEO tools like SEMrush, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, etc.
5. Do a holistic competitor analysis
Be it any kind of business, competition is inevitable. Dentists, too, have competitors who fight for patients around them. When it comes to the online platform, competitors are those who rank in the top 10 positions for keywords that your dentists are focusing on.
For example, if dentists are focusing on ranking for the keyword “dentists near me,” the top 10 websites that appear on the first page of the search results for this search are their competitors.
Conducting a competitor analysis can help dentists identify who their main competitors are and what strategies they follow to rank in the search results.
Conducting a holistic competitor analysis on competitors can help
- identify new opportunities for improvements in the website,
- understand the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses,
- understand the winning strategies they use to reach potential patients, and
- implement their method and create new strategies based on them.
6. Keyword research
Dentists should understand and identify the keywords they want to rank for before starting to create content for their website. Keywords are the search terms that users use to search for something on the Internet.
Google is designed in a way to provide the most relevant and helpful content for its users. To get ranked for a keyword, dentists need to make Google understand that their website is relevant to what the users are searching for.
Keyword research is an important step to undergo before starting to create content for websites. Dentists can use keyword research tools, like SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, etc., to get keywords that are most relevant to their practice.
Dentists can use these keywords in their content and other areas of the website to rank in the search results and reach their prospective patients who are looking for dental treatments.
7. Develop content structure
After conducting competitor analysis and analyzing relevant keywords, the next step would be to develop a content structure for the web pages. Structuring the content on each page can make things far easier for both the search engines and the users to understand and interpret the content.
This allows Google to crawl the pages easily and rank them higher than competitors. As the content structure gets better and better, the content’s rank and readability also improve.
8. Create helpful content that meets users’ needs
Google only ranks web pages that provide relevant and meaningful content to the readers. To rank higher in Google, dentists should create content that satisfies their reader’s needs and gives them answers to what they are searching for.
Many people assume content marketing is all about writing blogs for their websites. While blogs play an essential role in content marketing, they are not the only type of content that dentists can use on their websites.
Dentists can also create medical content related to their field in other formats like
- case studies,
- video content,
- surveys,
- FAQs,
- resources,
- webinars,
- medical updates, etc.
Building authority in a niche is very important for a website in any industry. Dentists should aim to create as much content as possible on topics relevant to dentistry and build authority for their websites.
9. On-page components
On-page SEO is what brings countless new visitors to your website. After all the website optimization, get on with all the on-page components that you can optimize for maximum results.
On-page optimization is important for a dentist’s website because it adds value to their potential patients and allows Google to understand what the website is all about. They optimize the website for both search engine bots and the audience.
Here are some on-page components that dentists can focus on while optimizing their web pages for higher ranking.
HTML Meta Tags
- Title
- Meta description
- Headers (H1)
- Subheaders (H2, H3, etc.)
- Canonical URL
- Robots Tag
Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
The URL is the address of any website that can help search engines identify and understand the relevancy of a web page. The keywords that are placed in the URLs are one of the Google’s ranking factors.
Image optimization
- The images should be less than 100kb.
- Use Alt Text for images and place relevant keywords in them.
- The images should be in WebP or AVIF formats.
Links
Keep internal links (links to other pages of your website) and external links (links from other websites that are relevant to your niche) to share the authority of your website.
10. Link-building strategy
Backlinks help build authority for a website and is one of the Google’s ranking factors. A higher authority in a niche (in this case “dentists”) means that you can rank higher on search engines. This can get you more organic traffic and increase the conversion rates for your services.
Below are some ways to build links for a website.
- Guest posts
- Directories
- Working on a listicle
- Press Release (PR)
- Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
There are some criteria you need to follow before choosing a backlink. You cannot choose any website to get backlinks from. Below are Google webmaster guidelines for choosing a backlink for your website.
- Choose a website relevant to your niche.
- The website’s organic traffic should be higher than 1000 per month.
- It should have organic traffic for relevant keywords of your industry.
- Its relevant domains should be higher than outbound domains.
- It should not participate in any link scheme.
- Its organic traffic and referring domains should fall at the same time.
11. Ensure the web page gets indexed
The next step you should do after optimizing your website would be to make sure that all its web pages get indexed by Google. Only when Google indexes a web page, it can be ranked and appear before by the users.
Here’s the process of how Google indexes a web page.
- Crawling: Google bots crawl and scan the web pages to identify the relevancy of the content.
- Indexing: Google analyzes and stores the web pages in the database.
- Ranking: Google algorithm searches for and picks the web pages that are most relevant to the user’s search intent from the database.
12. Work on fixing Core Web Vitals
One of the most important aspects of SEO optimization is your user’s page experience. Core Web Vitals are a metric that is used to measure the page experience of a web page on both mobile and desktop devices.
There are three attributes that are used to measure the Core Web Vitals of a web page.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures the loading speed of a web page
- First Input Delay (FID), which measures the user’s interaction with the web page
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures the visual stability of the page
These three metrics are very essential for Google Page Experience. So, ensure you optimize these three factors to get ranked in search results and give your users the best page experience.
13. Analyze the website’s performance
SEO is not done until you analyze and make improvements in your website’s performance. Now that every step regarding SEO is completed, the next step would be to analyze and measure your website’s performance.
There are several metrics that you can use to measure your website’s performance. Google algorithm has over 200 ranking factors to rank a website on the first page.
Some of the aspects that you need to analyze in regard to the performance of a website are
- organic traffic,
- keyword ranking,
- SERP visibility,
- Click-Through Rate (CTR),
- bounce rate,
- website authority over time,
- backlinks,
- page speed,
- time spent on a page, and
- conversion rate.
SEO is a never-ending process; you need to optimize them regularly to get the best results. You need to improve your website repeatedly until it appears in the featured snippets.
Conclusion
Completing SEO and getting ranked on the search results may not occur overnight, but it will definitely give the desired results if you put in consistent efforts.
The above steps will help you optimize your website for the search engines and help them rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Suppose you don’t have the time and experience to optimize your websites yourself, you can always seek the help of marketing agencies that can offer you expert SEO services to make your websites user-friendly and rank them higher on the search results.
FAQs
Most people who search for something on the Internet only look at the results that appear on the first page of the search results. This is the same even for dental websites.
Dentists need to focus on getting their websites to rank on the first page, most preferably on the featured snippets, to attract the maximum number of prospective patients for their clinic.
Most dentists nowadays started having an online presence and are targeting people who search for their services online. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lets you rank for keywords that are relevant to your services and attract more patients than your competitors.
Dental SEO is the process of improving a website’s ranking and performance in search engines to increase the visibility of a dentist’s practice and bring relevant patients to their clinics.
It is a cost-effective method of bringing new patients to your doorstep. You don’t need to spend much on advertisements if you have already optimized your websites and appear in the search results when your patients search for you.
