To expand your dental practice in 2024 and beyond, ensure that patients are able to locate you online. But, with so many dentists fighting for people' attention, how do you ensure that your website is discovered?
The answer is dental SEO, or search engine optimization.
While an omnichannel advertising approach can help you dominate your market, a good SEO strategy will ensure that potential patients find you naturally when looking for solutions to their problems.
However, the world of SEO continues to change, so in order to rank your practice at the top of Google, you must stay up to date on the latest dental SEO trends.
We have you covered! This definitive step-by-step guide will teach you all you need to know about optimizing your dentistry website and increasing traffic to your office in 2024 and beyond.
Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the practice of increasing your website's ranking on search engines such as Google.
SEO is about getting your website at the top of the search engine results page, or SERP, when people search for keywords related to your dental practice.
When your website ranks higher in the SERPs, it becomes more visible to potential patients, resulting in more website visits and, eventually, more patients for your dental business.
PRO TIP: Google owns more than 86% of the search market in the US. So, while other search engines exist, such as Bing and Yahoo, you must optimize your site for Google to grab the majority of dental search engine traffic.
Dental SEO is important for a variety of reasons. According to one survey, 90% of people look for a dentist online to find a new one or to validate a recommendation from relatives, close friends, or the community.
So, if your practice is not clearly visible, you are losing out on potential patients.
While sponsored ads can help you increase your visibility, this analysis found that organic search listings got over 95% of all clicks in 2022, rather than paid ads.
So, if you're not ranking in the SERPs, you're not actively competing for new patients.
Finally, higher rankings in search results might increase your dental practice's credibility in the eyes of potential clients.
To optimize your dentistry website for SEO, you should focus on three key areas:
Researching and identifying the keywords that dental patients use in their search engines is essential for optimizing your dental website for SEO.
This might mean anything from "dentist" to "teeth whitening" to "pediatric dentist downtown Atlanta."
If you hire an advertising agency, they will do dental SEO keyword analysis for you. However, if you're doing it on your own, you should use a keyword research tool.
There are numerous free and paid resources available to assist you in identifying the most popular dentistry-related keywords.
Google's Keyword Planner is meant to assist you identify the most effective keywords for paid advertising campaigns.
However, because this free tool displays search volumes for keywords and suggests similar keywords and phrases, you can also use it to find high-volume or highly targeted dental keywords to add into your SEO approach.
Another alternative is to use a paid competitive analysis service, such as SEMrush or Ahrefs, to determine the keywords and themes that your competitors are targeting.
Such tools typically provide a free or low-cost trial period, which may be enough for you to identify the SEO keywords with the most potential for success.
By researching your target audience and keywords, you can ensure that your content is optimized for search engine rankings and captures the attention of your target audience—great SEO keyword research leads to greater traffic to your website and money for your dental practice.
PRO TIP: The secret to succeeding at SEO in the short term is to identify possibilities to rank for SEO phrases or keywords with high volume but low competition.
Of course, you'll want to rank for high-volume, competitive keywords, but it may take some time.
Whenever it comes to improving your web pages, there are some things that you must do to ensure that your sites rank for the keywords you wish to be ranked for:
The title tag acts as the page title for SEO purposes. It informs search engines what the website is about.
When you show in a search, your title tag is frequently displayed in the search results, as well as in the "tab" at the top of your browser:
Your title tag tells Google's algorithm how your website does and who it is for. As a result, you must put your most crucial keywords for the page in the title tag.
Because the title tag appears in many search results, an optimized title tag will help your site receive more clicks when it appears in SERPs by making it clear to visitors how you can assist them.
A brief overview of your page that is essential for Google's search algorithm is called the meta description. It provides additional information regarding the contents of your page by expanding on the title tag.
It frequently appears in search results under the title tag as a "preview" of your website:
The focus keyword or phrase for the specific page should always be included in the meta description.
Furthermore, in order to increase the number of impacts on your website, it should be written so that users can easily understand what's on the page.
Technical SEO includes factors such as website speed, mobile usability, and website structure. All of these factors affect both the user experience and SEO rankings.
Google crawls your website on a regular basis to see how quickly your server operates data so that all of the words and images are displayed appropriately.
If your website is too slow, you will be penalized and never make it to the top of the search results.
Here are a few actions you can do to ensure that page speed does not harm your rankings:
While many of these recommendations are something you can teach yourself if you truly want to, there is one that should be handled to the professionals.
Schema markup (schema.org) is an organized data vocabulary that allows search engines to understand your website's content and provide rich results.
For example, Schema, can be used to display pictures, tables, quotations, and lists in a style that web spiders can easily detect.
Using proper markup will make it simple for Google to locate your:
Schema.org provides a set of standard markups. In addition, there are online tools that can assess your website and offer methods to integrate structured data, such as WordPress' Yoast plugin.
For SEO factors, consider the internet as a connected system of websites. Links are what connects all of these websites. So, the more links your website has, the better connected it is to the remaining parts of the internet.
Google analyzes your website's authority and trustworthiness based on the number and quality of links it has.
As a result, one of the things that you can do for dentistry SEO is create high-quality backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites that direct visitors to your site.
The more high-quality links you have connecting back to your website, the more trustworthy it seems to search engines, resulting in higher SERP ranks.
To build high-quality backlinks, contact other websites in your field and ask them to link back to yours. You can also generate excellent content that others would naturally connect to, such as blog posts, e-books, and videos.
So, these are just few tips you can use to improve your dentistry website ranking on Search engines. So, you now have all the information you need to use Search Engine Optimization to attract more new patients to your dental business.
The journey to the top of Google's search results starts now, so go out there and overcome local SEO in your market. And get the long-term benefits of increasing visibility and influence online!
