For the longest time, dental practices had to rely on traditional means like TV ads, radio spots, and billboards to market their business.
While traditional dental marketing platforms are still in use and delivering results, more dental professionals are turning to digital marketing techniques to promote their dental practices.
Most dental practices these days are putting up websites indicating that they’re aware of the importance of implementing custom online marketing strategies.
However, it’s not enough for a dental practice to have a website. Before it can attract patients, a website must be visible to as many people as possible and rank high in search results.
If you’re a dental professional with a website, you can increase its visibility and rankings by incorporating search engine optimization or SEO strategies into your digital dental marketing efforts.
Dental SEO represents a cost-effective and long-term method of drawing new patients to your dental practice. By implementing the best SEO practices, you can show up in various searches and local listings, among other things. That should make it easier for people needing dental services to find you on the web.
Here are five SEO practices that will give your dental marketing a boost.
1. Local SEO Is Your Best Bet
The point of marketing your dental practice is to attract more patients, and your best bet of doing that is putting a little more effort into your local SEO.
Ranking high in local searches improves your chances of getting found by people searching for dental services near them.
One of the more effective ways of ranking well on local search is creating online listings. Google My Business is a great platform to list your dental practice, and so are Yahoo Local, Foursquare, and Yelp.
When you create your listing, provide your location, office hours, and other pertinent detail about your dental practice. Make sure all the information you provide is accurate and up-to-date.
Create as many of these listings as you want to boost the location signals of your website.
2. Acquire Positive Reviews
Google pays attention to the reviews that you get on your business listings.
So, if you want Google to notice your dental practice, always remind your patients to leave reviews. Of course, you would want positive ones, as they can also help build your practice’s reputation in the eyes of potential patients in your community.
If you can reply to reviews, then that would be great, as it shows that your dental practice actually values customer feedback, which will, in turn, help develop customer trust.
3. Keyword Research
No dental SEO strategy—or any SEO strategy, for that matter—will ever succeed without keyword research. It’s the one task that will help you find unique, hyper-targeted keywords that contain what type of service a user is searching for and the location.
With hyper-targeted and buyer-oriented keywords, your chances of attracting traffic to your website and getting more patients are better.
4. Publish High-Quality Content
There is no question about how important quality content is for your website.
When your pages carry quality content, people will stay longer on your page because they’re getting information that they deem relevant and valuable. Considering that Google takes your visitors’ “time on page” into account when ranking pages, quality content definitely plays a key role in getting higher rankings for your pages.
As for the content to provide, you can always go for articles that focus on proper oral care and hygiene.
Since many potential patients are curious about specific dental procedures that they might need, a video explaining what they entail would also get their attention.
If your website has a blog (and it should have one), then you can share, among other things, dental care tips and, in the process, engage with your readers in the comments section. You can also use the blog to share the latest news and developments in the dental industry. You can even post information about contests and special offers on your dental practice blog.
5. Put A Premium On User Experience
Quality content may keep visitors around longer, but a generally bad user experience—which can be caused by other things about your website—is bound to frustrate them and make them leave earlier than you hoped.
Google has long been giving higher rankings to websites that offer a great user experience. If the world’s biggest search engine is putting a premium on user experience, so should you.
One of the best ways to enhance user experience is to make sure your website is well-designed and superbly organized.
Such a website should have excellent navigation that will make it easier for users to jump from one page to another. If your users can access all the pages on your site in three clicks, you’re on the right track. With such easily accessible pages, you get to keep your bounce rate low, which is excellent for your SEO.
Increasing your pages’ load speed will also be great for the user experience. As long as your pages do not take more than three seconds to load, your visitors will likely spend more time exploring them. Among the things, you can do to improve page load speed include reducing redirects, minifying your code, and optimizing images.
To make sure that visitors will have an optimal user experience across all platforms, you must make your website mobile-friendly as well.
Again, Google leads the way in giving mobile-friendliness such importance with mobile-first indexing, where it prioritizes the mobile version of a website when determining rankings. By providing a mobile-friendly user experience, your chances of getting higher rankings will improve.
Conclusion
These are just some of the many SEO practices that you can implement to enhance your dental marketing. They’re an excellent place to start, but you might want to consider getting the services of a reliable and experienced SEO agency that will draw up and execute the best dental SEO strategy possible for even better results.
And sharing here infographic for some strategies that have proven to be successful for dentists:
