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As a dental professional, your main income is a result of taking care of your dental patients.
If patients do not come through your front door, you do not make money.
To generate a consistent flow of new patients, you need consistent dental advertising and marketing.
This doesn’t just mean posting occasionally on Facebook or Instagram— it also requires that you are providing opportunities for people to see you via search engines, and to push your messages through ads.
If you want potential patients to discover you on the internet, you have actually got to market your practice to them… not just hope they will show up.
DIGITAL MARKETING: INCREASING THE ONLINE PRESENCE OF YOUR DENTAL PRACTICE
SEO is the process of creating relevant content to search queries, and building backlinks to that content…so that people looking for a dentist (prospects) can find your website on the search engine results pages of Google & Bing.
Search Engine Optimization for the dental sector (Dental SEO) can be a difficult process, as you website has to not only satisfy the questions and needs of those prospects, but also needs to meet certain quality score standards of the above mentioned search engines and their algorithms.
At the end of the day, what you need to do is build a good looking website, that is full of relevant content… present that content in a meaningful way to visitors… but also make sure you are getting that content indexed.
As you can imagine, it’s not easy.
While SEO agencies don’t have to go through the same level of education you did with Dental School, there is still a great deal of information that needs to be obtained, and there are certain skill sets they must have to successfully serve their clients.
HOW TO MARKET A PRACTICE WITH DENTAL SEO
Dental Search Engine Optimization consists of a number of different elements.
When done correctly, they enhance your site and also drive people to your practice.
Below are just a few of the items that you should focus on in order to get your site ranking on search engines, and get notices by new prospects.
Keyword Research
Among the first steps required to boost Search Engine Optimization is keyword analysis.
Put simply, this is a process of determining which keywords your consumers are searching for online, and which keyword phrases will get you the most bang for your buck.
Meaning, just because a keyword gets a lot of searches…it isn’t automatically the best keyword for your practice.
Something relevant to your services, or your local area can have a much higher return on your marketing dollars than just the most searched terms.
Picking the ideal search queries helps to bring even more web traffic to your site and also helps to get your site indexed in the top search results when done right.
Understanding exactly how keywords work and how they need to be used can be hard, but an expert SEO agency can help you meet this crucial element of SEO.
Local SEO & Social Media
When combined effectively, these 2 components can make a huge impact in the amount of local prospects find your website and ultimately come in for a consult.
The best way to get started is to start getting citations.
No, not the bad kind… citations are Local Directory Links.
Local directory citations are the bread and butter of local SEO.
Anyone can do plain old directory submissions, but to make them count, you need to beef them up with geo-tagged photos and videos, plus citations and links from rich media sources.
You do not need to focus on being number one in the entire world– simply being the #1 ranked dentist in your immediate geographic area should be more than enough.
When you have great Local SEO in place, you will have the ability to provide more services to locals, and you won’t have to focus on expanding your advertising to different communities.
Another focus is Online Reviews. This is where Social comes in to play.
Make sure you do a great job following up with customers (during slow days) and ask them to provide reviews on Google, FB, Yelp, or whatever relevant review sites you can think of.
If you need help with generating testimonials… reach out to us, we have you covered 😉
Outside of the obvious benefits of reaching new patients… a strong review profile actually reinforces your services to your “current” customers.
Nothing feels better to people than seeing social proof that they chose the right dentist!
Analyzing Your Competitors Practices
Your competition may currently be making use of dental web marketing to boost their search engine rankings.
If they are, and more importantly if they are ranking above you… it is worth taking some time to review their website, and their web content.
Things to look for would include the overall design, are they using landing pages for their advertising, where are they getting their links from, and they keywords that their web pages are focusing on.
The easiest way to do this is to look at the Page Titles and the URL’s of their dental websites.
This will quickly show you what their keyword targets are.
Modeling your site after more successful sites is what all the big players in marketing do… and your SEO firm can certainly help you do this if they are worth their rates.
Optimizing Your Dental Practice Website
The most useful thing that most dental practices can do, is to make sure they get the website right.
Obviously there are a lot of website providers out there, so focusing on one that makes a site that pleases the demands of both consumers as well as Google’s algorithms is one that will be best.
PLEASE NOTE>>> From our experience, national dental website providers do a really crappy job with SEO. They may provide the service, but it is rarely anywhere as good as a good SEO company.
Your website is evaluated constantly by both users and search engines with regards to how well as how well it operates will determine exactly how well your website eventually ranks.
With the right design, your website will certainly be transformed into something that brings in brand-new consumers with a good focus on services.
We call this conversion rate optimization (CRO), and basically its the process of making sure you convert more visitors into customers.
Going from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100 can have a huge impact on your bottom line as you can imagine.
A good site design will make sure your pages are well organized as well as very easy to read and navigate through.
This will certainly make customers more likely to hang out on your website (Google calls this dwell time).
Things like making sure relevant information like a telephone number or address is easy to find can make your site much more straightforward and engaging to customers, and search engines really like that.
There’s also a large amount of work that takes place behind the scenes.
On-Site or On-Page SEO is HUGE (even though we don’t think it’s as important as link building)!
Components like using proper title tags and page descriptions will certainly need to be modified and tweaked to make sure that Google’s web crawlers can much better browse through and index your website.
Even as you develop a site that your customers enjoy, you will certainly still have some behind-the-scenes modifications that can be seen only by web crawlers.
These modifications work in tandem with your more apparent modifications to produce something that works for everyone, algorithms and eyeballs.
Creating High Quality Web Content For Dental Prospects
Creating really helpful web content is another part of marketing for dental practitioners.
Old school methods of outbound marketing have sales people pounding phones all day trying to get somebody to listen.
By producing quality content around your subject matter and services, your prospects will start to find you through your web content – this is true inbound marketing.
High quality web content is meant to educate, inform, and draw in your prospects.
Building Local Links
Saving one of our favorites for last here…
If you’re like most dentists, link building is that bleeding sore that never heals.
It takes a ton of time. It’s super boring. And you probably don’t know how to fix it fast.
Not all links are created equally… and we pride ourselves on getting some of the best links in the industry for our clients.
Generally speaking, you want links coming from relevant websites, sites that are of high quality… and not to be spammy.
When getting started, start locally. Reach out to other practices, organizations and directories in your area and see if you can get a link to your site from them.
We find the best links come from other businesses… so if you need help with this process, you know where to find us.
SEO That Meets Your Practice’s Standards and Requirements
SEO is essential for any kind of dental practice.
Whether you’re wanting to become the most dominant family dentist in your area or you simply intend to make certain that you can obtain a continuous stream of brand-new patient leads, a strong seo strategy will help you fulfill that mission.
With the right dental marketing agency, you will be able to get a great website, a strong seo strategy, beautiful and high converting landing pages, engaging content, and a social and advertising plan that gets results!
Working with the right SEO experts will certainly help you take advantage of your competition and also make sure that you’re always the first name that enters your mind when individuals are considering dental practitioners in your market area.
If you are ready to get better results, contact us, your dental seo experts.
