The Ultimate Guide on Dental SEO
What is Dental SEO?
Why Do Dentists Need SEO?
1. Building Trust and Credibility
People have a perception that dental websites that rank higher on search engines are great. Moreover, Google also believes the same.
However, there are many dental websites that aren’t getting the necessary attention from the users despite offering excellent service. The main reason behind this is that they are ignoring SEO.
For the patients to trust your dental service, you should focus on ranking your dental website higher on the search results. The better your ranking on search engines, the more patients visits your website. The more patients visit your site, the higher your website’s credibility among the search engines. It is a continuous cycle that goes on the on.
2. Getting More Patients
As search engine optimization improves the visibility of your website, it helps in increasing traffic. Increased traffic creates leads, which can be converted with great content on the website and amazing offers.
You can offer a discount for any patient who comes to your clinic for the first time. Similarly, you can also target your existing customers by offering them special services when they again visit your clinic.
3. Defeating Competition
4. Offering a Better UX
A search engine algorithm uses various factors to rank a website. One of the most important factors to which an algorithm gives more weightage to rank a website is the user experience. Your website should satisfy the intent of users and give them a great experience. To offer better UX, you must optimize your website so that it includes the following points.
- Faster load time
- Ease of navigation
- Mobile-friendliness
5. Improve Brand Awareness
Your target audience should be familiar with your brand, and what type of services you are offering. SEO helps in improving your brand visibility so that whenever your target audience thinks about dental services, the name of your clinic comes to the top of their mind. Improved brand awareness has several other impacts that include the following:
Brand Equity: The value of any brand can be found by how great an experience you were able to provide to your customers. If there is a positive perception about your brand, it will automatically improve your brand value.
Trust: One of the aims of a successful SEO strategy is to create trust in your brand. When you create trust in your brand, it will help in attracting repeat customers.
Brand Association: It is also an extremely important part of a successful SEO strategy. You must try to associate your brand with your patients. It will ensure more traffic to your website.
How to Optimize Your Dental Website for SEO Purpose?
To optimize your dental website for SEO purposes, you have to use a multipronged approach. Some of the important elements that will improve your ranking through an optimized website include the following:
Design an Attractive Website: You must design an attractive website so that it catches the eyes of your target audience and encourages them to go through your website to find out what you are offering.
Create Original Content: You must post original, relevant, and trendy content on your website that is also keyword optimized. Here, you should ensure that your content emphasizes the patients’ most common questions and address their concerns effectively.
Keywords: Keywords are words or phrases that your target audience is likely to use to look for the services that you are providing. For example, when a patient search "dentist near me" or any other words related to the dentist or dental, keyword-optimized content and good SEO help you to appear your dental website in the top position.
You have to research popular keywords and use them in the content of your website. You can use the keywords in your titles, meta titles, meta descriptions, subtitles, and image & video titles.
Do Technical Analysis: You must do a technical analysis to figure out whether Google indexes your website. It will also allow you to find whether you are using the right keywords, metadata, optimized images, site structure, navigation, canonical URL, structure data, etc. The technical analysis will also show whether your website could be crawled by the search engine (which will help in its indexing).
Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices: Your website should be properly optimized for mobile devices so that people who use their mobile phones to look for your service can properly view your website. Furthermore, the “mobile first” rule of Google ensures that only those websites which are optimized for mobile viewing are ranked higher in its search engine result pages.
Easy to See Contact Information: Your contact information should be easily visible on your website. You should add your email address, phone number, and address on the footer of all your web pages.
What are the On-Page Ranking Factors for Your Dental Practice?
The on-page ranking of your dental website includes various factors which help in improving the user experience significantly. Some of these include the following:
Content Relevancy: The relevancy factor of your webpage to the query posed is very important. The viewer types keywords in the search engine bar and based on the keyword, the search engine shows websites that have the relevant information. The search engine algorithm identifies the relevancy of the content in your website by checking the keywords that you have used in your content, titles, subtitles, meta description, and URL. Therefore, you have to do proper keyword research and create relevant contents, which addresses the search queries.
Title and Header Tags: Once you have identified the relevant keywords, you must put them into specific places that include the header tags, and the title. The search engine algorithm looks for these keywords to understand what the content is all about and then indexes it properly.
Meta Title and Description: It is a short description that is included in the HTML code of the web pages. This is displayed in the search result. It helps search engine algorithms to understand what is there on the webpage. The proper and attractive meta title and description help to increase the click rate.
Image Alt-Text: You must optimize your image alt-text to ensure that it comes on the first page of image results. This helps in improving the ranking of your website significantly.
URL Structure: The URL structure of your website should be simple, and must include the primary keyword to make it SEO friendly.
What are the Off-Page Ranking Factors for Your Dental Practice?
Off-page ranking factors relate to all those elements that are outside your website. It includes influencers, social media platforms, and other websites. Some of the important off-page ranking factors include the following:
Backlinks: It is a hyperlink that links your website to a page on another website. It is a great way to establish the authoritativeness, expertise, and trustworthiness of your website by creating a backlink with other reputable websites.
Social Share: The more attention you get on social media, increases the more traffic to your website(which indirectly helps in improving your ranking).
Domain Age: This is another important off-page SEO factor. How long your website is running has an impact on the ranking. Therefore, if you have an existing domain, do not dump it and start a new one.
Citation: These are inbound links that come through online directories like CitySearch, Yelp, and Angie’s list. You must submit your website to multiple high-quality healthcare directories to increase your backlink profile.
Reviews: If your website gets quality reviews from your clients, then search engine will recommend your website to searchers of dental services in your locality.
Where to List Your Practice for Off-Page Activities?
- In the local directories
- In Google My Business
- List your website in niche directories (directories that only list medical services like ZocDoc, Healthgrades)
What is Local SEO for Dentists?
Why is Local SEO Important for Dentists?
- It helps in citation building. This in turn helps in improving your brand visibility online.
- It helps people of your locality to find out about your service when they type any query related to dental services.
- Local SEO attracts more traffic to your website.
- It makes your website visible in Google Maps.
- It helps to build your local reputation and trust.
How Dentists Can Know if SEO is Working?
There are different ways through which you can check whether your SEO strategy is working or not. Some of these include the following:
Measuring Organic Traffic: How much traffic is coming to your website through search engines is a great way to understand whether your SEO strategy is working. You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console tools to measure your website traffic.
Referral Visits: If your SEO strategy is working perfectly, then you will find that your referral visits have increased significantly as you have chosen good-quality backlinks for your website.
Ranking of Your Website: If your SEO strategy is right, you will see an immediate jump in the ranking of your dental practice website on the organic search engine result page.
How Much Does Dental SEO Cost?
Dental SEO service is not cheap. The average charge of an SEO expert ranges from $100 – $150 per hour in the USA and Western Europe. However, if you offer this job in emerging markets like India, then same dental SEO service you will get under $25 per hour. The cost of Dental SEO depends upon multiple factors that include the following:
Level of Competition for Keywords: If there is higher competition for specific keywords, then you have to spend more money.
Timeline: SEO is an ongoing process, and how long you hire the services of an SEO consultant will have an impact on the overall cost of your SEO.
Your Current Website: If you don’t have a website or the overall SEO of your current website is very poor, then you have to rebuild the entire website or even create a new dental website. So, it will cost you more.
How to Measure ROI in Dental SEO?
You have to look at three important metrics to measure ROI in dental SEO. These metrics include the following:
Website Traffic: You should look at the amount of traffic your website is attracting at a specific time. You should also check out the sources from where you are getting your traffic. This will tell you how successful your SEO strategy is. Some of the best sources like social media, organic traffic from a search engine, paid/CPC traffic, and referral traffic.
Average Session Duration: This is another important metric to find out ROI in dental SEO. It is the amount of time an average user spends while visiting your website. This will help you to understand how engaging the content on your website is and whether you are providing good value or not.
Bounce Rate: This rate reveals how many people arrive at your website and leave immediately. A higher bounce rate means your website needs further optimization(faster load time, ease of navigation, visually attractive care, relevant content et cetera).
Should You Hire a Dental SEO Company?
A dental SEO company offers an integrated approach that includes SEO, content marketing, PPC, and social media marketing to divert traffic to your website.
A professional dental SEO company has the knowledge, experience, and a team of experts. They know how to use multiple tactics in synergy to improve the overall ranking of your website. Therefore, if you want to improve the ranking of your website, you must hire the services of a professional dental SEO company with a good reputation in the market.
Conclusion
People use search engines extensively to find dental treatment services, the best dental clinic in their neighborhood, and so on. Patients also use it to check the reviews of a dental clinic before they make an appointment.
Therefore, SEO plays an essential role in improving the overall visibility of your website and letting people in your neighborhood know about the dental service you are offering. It helps you improve the patient footfall in your clinic.
WebyKing is a leading dental web design company. We also offer best-in-class dental web marketing services. Hence, we can analyze the current situation of your dental website and do SEO accordingly to ensure your site attracts a vast audience and generates good revenue.