Different local SEO strategies for dentists
You are abreast of the benefits of leveraging dental search engine optimization for your dental practice. But the big question remains: how do you do it correctly and successfully? This section discusses seventeen strategies from SEO experts to get you on top of the local SEO game.
- Start with keyword research
Start your profitable adventure by conducting intensive keyword research for your dental SEO strategy using keyword research tools. Remember, your potential patients start their journey to your dental practice in search engines. It’s critical to know the exact words and search terms your target audience uses to search for your dental practices.
Begin by listing your dental practices and services like teeth whitening. Next, head to your Google Ads platform and key in your services in the Keyword Planner Tool. The Planner helps you detect the top search terms your target audience uses to search for dental services in your location.
Don’t forget to use long-tail search keywords because they’re more specific, cheaper, and yield better results than short-tail ones. For example, don’t say “dentists” when saying “emergency dentists in Toronto” gets you more visibility in search engines.
- Improve your Google My Business page
Enhancing and optimizing your Google My Business is another critical milestone in your local dental SEO journey. Searchers see this page when accessing Google’s “map” search results. So, optimize it by updating its contents and ensuring they’re accurate. Otherwise, any single error can cost you potential patients and enrich your competitor.
Additionally, always use the most relevant categories on your Google My Business page to rank favourably on search engines. All your descriptions must be clear and contain relevant keywords. Excellent pictures still speak louder than thousands of works. So, include your dental practice’s best photos to give your potential patients a clue of what to expect. These snaps also boost your clinic’s credibility.
- Leverage patient reviews to convert prospective patients
Honest reviews on your dental website are your best testimonials. Therefore, boost your ranking in search engines by getting more honest patient reviews. Encouraging your happy customers to give you positive reviews boosts your credibility and trust. These reviews also boost your clinic’s ranking on local maps.
Don’t forget to provide a link to your reviews to make it easier for current and potential patients to review your dental practice. Also, address any negative reviews diplomatically even if the patient sounds unfair or they wrote it in anger. Don’t be defensive, but try to fix the patient’s concerns and learn from mistakes if you goofed.
- Leverage Yelp listings
Leveraging Yelp listings also boosts your digital marketing for better search engine optimization. Go ahead and create a Yelp profile for your dental clinic to win more genuine local reviews. People visit this site for different services; thus, they can find more information about your dental practice there. These reviews will help you rank higher in search engines.
- Never purchase backlinks
While backlinks are essential, never undermine your search engine visibility by buying them to fool Google. Better take the longer and safer organic path to get links because Google is smart enough to detect purchased links. Just take your time and create high-quality content that earns you organic and deserved links.
Otherwise, you will lose your money, time, and effort when Google catches you. Moreover, you will lose the same trust you thought you were earning fraudulently. Google can also penalize you heavily for this unethical behavior.
- Analyze your technical dental SEO
Analyzing your dental website’s technical SEO is another way of boosting your dental practice in search results. Check it out to ensure your dental website is easy to navigate and then answer these essential questions:
- How have you organized your dental website?
- Do visitors find what they’re looking for quickly?
- Where did you place key buttons on your dental website, and do they distract your website visitors?
- Where is main navigational bar on your dental website?
- Address your website’s readability
It’s not enough to build a beautiful dental practice website. You should also ensure that your website’s texts are easily readable. Use the correct font size and type so that your website visitors don’t strain their eyes trying to read tiny writings.
Also, mind your language because it affects readability. While every industry has its jargon, do your best to use plain language your current and potential patients can easily understand. Avoid jargon as much as possible. Otherwise, your complicated language could defeat your noble efforts to appear more visibly in Google search results.
- Join reputable dental communities
You can also enhance your rankings and visibility in Google search results by becoming an industry authority. Joining reputable dental communities helps you showcase your expertise in various dental practices by helping others. Activities like leaving valuable comments or answering questions make people feel your presence.
Don’t forget to focus your contributions on trending topics to gain relevance with your target audience. You may also add your dental office’s URL at your comments’ bottom to increase organic traffic and search engine rankings.
- Optimize keywords in your URL
After successful keyword research, go ahead and boost your organic search results by optimizing keywords in your URL. Do so by including local keywords that feature your local area and dental office. For example, using a URL like Ontario Emergency Dentists gives you a sharper edge because it includes the location’s name. Only be sure to limit your URL’s length to 70 characters.
- Draft magnetic titles
Pay special attention to your blog and article titles. Use headlines that make dental patients want to click and engage with your content. Shorten and sweeten your titles by including numbers, questions, and superlative adjectives.
- Compose compelling meta descriptions
Create compelling meta descriptions that accurately show your readers what your pages are about. It’s best to incorporate keywords into these descriptions to make them more visible in local search rankings. Don’t forget to keep every meta description within Google’s 160-character limit.
- Maintain a vibrant social media presence
No dental owner can ignore social media and expect to succeed in their dental SEO campaigns. Social media is the Net’s largest and busiest wing. It’s the Internet’s only wing that brings together all users despite their social, economic, religious, and academic statuses.
Remember, you own a dental clinic, and your profession is universal. Therefore, be active on social media because it pools all your diverse prospective patients in one place.
Your social engagements with patients are essential for generating traffic, increasing qualified leads, building brand awareness, winning new patients. It’s also a perfect place to sharpen your social “listening” skills that bond you with your current or new patients. All these organic factors pooled together can boost your rankings on Google search results page.
- Enhance your website’s speed
In the natural world, speed kills; in the online world, slowness kills. Your prospective patients search will suffer a deadly blow if your current or prospective patients can’t transact fast. Your old and new patients are busy and have limited time; hence, nobody wants to waste time on a slow-loading website.
Loading speed is so critical that surveys reveal that it significantly affects their buying decisions. Old and new patients will punish you for a slow-loading dental site by pressing the “back” button straight into your competitors’ hands.
You can boost your loading speed by compressing large files. Also, host your website on a reputable hosting platform that won’t compromise loading speed. Don’t forget that loading speed is one of the criteria Google uses to rank dental websites and other dental websites.
- Go for citations in online directories
You can also accelerate and consolidate your dental search engine optimization efforts by going for citations in online dictionaries. Only be careful to avoid too many of them at once because they might look fishy and damage your reputation.
Appearing in these local or regional directories benefits your dental practice because:
- People need local dentists and check directories to find dental experts in their areas.
- Quality citations boost your local search engine optimization rankings and general visibility in search engines.
- Most directories have links that can help build up your website’s authority.
- Google searches detect the directories and sites that contain your clinic’s listings.
- Leverage blogging and long-form content
Blogging and long-form content boost your local search engine optimization success. Google updated its algorithms to include “EAT” (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) into its ranking criteria. Leveraging this strategy has these benefits:
– You will position yourself as an authority in your dental practice like professional teeth whitening and dental implants with accurate knowledge and experience. Remember, people trust authority and expertise. That is why they always flock to dental websites that answer their questions.
– Longer posts usually rank higher than shorter ones and are more visible online.
– Longer posts sometimes appear in Google’s in-depth content feature.
– People engage more deeply with long posts, spending more time on your dental website.
– Longer content produces more inbound links, which significantly consolidate your rankings in Google and other search engines.
- Take care of your links
Links are still important in your local search engine optimization strategy if you use them well. Thus, promptly address any broken links because they frustrate patients. Always ensure that all your links are working correctly and remove or replace all broken links.
- Provide fresh and qualitative content regularly
Lastly, provide your audiences with fresh, qualitative content because it’s a part of Google’s ranking algorithms. You can maintain a constant flow by setting up a weekly or fortnight blogging schedule. Google and other search engines will always re-index your web pages as long as you stick to your blogging schedule.
