Your days as a dental health professional are jam-packed with appointments, calls, and follow-up consultations. But you’ll lose out on promising prospects if you overlook the value of having a local SEO strategy. SEO, or search engine optimization, has become a crucial component of every company’s marketing strategies to attract new clients, and your practice is no exception.
Understanding the power of SEO is essential if you’re trying to market your practice to bring in plenty of local clients in a crowded and diverse field like dentistry. Attracting, converting, engaging with current and prospective patients and building your reputation requires an effective strategy to meet their demands.
SEO strategy is also fundamental when you’re tired of relying on word-of-mouth and outdated marketing techniques or struggling to attract new patients. The best method for optimizing your website to appear higher in search engine results for relevant keywords is SEO. Keeping up to date with the latest local SEO practices can increase your online visibility and attract more qualified traffic to your website. So, how can you accomplish this?
This article will explore how SEO can help you get more dental patients and take your practice to the next level. Let’s dive right into them.
1: Optimize Your Website
Your website is the cornerstone of your dental practice. You need to build an optimized website to attract many patients. Web design with WordPress is what most well-run businesses opt for. By investing in this, you can have a website that is functional, responsive, and scalable (meaning that it grows with you). Some of the defining features of a dynamic and optimized website are the following:
- Professional looking
- Relevant
- Flexible
Having an optimized dental website also means it must deliver results, boost your online visibility, and market your services to the right patients in the right way.
WordPress is also a viable tool for designing your dental website because it mostly functions on desktop and mobile. Additionally, they are SEO-friendly; this is essential for dominating the local competition and ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). Further, when you use WordPress, you can manage your site, helping you save money. This platform lets you publish content quickly, update images, and add pages without engaging a professional website developer.
A local search optimization strategy will also help your practice rank higher on maps and Google searches. Some other ways to optimize your website for local search include the following:
- Claim your Google My Business listing. This allows you to manage the information that appears in Google Maps and the local results of Google searches.
- Use local schema markup to help search engines understand geographical information about your business and can improve your local search ranking.
- If your company has a physical location in a specific country, consider using a local domain (.ca for Canada).
- Many people use mobile phones to search for local businesses, so optimizing your website for mobile is imperative.
2: Use Relevant Keywords
By conducting effective keyword research, you can choose the right keywords that will help you rank higher in search results. Relevant keywords will enable your website content to appear in searches.
To help you find the right terms, utilize keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner. We recommend focusing on long-tail keywords. These contain 3 or more words, like “dentist in Sarnia” or “dentures in London, Ontario.” Long-tail keywords will help you reach more qualified leads. On the other hand, generic searches like “dental,” “dental services,” or “dental office” don’t tell you much about what the user wants to find.
Once you’ve selected your long-tail keywords, integrate them throughout your site, highlighting different aspects of your offer. Don’t forget to use these keywords in your meta descriptions, too. It’s also worth noting that you shouldn’t overuse these relevant local keywords to avoid keyword stuffing. Inject your chosen keywords where they make sense to drive better results.
3: Claim Your Local Profile Listing
Getting more dental patients begins with optimizing your local presence. This way, you can put your dental practice front and centre for those searching for a dentist in your local area. When you claim your local listings, you can add relevant information about your practice, such as your address, phone number, and business hours.
You can also add photos and a description of your services, which can help potential patients learn more about your practice. Additionally, claiming your listings allows you to respond to customer reviews, which can improve your online reputation and help attract new patients.
4: Join Dental Forums
Reputable dental forums on the Internet are designed for professionals to share information and ask questions about their profession. Many dental forums can offer you a wealth of knowledge and resources shared by experienced practitioners. Participating in discussions can help you stay up-to-date on industry trends and best practices. Dental forums also allow you to monitor mentions of your practice and address any negative feedback or concerns that may come up.
By joining these online communities, you can connect with other dental professionals and form partnerships or referral relationships. At the same time, you can get up-to-date news that traditional media outlets might not cover. Furthermore, by actively participating in discussions and offering helpful advice, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your field and increase awareness of your practice.
Often, website owners will allow you to post comments without having an account, which will cost you nothing. You can even add your website’s URL along with your comments. This will help increase your website traffic when forum members click the link.
5: Create SEO-Optimized Content
A fast-speed and professionally-made website is as good as nothing when you don’t have original, valuable, and SEO-optimized content. Content is a significant foundation for your dental practice’s SEO strategy. Why? First and foremost, you’ll be penalized when you copy content from a competitor’s website or somewhere else. This will keep your business from ranking high in the SERPs.
Since your potential and existing customers want to hear updates regarding your business offers, your content should be original in wording and brand tone. Valuable, relevant, and informative content should aim to help your clients. When you produce your content, it should answer some of the most often-asked questions, address problems your potential customers are facing, and give them solutions through your goods and services.
SEO-optimized content is also essential so your website gets ranked higher in search engines. To ensure this, you must conduct keyword research and ensure that the terms you select are injected into the copy, headings, and metadata. Keyword planning tools such as Google Keyword Planner, outlined above, are helpful, especially when keyword research overwhelms you. It allows you to see competitive keywords and which keywords have the potential to rank high.
Another way to ensure that your content is SEO optimized is to use the suggested search option in Google and other search engines. This will allow you to know what your prospects are searching for in your industry.
