Dental Marketing 101: Effective SEO Strategies for Dentists

image of dentist working in office wanting to get more patients with SEO for dentists.

Search engines drive 300% more traffic to company websites than social media platforms. In fact, 68% of all experiences online begin with a search! Organic searches help generate 53.3% of your website visitors.

With search engine optimization (SEO), you can help more people find your dental practices. Effective SEO for dentists takes time, however.

Read on to learn how to start using SEO to improve your dental marketing strategy today.

Know Your Audience

SEO will help you appear for searches as potential patients look for a local dentist. To appear for those searches, you need to know your target audience. Google displays content that aligns with the user’s search intent, or needs.

Search intent is usually:

  • Commercial
  • Navigational
  • Transactional
  • Commercial
  • Informational

While some people want oral health tips, others want locations of nearby practices. Understanding the user’s intent will ensure you create relevant content. Otherwise, your blog posts won’t appear for searches.

Take the time to learn more about your patients. Gather demographic (age, gender, location) and psychographic (interests, needs, pain points) information. If necessary, segment your audience into smaller buyer personas.

For example, you might want to reach busy business professionals or women with kids.

When creating content, write with your target audience in mind.

Determine what keywords each buyer persona uses to find dentists or oral health information online. You can use tools like SEMRush, Keyword Planner, or Answer the Public to create a keyword list. Look for longer phrases (longtail keywords) that include four or more words.

Longtail keywords are more precise and more competitive. You’ll have an easier time appearing for these search terms.

Update Your Website

Google’s bots will crawl and index your website’s content before displaying your site for searches. Updating your website will allow you to appeal to two of the four types of SEO: on-page and technical SEO.

On-Page SEO For Dentists

Use your audience and keyword research to optimize your website for on-page SEO.

Make sure each page and post on your website appeals to a specific keyword. Strategically place the keyword in the:

  • Opening and closing paragraphs
  • Page title
  • Page URL
  • Body text
  • Image file name and alt text
  • SEO title and meta description

SEO titles and descriptions appear on search engine result pages (SERPs). Make sure they’re appealing and relevant to the content. You can start generating clicks and attracting website visitors from SERPs.

Add internal links to your content. Internal links will help Google’s bots better understand the context of each page and post. It will also encourage visitors to explore your content.

Your clickthrough rates and dwell times will improve, which can boost your rankings.

Technical SEO For Dentists

Technical SEO involves updating the backend of your website to appeal to Google’s Core Web Vitals. The Vitals are user-centric ranking factors that can improve the user experience (UX).

If you offer a bad UX, visitors will leave, causing your bounce rate to increase. Your organic SEO rankings will drop.

The lower you appear on SERPs, the less likely people will visit your website.

To appeal to Google’s Core Web Vitals:

  • Add white space
  • Improve page load times
  • Improve readability
  • Optimize for mobile devices
  • Improve the navigation
  • Add an SSL certificate for security
  • Preload custom fonts
  • Set fixed image dimensions
  • Remove unnecessary code
  • Eliminate unnecessary third-party scripts
  • Enable browser caching

Google uses mobile-first indexing; it crawls the mobile version of your website first. If your site isn’t mobile-optimized, invest in web design and development services.

Talk strategy with a SEO expert

Get expert advice on the right strategy for your business! In our 30 minute strategy session we’ll dive into:

How SEO can work for your website and business

Which strategies will get the best ROI

Which packages are right for you

Create Fresh Content

Create fresh blog content to appear for more search queries. Diversify your content marketing strategy by creating:

  • Blog posts/articles
  • eBooks
  • Polls
  • Quizzes
  • Webinars
  • Videos
  • Infographics
  • Testimonials

Use content marketing to demonstrate your expertise as a dentist.

Add external links to other websites to strengthen your credibility.

Consider guest blogging on other websites as part of your off-page SEO dental marketing strategy. Add a link to your website within the post to generate more referral traffic.

Make sure to promote your content using email marketing and social media marketing for dentists. Promoting your content will help you generate more traffic.

Update Your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business listing will benefit your local SEO strategy. Claim and optimize your listing. Make sure it includes your:

  • Practice name
  • Location
  • Business hours
  • Business category
  • Customer reviews
  • Photos/videos
  • Services

Share updates on your listing to keep the content fresh and relevant. Ask your patients to post reviews on your listing. Positive reviews can benefit your brand’s reputation and authority.

About 95% of customers read reviews before making purchases. Another 93% determine the quality of a local business based on reviews.

Reviews also count for 15% of the method Google uses to rank local businesses. However, about 85% of consumers think reviews older than three months are irrelevant. Continue generating reviews throughout the year.

As part of your local SEO strategy, target location-specific keywords in your blog posts.

Hire an Agency

If you’re struggling to apply these SEO dental marketing strategies alone, hire an agency. Relying on professional SEO services will save you time and effort. An agency can:

  • Gather keyword research
  • Create and optimize content
  • Generate backlinks
  • Promote your content
  • Generate patient reviews

They’ll also make sure you keep up with the latest SEO trends. For example, voice and video searches are becoming more popular. Image optimization, predictive search, and featured snippets can also affect your rankings.

Your dental marketing agency can complete regular audits to determine how your SEO rankings are improving over time. With their help, you can reach the top of SERPs to attract new patients to your practice.

Use SEO for Dentists to Reach New Patients

Using SEO for dentists could provide essential to your practice’s future success. Use these dental marketing tips to get started. Otherwise, consider partnering with an experienced SEO marketing agency this year.

Grow your reach today.

Eager to get started? We’re excited to learn more about your dental practice.

Reach out for a free, personalized quote.

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