The dental industry has a value greater than $130 billion, so dental marketing is a necessary cornerstone for growing a practice.
When you’re trying to bolster your dental practice in ways that bring in new qualified patients, search engine optimization (SEO) is a core tenet to keep in mind.
Follow these dental SEO tips to take your marketing efforts and success to the next level.
What Makes Dental SEO So Important For Your Practice?
First off, recognize why search engine optimization can help your practice. Marketing is critical no matter what you hope to accomplish.
Here are some foundational ways that SEO will be the best tool to use moving forward:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the Current Marketing Currency For All Fields
If you can master SEO, you can master the primary way to bring new eyeballs to your dental practice. This is the marketing tool that bridges gaps in all industries and allows you to bring in qualified patients.
Prioritize good technical SEO that shows your expertise and comfort in the dental industry.
2. It Helps Connect You to People That Are Looking For What You Offer
Another major benefit of dental SEO is that you’re connecting with people that are already looking for what you offer. It’s a passive form of marketing that brings aggressive results.
You’re essentially implementing keywords into your website and blog content so that web searchers can find you.
3. SEO is Great For Local Dental Practices
You will also appreciate that search engine optimization is excellent for local marketing endeavors.
Focusing on local SEO is great when you’re trying to get an influx of new patients. Marketing professionals will help to research and optimize local keywords that will bring you fresh traffic and high rankings in Google.
4. The Possibilities Are Endless With The Services You Can Offer Via the Web
Today, it makes perfect sense to also think of your practice as a global one.
Though you may primarily serve patients in your local and surrounding area, the worldwide possibilities are endless. For example, you can publish dental eBooks and courses that can help people all over the world.
The fact that you’re medically licensed gives you credibility that other content creators don’t have.
When you work your SEO marketing strategies, you open the door to new followers and traffic, which can help you leverage what you do best.
5. You Can Improve Your Mobile Reach
In this day and age, you’ll need to optimize your site to serve people that use mobile devices. Right now, 96% of people in the United States own and use cell phones.
If you’re not designing your site in a way that caters to those devices, you’re missing out on a large segment of your potential audience.
How to Bolster Your Dental Marketing With These SEO Strategies
Your dental practice will soar when you have the right marketing strategies to help you out this year and beyond.
Here are a few different ways you can incorporate SEO strategies that get huge results:
1. Create a Blog For Your Dental Practice
When you have a quality dental blog, you will always be able to improve your dental practice. This brings in an influx of traffic that also builds you a long-term following.
A blog also keeps your site timely, and not static. This is especially important in keeping your patients up to date with new norms in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you’re going to create a dental blog, start by researching a series of links, keywords, and topics that will allow your blog to grow.
Blogging, consistency, and strategy will grow your Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA).
The best thing you can do is publish to your blog several times during the week. You will need to have evergreen content that is helpful and informative.
You would do well to specialize in long-form content, which may spend between 1,000 words and 2,000 words. Before you know it, the blog will become a staple for your website, which will work wonders for your practice.
2. Cam Up and Start Making Video Content
Right now, you have to create video content that engages people. This is a core principle of search engine optimization that will grow your ranking and get you plenty of repeat followers.
This is particularly useful in fields like dentistry. Think about it—Dentistry is not a field that you use every day.
It fills a very specific need, and most people only visit the dentist one or two times per year.
When you put out consistent and valuable video content, you stay on people’s minds year-round. This makes them more likely to remember their appointments and reach out to you in the interim if they have any kind of problems.
Always produce a sharp video that is at least 4K resolution. Match your video with quality sound so that your audio levels are where they need to be.
You can also optimize your video by incorporating keywords and creating videos with interesting topics and catchy headlines.
3. Make Use of Chatbots and Other Kinds of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Making use of chatbots will be a regular part of your dental practice. Utilizing chatbots gives you increased search engine optimization because it improves patient engagement.
Each patient that uses a chatbot will have their own individualized experience. This adds to your on-site function, which is a quality way to improve your dental website SEO.
The best chatbots are programmed to improve the interaction with web users so that it feels as natural to use as possible.
This keeps your practice available around the clock, which is great for your dental practice marketing.
4. Start a Dentistry-Based Podcast
The more content you produce, the better. Podcast listenership increased by 20 million listeners in recent years.
When you take the time to create this kind of engaging audio content for the web, patients can reach you across several different devices, which grows your brand as a whole. It allows people to see your practice in a different light, which also grows long-term loyalty.
Since a lot of people have a fear or phobia of the dentist, connecting with them regularly in the form of a podcast can help bridge that gap while also building equity in your practice.
5. Always Use the Keywords That Make a Difference
For all intents and purposes, the keywords that you select will be the most important building blocks for your SEO.
You’ll need to use some keyword research tools that apply to your practice and the services that you offer.
This can mean looking for keywords related to dental implants, braces, teeth cleaning, fluoride treatments, veneers, and more. Studying keywords provides you invaluable insight into your industry as well.
It can help you lean into niches within your field, rather than casting a net that tries to get every dental patient.
Some of the variables that you’ll want to look into include search volume, trend percentage, and keyword competition. Choose long-tail keywords that will get you traction over time.
After you do some due diligence into your keywords, you’ll need to make certain that you’re placing them throughout the site.
This is why blog content is so valuable.
By incorporating keywords multiple times throughout a post, including in the body, headers, and intro, your page will become more optimized over time. You’ll also want to use the keywords authentically and organically.
When you are subtle about the way you use your keywords, you will get the ranking improvements that you need without your reader being distracted or put off.
6. Optimize Based on Mobile Devices
In 2020 and beyond, you’re only getting the benefits of SEO if you also focus on mobile.
Dental practices that create websites that are easily viewable on mobile devices will gain more traction and traffic. Your patients won’t have the attention span to work through buggy sites that crash.
Work with web designers that can create the best and most navigable templates you can find. Put together a test group that can help you improve on any deficiencies in your setup, and constantly jump on updates.
You will also want to work on building a mobile app for your practice. Your patients can use the app to book appointments, contact the dentist or specialist with questions, find information, and more.
7. Select Images That Stand Out
Don’t forget to consider images when you are trying to create an SEO presence.
The internet is visually-friendly, so your site will be rewarded when you create photo-intensive layouts. You can even bolster your site’s traffic when you include alt tags and keywords.
This is absolutely crucial to your practice’s SEO success since studies show that 20% of all web searches take place on Google Images.
Make sure that the images you choose are sharp and high-resolution, and that they are placed in areas that are eye-catching.
Use these same principles for your social media accounts — particularly those like Instagram and Twitter. So much of your SEO will boil down to your social media presence.
As long as you have the right image quality you’ll always be able to stand out.
8. Create Plans With a Dental Marketing SEO Company
A marketing company will be an excellent part of any SEO services that you are looking for.
Even though SEO is accessible to everyone, you won’t really get the maximum effect from the strategies without a marketing professional. There are several pros that understand the nuances of dental care, and they’ll know just what will bring in patients.
Set up a consultation with a company that does excellent SEO work.
Most importantly, a search engine optimization pro will help you to set goals. These goals can be broken down by the month, quarter, year, and beyond.
By simply having some goals that you can chip away at, you will be able to meet a variety of metrics that will grow your practice’s visibility.
9. Make Sure Your Site is Well-Designed and With Great Uptime
Good old web design is a staple for any search engine optimization strategy. Hire a professional that can help you out with any web design project.
This applies whether you want to build a site from scratch or if your current practice’s site needs a redesign. Your site should be able to withstand the new wave of traffic that you’re bringing in.
When your site is easy to use and most importantly, always up, your patients will trust you and find you reliable.
Test out your site for speed and page insights, and make it so that people can always connect.
10. Target Local Patients Whenever Possible
Finally, honing in on local patients will always be your bread and butter. By choosing local-specific keywords and strategies, your practice will carve out a place in the community.
This also leads to glowing reviews and word of mouth, which is some of the best marketing that you can ever hope for.
Put Together Some Great Dental SEO Plans
The tips above will help you out when you’re interested in improving your dental practice’s search engine optimization. It will carry you a long way and allow you to make your practice as visible as you need it to be.
Local SEO for dentists At the Search Business Group, we can help you out with any healthcare marketing plans that you’d like to put together.
Take the time to contact us online for all your dental SEO, web design, and branding needs, or call us at (714)519-6290.
