We want to share some useful local SEO tips for dentists who wish to grow their practice and gain a better knowledge of the ways in which digital marketing can help them without requiring a 100-hour-long certification course. Here at Search Business Group, we know that you’d do great with help from specialists who have literally spent their entire professional lives understanding these parameters and how to optimize your digital presence. Still, many of these resources are freely available, and we like to empower our partners.
There’s plenty you can do on your own to help your dental practice grow and be noticed by your community more and more as time progresses. Ultimately, how much of this you want to do on your own and what you delegate to the experts will depend on your expertise level with some of the tools we use and how much time you can dedicate to maintaining your site and digital assets as healthy as possible.
Please read below to learn more about the areas anyone can focus on to grow their dental practice.
Local SEO for Dentist Needs a Google Business Profile
Formerly known as Google My Business (and, frankly, we don’t know if Google will rename this tool any time soon), this is a free resource all dental practice owners should consider setting up. You should follow our guide to setting up your Google Business Profile for a dental practice to know what to prioritize. Don’t worry; it doesn’t take too long.
You can add information about the services you offer, products sold, working hours, and office phone numbers, offer directions to help people navigate and reach your office, leave reviews, and post updates that keep your patients engaged.
To start your Google Business Profile, you should:
- Navigate to Google Business Profile.
- Click on Sign In.
- Find your business by typing its name in the search field that will appear.
- Define the main category for your dental practice.
- Specify the location from where you offer your services.
- Add the address for your dental practice.
- Add any other service areas you wish to cover.
- Add your telephone number and Website Address.
- Verify your business via postcard. Please note you’ll receive a postcard from Google within the upcoming days.
Why Is a Google Business Profile Important in Local SEO for Dentists?
It’s undeniable that when people think of search engines and online searches, they think of Google. Indeed, Google is the predominant search engine option in the market right now, and even though other options are trying to position themselves as viable alternatives, it’s still safe to bet on Google and everything it prioritizes to position your practice as the best option for patients in your area.
Using this resource helps you in two main ways. First, a Google Business Profile for dentists helps consolidate your online presence and lets Google know you are the owner of a reputable and real dental practice it can recommend to patients searching for high-quality services. Second, an optimized Google Business Profile, or Google My Business, will help provide online users who know you by name with a quick overview of everything you have to offer.
Besides, considering the importance mobile searches have now over traditional desktop versions, more and more individuals want as much information as quickly as possible. Your Google Business Profile offers that information at a glance.
Managing Your Online Reputation Is Crucial for Dental SEO
Dental health specialists, such as yourself, are well-known for providing high-quality services to their communities. However, when online users are weighing dozens of options for their needs in dental care, choosing someone with a good reputation is a critical factor in decision-making.
You shouldn’t be afraid to ask your patients, in the most polite way possible, to leave you a positive review when their experience under your care was a positive one. Businesses with honest and positive reviews thrive because more potential patients find them and consider them to be reliable.
Besides, it looks great when your dental practice has those 5-star reviews you can also add on your homepage.
How to Handle Negative Reviews for the Best Local SEO for Dentists?
First of all, you shouldn’t ignore them. Read their review and try to get to the bottom of what happened with your team to determine if there are merits to the claims made by the angry reviewer or not. Next, you can politely engage with the patient or user who left a negative review on Yelp or Google Reviews to address their concern or explain why some things happened the way they did.
Whatever you do, you shouldn’t expect this to solve the situation or misunderstanding right away, turning a 1-star review into a 5-star one. Many angry reviewers won’t budge until business owners offer them the compensation they deem fair, but considering how arbitrary this is, we’re sticking with our original recommendation that dental practice owners should not ignore the bad reviews and try to understand the situation before replying.
Do a Little Planning With Content Marketing for Dentists
So, when we talk about having an online presence, we go beyond a pretty collection of pictures, videos, and flashy buttons on your site. The way SEO for dentists works in 2023 requires you to keep up with new trends and constant updates to crawling algorithms. This may all seem a bit daunting, but when you have a good content marketing strategy for dental marketing, you won’t have to worry too much.
You can ask yourself the following questions to check if you’re covering the basics of a good content marketing campaign for dentists:
- Am I publishing content regularly?
- Do I create engaging content?
- Do I understand what my patients need, or am I focusing only on subjects that are important to me?
Even though developing a content marketing campaign requires a bit more time and dedication at first than simply publishing whatever you can initially think of through any channel that pops into your mind, it will be worth it in the long run. Here are the two basic activities you need to think of to succeed at content marketing for dentists.
How to Do Dental Keyword Research?
When you sit down to think of what to create content about, you should strike a balance between what you think is important and what your potential patients wish to know. This is what you can achieve with good keyword research. Dental health specialists, like many other service providers in unrelated fields, have a wealth of knowledge thanks to their secular education and years of experience.
However, not everyone wishes for an in-depth discussion about scholarly articles or long analyses of obscure topics.
Good research should lead you first to write down a shortlist of the most common questions asked by your patients. Sit down for a moment and think of the questions that your patients ask frequently, write them down, and group them on related topics.
Next, you can take to the power of the internet to find information about the keywords used by potential patients in your area or verify if the topics you chose are indeed popular in your area. One of the main reasons people use web browsers is to find information. If you know what information people crave, you have a better chance of engaging with more people.
You should use these two tools to improve your keyword research for free.
- Google Trends. This portal from Google will allow you to discover keyword popularity in your state. Besides, it will also let you discover related queries and specific questions you can use for your content marketing campaign.
- QuestionDB. This tool is helpful primarily to discover related questions from just a few words. The free version will allow you to explore a preliminary list of questions, and you should select a few to model your content after.
Creating Content
Now that you know what people are looking for, you can start creating content about it. The main way many people can do it is with blog posts. If you have a website built and managed with WordPress, it will be easy to add blog post articles.
Sure enough, there are many parameters that will determine whether or not your blog post is good enough for Google’s algorithm, such as the ideal word count for each blog post, optimization of headers, keyword density, proper internal linking, external links that don’t benefit your competitors, the right use of images or other forms of media, proper URL structure, meta tag descriptions, avoiding content duplicity, and more.
Also, the written content is not the only thing you can use to populate your site. When you’re exploring the world of digital marketing, there are many types of content you can produce that will help you engage with wider audiences and let people in your community know you mean business.
Get in Touch With the Experts in Dentist SEO
We know; there are many things to worry about. All in all, you’ll do good so long as you are careful about writing original content with your own explanation of things and follow a few tips we give in other articles. But that’s why we exist as an SEO digital marketing agency for dentists. We have a lot of experience researching and creating content that matches and exceeds those parameters. If you feel like you need help, make sure to get in touch with a qualified digital marketing agency, such as Search Business Group.
