Like any other medical practice, dentistry is also replete with a high level of competition. The sure way to establish your presence, bring in more customers and grow your dentist practice is to strengthen your online presence through dentist SEO. Here are a set of strategies dentists will find useful to drive more traffic to their website and promote their business through proven online marketing strategies.
Optimize your practice for ranking factors offline
There is no point in neglecting the off-site SEO opportunities. You must not forget that these factors because these will help complement your onsite efforts.
Any of your dentist SEO strategies will start from your website and hence it makes sense to start your efforts from there. Here are a set of actions to concentrate on while developing your website.
Developing your website
While there are a large number of website development platforms available today, I would suggest WordPress as the number one choice that can benefit you in many ways. WordPress sites enjoy some valuable advantages like being scalable, flexible, and perform great on mobiles as they do on desktops. It is important to ensure that the websites not only find your site, they also read it. Never resort to media-heavy tactics, Silverlight, iFrames, or flash items. The important SEO details that you must focus on at the back end of your website include Page load times, URLs, Meta titles and descriptions, image and video file sizes, no broken links, and image alt text. Also, make sure that these things are taken care of for every page that you have on your website.
Get a beautiful dental website
It is important that your website wears a great design that will appeal to any online visitor trying to know about your practice. Remember that user experience is one of the most important components of dentist SEO which will augment the ranking factor.
Your dental website must successfully create the first best impression. This can be achieved by a modern and custom-made site by a professional who can understand the dental industry and has a background in SEO. A few ideas that will help land on a professional and successfully performing website are ensuring that the site is mobile-friendly, ensuring that the pages load fast, implementing ADA & HIPAA compliant practices for your site, making the navigation simple and easy to understand experience for the visitor.
Create original content optimized for keywords
A great design must be duly supported by original content that is optimized for important and top-ranking keywords. Use your own voice and tone to reach out to the customers and never resort to copy and paste practice for your website content as this will be penalized. Your site’s copy must be patient-focused and not practitioner-focused. Answer some common questions and the problems faced by the patients. Outline how your practice can solve their problems. The most important thing for Dentist SEO is to optimize the content for the important and top-ranking keywords. To this end, you must do thorough research for every page of your website. The keywords must also be included in the headings, Meta info, and copy
Add your business to Google Maps
If you had ever searched for a local business, you would have known that the first result that tops the page is a map directory. This can be described as the Local 3-pack. It is important to ensure that you add your practice is added to Google maps and also optimized to rank as high as possible on the search results. To do this, you must claim your Google maps business listing, provide as much information as possible about your website, give a local phone number of a call tracking number that can work better, post some photos of your practice.
List your business on local directories and citation sites
Local directories and local citations are a great way to enhance your local dentist SEO. A mention of your practice on the web is called a local citation. Though these citations need not link to your website, they need to mention your name, address, and contact numbers.
Encourage your customers to post positive reviews
One of the most important steps in dentist SEO is to show Google that yours is a highly trusted dentist practice in the region. Patient reviews are often the most underutilized strategies for building SEO trust. Invent some nice strategies to ask for patient reviews, and it is good to follow up. Having as many great reviews as possible for your dental practice can speak for itself and also support your dentist SEO efforts.
How will you know if your SEO efforts are working?
An important part of dentist SEO strategy is to make sure that your efforts are working well. The points you must review in these lines are conversions, website traffic, keyword ranking, and reviews. Conversion refers to the action you want your patients to take. Some of these actions relevant to dentist practice include recommending calls, form submissions, online bookings, chatbot conversions, and providing driving directions. Check the column, quality, and source of the visitors to your website. Check where your page ranks for each of the keywords and how these rankings change in course of time. Respond to your patient reviews and ensure that the number of reviews is growing.
A systematic dentist SEO can get you more patients
If you are keen to grow your business successfully in today’s competitive world, it is important that you understand the importance and power of dentist SEO. After you have understood the basics of SEO we have discussed here, you might struggle when it comes to implementing the right strategies. Dentist SEO is a comprehensive task that requires a lot of time and effort from someone who knows the ins and outs of SEO and how it can be made to work well. Working with an accomplished and reliable SEO firm is the sure way to give the right direction to your SEO efforts and grow your practice.