For your dental practice to succeed, you want to ensure you’re attracting new patients to your practice. But in the age of the Internet and an ever-expanding online market, it may feel like a challenge.
While there is a surge of competition in the online market, there are steps you can take to ensure your practice attracts new patients. When it comes to the online market, your best bet is to employ SEO, or search engine optimization.
Whether this is the first time you’ve heard of SEO or you’re looking for fresh strategies for your dental practice, we’ve put together a guide on SEO for dentists.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is an Internet marketing technique that considers what keyword terms and phrases a target audience would use to raise how your website ranks on search engine sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing. The higher you rank on a search engine results page, the more website visitors you get, which increases your chances of converting those visitors to patients.
SEO has evolved in recent years beyond keywords and phrases. While those are still important, it’s just as important to ensure that your website is easy-to-use and up-to-date with the current online trends. Here are some ways you can help ensure your SEO marketing strategy is in line with the current SEO trends:
Keep It Local
To attract potential patients, your SEO efforts should also be focused on your local area. Using keywords throughout your site that include “dental practice” and your location will help patients in your area find you on Google. It’s also important to ensure that you have correct and up-to-date listings in local online directories.
Optimize Everything
It’s important to ensure that you have as much of your website optimized as possible. This can be done in a variety of ways. Start by ensuring that all the services you offer are listed on your dental practice’s website; that way, you can make sure you reach potential patients looking for specific dental services. Each page of your website should include a description that you can pepper with keywords and phrases. You should also make sure that your page headings, titles and permalinks contain target keywords. The more you optimize, the more opportunities you have to include all the keywords and phrases you need to attract the patients you want.
Consider Patient Needs
If you’re still having a hard time thinking about what SEO keywords to use, think about what your patients want and need. If you’re still at a loss, put yourself in your patient’s shoes – what terms would you use if you were looking for a dental practice in your area?
Another way to use SEO is to answer questions your patients may have. Creating a blog for your dental practice will help you answer patient questions, whether they’re about specific dental procedures or common dental pains.
Keep Your Website Fast
SEO isn’t just about keywords – it’s also important that your site functions properly to ensure you have a good SEO ranking. Search engine Google uses site speed as an algorithm signal to rank pages. Make sure your website and mobile site have fast loading times to keep your SEO ranking high.
Add Links
Another way to increase your SEO ranking is to add links to your website. You can do this two ways: Link to other pages of your website on your site or link to other websites and articles throughout your site to help your SEO ranking.
Update When Needed
Always make sure to update your website as needed. Adding fresh content to your website helps increase the number of times a search engine indexes your website. The more you update, the more frequently search engines reassess your site’s position on its index, giving you the opportunity to have a higher ranking.
Make Sure Your Mobile Site Has SEO, Too
Don’t forget about mobile devices! Mobile sites are indexed separately from desktop websites for SEO. By optimizing your mobile site, you get twice the SOE optimization opportunities.
Like anything trendy, SEO trends change and evolve over time – sometimes in as little as a few months. To stay current with your SEO marketing strategies, consider using the services of a dental marketing company like Practice Builders. We can assess your online SEO strategies and suggest changes so you can make the most out of your marketing techniques. Visit our website to book a complimentary general dentistry marketing consultation. We’re here to help!