As a dentist, you know that your services are essential for maintaining good oral health, but how do you ensure that potential patients in your local area can find you online? The answer is through dental SEO, or local SEO for dentists.
What is it?
Dental SEO marketing is the process of optimising your dental practice’s website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant search queries. The ultimate goal of dental SEO marketing is to attract more local patients to your practice by increasing your online visibility. There is no point having a fancy website, if nobody is going to see it, after all! And, no. Your mum’s 100 clicks don’t count!
How will a marketing company help?
There are various ways that a marketing company can help to improve your visibility with SEO. Firstly, they will use local keywords. This is the first step to optimising your dental practice’s website as they are keywords that include your city, town, or neighbourhood. For example, if your practice is located in Sydney, you might use keywords like ‘Sydney dentist’ or ‘dentist in Sydney’.
Another way that a marketing company can help is by optimising your website’s metadata. Metadata is the information that appears in search engine results pages for your website. This includes your title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. By optimising these elements with local keywords and compelling copy, you can increase the likelihood that potential patients will click through to your website. They will also be able to produce local content, such as blog posts, that is relevant to your community. This can help to improve your SEO presence because if a blog article is written about a local charity that your dental practice is sponsoring, by including keywords in the content, it will increase the likelihood of potential patients in your area finding your website.
A further strategy used by marketing companies is to build local citations. These are mentions of your dental practice’s name, address, and phone number on other websites. Building these can help to improve your SEO by increasing your traffic through your increased visibility and credibility. They may build local citations in local directories or social media platforms, for example.
Is it worth it?
If you’re still considering why it is worth investing in the services of a third party company to promote your business, then you may like to imagine how time consuming it would be to do it yourself, when you should be devoting your time to all of your patients, new and old. While this may be something you could dip your toe into (metaphorically, of course) this is a service that people have trained in and are familiar with; they will also have the time to devote to promoting your business, whereas you could find you don’t. So, make the move to find an SEO marketing company that has experience of dental practices and you shouldn’t have to look back; just get ready to welcome all of your new patients.
Any surgical or invasive procedure carries risks. Before proceeding you should seek a second opinion from an appropriately qualified health practitioner.
