Dental SEO Guide for Clinics and Dentists to Attract New Patients

One exciting thing that I’ve witnessed doing dental SEO marketing is there isn’t a specific age or audience group that you can avoid from the SEO campaign. 

Unless evolution makes all of us toothless, everyone, even a random person walking down the street, can be your potential patient.

I know similar thoughts may have gone through your mind when starting your dental office website. 

When there are so many prospects out there roaming around with not-so-perfect teeth, why wouldn’t they book an appointment with you online?

I had this client who started his dental website with the same aspiration. On one of my initial discussion calls, he said: 

Doc: It seems like the Dental hygiene programs in the US have improved multifold…

Me: Why do you say that? 

Client: I see fewer bookings now!

LOL 

If the low organic traffic and meager bookings are making you think in similar lines, let me tell you there hasn’t been a better time to get more patients than now. 

With people using internet-enabled devices more than ever to get their information – from checking the weather to finding movie timings to booking appointments with their doctor, your patients are just a stone’s throw away. 

But why aren’t they landing on your website if that’s the case? What’s it that’s stopping them from taking their phones to make the bookings? 

The truth is they ARE doing it, but for your competitors. 

Yeah, I know that hurts. 

This doesn’t mean your competitors are better than you or have some magic wand that attracts patients. It’s just that your patients don’t see you on the top of Google search. 

Let me explain this with a bit more context:

You know the kind of people who visit a dentist – some patients are writhing with pain, a few are depressed because of a tooth deformity, and there might be parents who are worried about a hanging tooth in a toddler. 

In all these scenarios, they are concerned, and they want quick assistance. Since smart gadgets are the new-age conscience keepers, they immediately reach out to them. 

The first thing they do is go to their phones, open Google, and type “best dentists near me,” or if they want to learn more about possible solutions, they may type “how to treat tooth impaction.”

In both these cases, they click on the website that appears on the top of the search listing and ignore the rest. 

If you aren’t seeing people coming to your dental office website, making the booking, and revisiting you for a follow-up, these symptoms suggest you need the help of a dental SEO expert today.

What is Dental SEO?

By now, you already have a dental website up and running. But how can your patients find out about it? You could hand out business cards but even for that, you’d have to meet them at places they frequently visit, right?

Well, thankfully, since 85% or more global searches are happening within Google, that’s where you can first meet your patients. 

Dental SEO is the process of optimizing your dental website to make it appear on the top of the search results when a prospective patient types in a relevant search query. 

Leveraging SEO for dental practices will ensure you make it difficult for your rivals to steal your patients.
On the flip side, SEO for dental websites can help dominate the Google search results page for important dental keywords and thereby rope in competitors’ customers ethically!

What I mean to say is when you have optimized your website for SEO, ranking for highly searched keywords such as “dentists near me”, “dental office”, and dental implant in us becomes easy.

So, if you aren’t happy with the number of footfalls to your dental office, the latter part of this blog is going to show you how SEO marketing for dentists can attract people like bees to a honeypot.

Importance Of Doing Dental SEO

Are you forced to conduct free dental camps or send postcards or send direct emails just because people aren’t visiting your dental office? This means you need to think about doing SEO for your dental office seriously.

You are trying to find new patients for your dental office using the above strategies. However, you get the same outcome when SEO is done right, like clockwork without even lifting a finger. 

Let me tell you the truth about today’s Dental industry. If your patients are not finding you on Google, you indirectly show them the route to your competitor’s clinic. Here is how:

People Trust Dental Office Ranking Higher on Google

Over the years, people have the perception that any dental website that’s ranking higher on Google search is the best. 

But the truth is, there are hundreds of other dentists and dental firms out there who aren’t ranking there on the top just because they ignored doing SEO. 

It’s such a big miss for these sites, which despite doing all the hard work and providing superior service, are reeling behind inferior competitors on the search results. 

Do you know that the dental website ranking #1 on Google gets 2x more calls and bookings than the second position? 

That’s because people generally ignore the sites ranking below on the search results page.

You Get More Traffic

With higher rankings on Google comes more traffic. So when you get more people to visit your website, you get as many more opportunities to convert them into your patients. 

Of course, not all the people landing on your dental website are looking for your service. A few of them may be looking for information. 

It’s essential to address the needs of such an audience as well because they could be your future patients. 

With a proper dental SEO strategy implemented, you can target both immediate and future patients. While people looking for immediate dental assistance are directed to your service page, those looking for information are moved to your resource pages.
By adopting this strategy, you can satisfy the needs of both types of people who may visit your dental website.

Chances are, you may see more people coming to the resource page than your dental service page. This is normal, and you should consider it an opportunity to woo them and introduce your services.

Make the Visitors Stay Longer

The more time users spend on your website; the higher chances are they will choose you as their preferred dental clinic. 

To make the users spend more time on your website, you must provide them with a great user experience. 

One of the important steps in SEO optimization is making your dental website highly user-friendly. That’s because Google considered the user experience as an important factor to rank higher. 

If a user spends less than a few seconds on a dental website, that indicates that the website isn’t providing a great experience. Over a period, Google’s algorithm will demote the site’s ranking and replace it with the one that satisfies the user’s intent. 

Additionally, the load speed and the responsiveness of the website on mobile devices also provide a better user experience and, for that reason, is one of the milestones in SEO optimization.

Your Competitors are Using SEO to Rank Higher

Have you heard of the term peer pressure? It’s absolutely true with SEO. Most businesses and website owners out there are doing SEO because their competitors are using it to rank higher.

If you decide not to do SEO for your dental clinic website, it becomes an opportunity for your competitor. Sooner or later you will start noticing the traffic plummeting and bookings decreasing.

This means, there is no reason why you should overlook SEO if your goal is to run a successful dental website. 

Adding to this, SEO isn’t a do-it-and-forget strategy. SEO best practices are and businesses that add it as part of their long term strategy because that’s when you reap the most benefit. 

SEO Factors That Decide the Rankings of Your Dental Website 

There are multiple SEO factors that Google considers when ranking a dental website.

On-Site Optimization 

On-site SEO or on-page SEO deals with optimizing the elements within your website to improve search rankings. 

Though some SEO professionals consider technical SEO as part of the on-page factor, we will deal with that separately because it’s a giant in itself. 

It’s essential to understand how Google crawls and indexes your website before moving further. 

This is how the story begins. 

When you add a sitemap on Google’s Search Console (or if you don’t have one, Google’s robots trace you through other methods), they crawl the page and then add it to the index first. 

During the indexing process, the search engine algorithm makes an effort to understand the content. This helps it segment your content within its highly diverse knowledge graph and deliver it whenever a user enters a relevant search query. 

In your case, Google’s algorithm will be able to identify the site falling into the dental category based on the content and the metadata provided. 

The higher relevance Google’s bot finds in your content and metadata, the higher chance of the site and its pages to rank on the top positions. 

That means on-page optimization helps a website to add more relevance to the content for the search queries entered by the target audience. 

Here are some dental SEO tips focused on on-page optimization. 

Define Page Type and Purpose 

Google tries to understand from your content, the type of website and pages that you have, and the purpose it serves.

In the case of your dental website, it will index the service pages as a different entity with buying or purchase intent and the blog page as a different entity with informational intent. 

By sorting pages based on the intent, Google is trying to provide the users the best possible result based on the type of search query entered. 

All the advancements Google has made in the past are rooted in delivering the best results for the users. That’s what is running the show for Google’s allied services as well. 

In this case, a person who is looking for more information on a particular dental procedure sees your blog on the search results page whereas the one looking for an implant sees the service page to book the consultation. 

All this can be achieved by optimizing the on-page SEO elements such as the page title, meta title, meta descriptions, content, internal links, alt text of images, and the navigation throughout your site.

Establishing E.E.A.T. Authority for YMYL Site

Did you know that Google has made it really difficult for medical websites to rank higher on search results? That’s because there have been clamors from different quarters to vet further the results that are showing up for health and wellness-related search queries. 

There have been multiple instances where people got into trouble blindly following steps and procedures mentioned on mediocre health websites that ranked higher on Google. Also, there are numerous litigations that the search giant is facing across the globe. 

This is why Google has been stressing about following the E E A T guidelines for any website under the YMYL category. YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life and E.E.A.T. for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. 

Any site that directly impacts the users’ health, wellness, life, and financial security fall under the YMYL category. For such sites to rank higher, they must ensure the highest level of professional expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in the industry. 

Since dental websites fall under this category, you must enable on-site factors such as the author bio, the people behind the dental firm, about us, and awards and recognitions. You must display them prominently across the site wherever required. 

Ascertaining Page Quality

Why should you rank higher than your competitors? If you look from Google’s perspective, your dental website is just like any other website in its index. So, what is going to make you stand out? 

To become Google’s top choice, you need first to make their users happy. 

I mean to say that gone are the days when you vehemently made the content Googlebot-friendly and ignored the users while doing so. 

Google’s algorithms are now based on Natural Language Processing which is rooted in the neural model. This means that Google understands the meaning of the content word by word, sentence by sentence. Thanks to Google’s BERT and LAMDA algorithms. 

So, if Google finds your content superior to that of your competitors, there is a high chance that it will give you a ranking push. However, you can achieve this only by optimizing the content with highly relevant unique information. 

Off-Site SEO Optimization

As the name suggests, off-site SEO implies optimizing the ranking factors outside of your dental website. 

When off-page or the term off-site is used, it generally means an external quality signal that tells Google the worthiness of ranking your dental site above others. 

Ever since its origin, Google has been using the PageRank algorithm to determine the off-page quality signals. This algorithm looks into the external links pointing to your website to determine the quality. 

Though reviews about your dental firm on other platforms and the doctors’ reputation are off-page signals, the quality of backlinks you have received from other sites is what matters the most. 

Backlinks are the external links that point to your dental website from other websites. Google considers your website an authority one when high authority domains in the medical niche link back to you. 

For Google, backlinks from high authority relevant websites are votes of trust and confidence to rank you higher. 

Unlike the on-page SEO factors that are entirely under the website owner’s control, off-page activities, especially link building, require the support of other websites. 

Having said that, you cannot go and ask any website out there to give you a backlink. Think why? Because it will backfire as Google considers that as a spammy practice intended to trick its algorithm. 

As a dental website owner, you must strive to get backlinks contextually placed inside content that’s published on a relevant medical website. 

There are many ways to get backlinks; we have done an in-depth article about different methods of building quality backlinks. 

However, we will talk about two methods that are considered highly effective for medical websites, especially in the dental niche. 

Blogger Outreach Backlinks

As I told you above, a dental website needs backlinks from a health, medical or wellness-based website. Getting a link from a finance or technology website will just add up the numbers but Google will ignore those as they can’t find relevance in those. 

So, the best method is to reach out to niche-specific websites manually. But here is the thing, why would they give you a link to your dental site? You might be thinking of paying them.

Google is omnipresent within the internet and they hate building such backlinks. If their algorithms detect any such suspicious activity, penalization is on the cards. 

You don’t have to take this ominous path to build backlinks. All that you need to do is to create an irresistible content asset that’s unique to your dental firm. It could be something data-based or a research analysis done by your doctors. 

You can share this high-value asset with relevant websites and get backlinks. However, you need to sort high-quality sites alone. 

Not sure how to do it? My team can help you out to sort the best websites and send customized emails to get quality backlinks. 

Guest Posts 

There are a handful of sites out there that are in need of high-quality content from niche-relevant experts. One of the best ways to get backlinks is by asking them to publish your guest post. 

Coming to the medical niche, a dental niche in particular, not even a seasoned content writer can share valuable and authentic insights. This means you as an expert in the dental niche can compose articles and there will be a lot of sites waiting in line to get them published. 

By strategically placing a backlink to your website within the content, you get the backlink required to rank higher. Additionally, most of the genuine guest post sites publish guest posts under the bio of the guest author. This can fetch you additional brand and professional visibility, which are things that Google deeply value. 

Want help publishing guest posts on authentic websites? Our Guest Posting service can help you identify the best guest post sites for the dental niche and secure high-quality backlinks. 

Technical SEO

For Google to rank your dental website higher it should first discover, crawl and index your website. 

There are factors under the hood of your site that may close the doors at Googlebots. As a result of this, your site loses the opportunity to rank or even show up on Google. 

Doing an in-depth technical SEO audit will ensure your website is crawlable and indexable. 

Though this is the primary goal of technical SEO, there are a lot of other optimization factors that can speed up the process of ranking higher.

WebVitals: Core Web Vitals, which is the metric that Google uses to assess the load speed of a page, has to be optimized to accelerate your ranking. 

Sitemap Optimization: Creating a sitemap that excludes irrelevant pages and includes the must index pages based on hierarchy is critical to getting important pages crawled frequently. 

Duplicate Content Issues: There are chances of identical pages appearing on your website. This can confuse Google which page to rank. To avoid such circumstances SEOs use canonicalization and 301 redirects. 

International Targeting: For websites that target an international audience speaking different languages, it’s imperative to create pages with language-specific content. However, your site must tell Google about this using the Hreflang Tag. 

Error Codes: There are chances that a few pages may fail to load and display error codes. These codes convey unique meanings and it’s the task of the technical SEO expert to fix them. 

Schema Integration: Google uses schema data or structured data for better understanding the content within a page. As a dental website, you must use the Local Business schema as it can improve the chances of ranking for local search keywords. 

Technical SEO issues pulling your organic traffic down? Book a call with our expert and get it fixed once and forever. 

Local SEO

Local SEO is crucial for your dental practice because it allows your dental practice to take full advantage of increased visibility in your locality. 

Do you know that 72% of patients searching for any local services, including dentists go to Google to find them? Additionally, there is a high chance that they might choose the ones that are ranking higher and within the 5-mile radius from their location. 

Dentist local SEO allows your dental practice to take full advantage of increased visibility in your locality.

With local SEO, you get to tap into all the patients looking for your services in the neighborhood. However, you must follow a few strategies to optimize your website for local SEO. 

Add Dental Office to Google Business Profile

It’s not always that Google will rank your website for Local SEO search queries. 

Try doing a quick Google search for the keyword, dentists near me. 

You can see that the top-ranking ones are all Google Business Profiles.

These results are called map-pack, and the way to get your dental clinic listed there is by getting enlisted into Google Business Profile.

Here’s what to do:

• Claim your business in GBP.
• Add relevant information and description of your practice with images.
• Update your Address, phone number, website, and working hours/days
• You will receive a secret code from Google to verify the business listing within a few days.

Local directories and citations

Getting your website listed in top directories and getting a mention on sites across the web can improve the local search visibility. 

If you are looking at a genuine listing site, they may offer only no-follow backlinks. But that’s absolutely fine as the intention is to get your dental firm’s name, address, and phone number displayed in places where the target audience spends more time.

Example of listing sites for dental practitioners:

• Healthgrades
• ZocDoc
• Yelp

How Much will Dental SEO Services Cost?

I get it. After reading through all of this, you might be thinking your pockets are going to get burnt, right?

Don’t worry, that won’t be the case if you choose an affordable SEO service for dentists to get tailored needs met. I’m pretty sure the reason why you are here is because you don’t really have much budget to go with, right? 

That’s fine. There are SEO service providers like Stan Ventures who can get all the SEO heavy lifting for your dental website at 60-70% less cost than you are currently incurring. 

But before that, let’s take a look at the ROI you can generate once you make it to the top positions of Google. 

There isn’t a separate formula to calculate the ROI for Dental websites. However, the same formula that can be applied to all industries is applicable here as well. 

However, you first need to be clear with the lifetime value of the patients you get. 

Most successful businesses use the following formula to calculate yearly SEO ROI in percentage: 

(Profit Generated from Organic Conversions  – Total Spending on SEO) / Total Spending on SEO x 100

Let’s say you are spending $5000 dollars per year on SEO and getting a profit of 70,000. 

Here is how you can calculate the SEO ROI:

(70,000 – 5,000) / 5,000

65,000 / 5,000

13 *100

1300.00%

Wow, that’s such a massive revenue generated. So, what if I told you you don’t essentially have to spend even half of what we estimated above and get much higher revenue than we have predicted? 

Thinking it’s impossible?

We are ready to take up the challenge and get your dental website to the top positions of Google for just a fraction of what we estimated and you get all these: 

• 15 CornerStone BackLinks
• 4 X DA 50+ Blogger Outreach Links
• 3 X DA 40+ Guest Post
• 3 X DA 30+ Guest Post
• Technical SEO Fixes
• Directory Listing
• Citations
• GBP Creation and Optimization
• Keyword Performance Tracking
• Monthly Performance Review
• Dedicated Account Manager
• Contextual Links to Blog and Service Pages

The amount you are going to spend on all this will account for less than 2-4% of your returns. So, only a lunatic can ignore such a highly scalable SEO strategy. Don’t wait. Hit the live chat below to get assistance from our SEO team.