Dental SEO or search engine optimization is a form of dental marketing technique that helps increase the online traffic of your dental practice website. This allows your website to rank higher ranking on the SERPs or search engine results pages for relevant phrases and keywords.
When your website gets more traffic, it will let your business earn more leads that will result in bigger business volume. Unfortunately, despite SEO’s potential to attract visitors looking for dentists, many dentists tend to ignore this, depriving them of the chance to get good results.
If you happen to be a dentist, but you don’t make any dentist SEO efforts, you must remember that dentistry is a rather competitive industry. Patients in many cities have a plethora of choices when looking for a practitioner. You need a competitive and solid edge if you want to attract more new patients.
It is a must for your dental practice to have good online visibility, which is where SEO comes in handy. A good SEO strategy will help increase the organic website traffic of your dental practice and gain more patients along the way.
It is sporadic and even uncommon for prospective patients looking for a new dental practice online to go past the first page of search results. It has also been revealed that results found on the first page of the top search engines received almost all online traffic.
Below are the top reasons why SEO is essential for today’s dental practices:
Branding and Visibility
If your goal is for your potential patients to find you online easily, you need better branding and visibility. For you to enjoy this better visibility, you need to show up higher in search engine rankings.
You can gain an edge if you appear in search results for industry-related terms. For instance, many people don’t just search one time. They tend to click on a few sites, edit the criteria for the search, search again, change the search keywords further, and so on.
Considering this particular behavior, how will you be able to make your dental practice better? You can constantly show up in these search results using the keywords and key phrases that these people use during their search.
Business Credibility
You can establish the credibility of your business with the use of the right keywords and key phrases. Many people make mental notes every time they perform an online search. In the eyes of prospect patients, the ranking of your website is like a vote of confidence. For them, once they feel that Google trusts your dental practice and considers it relevant, they will also think that they can trust you as well.
Your patients might not realize it right away, but if they see your dental practice ranking higher on search engines, they will find your brand more credible.
Cost-Effectiveness
One of the best things about SEO is that it is cost-effective to target people who are already looking for your dental services or products. A good SEO strategy will help you save money instead of investing in other marketing strategies like cold-calling.
Even though cold calling remains to be an effective strategy, this can be very time-consuming with lower lead generation compared to that of an inbound strategy like SEO.
Since SEO is targeting patients who actively search for a service like yours, this makes the traffic more qualified compared to other marketing strategies that then results in more cost savings.
Higher Return on Investment
An SEO strategy that works can help increase your ROI. SEO has the capacity to reward your dental practice at a much higher rate than other forms of marketing and advertising. SEO is an inbound marketing strategy, letting you market to prospective patients during their search for relevant services or products.
If your goal is to reach out to your target audience, it is a must that you capture their undivided attention. To do it, you need to show up on the page where they land. Aside from that, you have to ensure that you stay relevant to their search by showing up every time they search for practices just like yours. Instead of convincing them to use your service, what you should do is to convey to them that it will be a worthy decision to choose your business.
Increased Website Traffic
If your dental practice appears in the highest positions on search engine results pages, you will get more clicks and impressions that will ultimately lead to higher traffic. The focus of SEO is to create meta descriptions and title tags related to the keywords, and these will be the ones to show up in results pages. Optimizing your descriptions and tags increases your clickthrough rate that will then boost your website traffic.
How to Determine If Your Dental SEO Efforts are Paying Off
One important part of a good and effective SEO strategy for your dental practice is to measure the results of the efforts you make.
Below are the data points that you need to review before anything else:
- Conversions
This involves the specific desired action that you would like your potential patients to take. It is recommended for dentists to use online bookings, form submissions, calls, driving directions, and chatbot conversations.
- Keyword rankings
It refers to the page and positions your website ranks for with every keyword and how these rankings shift over time.
- Reviews
Make sure that this number continues to grow, and don’t forget to respond to reviews of your patients.
- Website traffic
Check the quality, source, and column of your site visitors.
Conclusion
Executing and understanding an effective dental SEO and dental marketing strategy can significantly expand the reach of your dental practice. This provides your practice with more traffic, credibility, better branding, better reputation, more visibility, and ultimately, a higher ROI.