What Is Dental SEO, and Does It Work?

Dental SEO, also known as dental search engine optimization, is the process of refining your website so it appears higher in organic rankings. While organic rankings will appear below-paid results, organic rankings are free. It will takes longer to see the results from dental SEO work, but it is cost-effective in the long term from a marketing budget perspective.

It will takes longer to see the results from dental SEO work, but it is cost-effective in the long term from a marketing budget perspective. Pay-per-click ads can provide immediate results, however this is a high-cost way to get a website in front of the eyes of potential patients. Marketing money is better spent on long-term projects, like dental SEO. Below are some areas of dental SEO that dental practices and their owners should consider when making improvements.

Dental SEO Example: A potential patient searching for “invisalign pricing in Toledo OH”

Question 1. How do the keywords impact dental SEO, and how do I select them?
Question 2. How does the content of a dental practice impact dental SEO?
Question 3. How does the site speed of my dental website impact Dental SEO?
Question 4. Why does my dental website need to be mobile-friendly, and does that impact Dental SEO?
Question 5. How do referral links improve my dental SEO?
Question 6. Does offline or traditional marketing impact a dental practice’s online dental SEO?

Question 1. How do the keywords impact dental SEO, and how do I select them?

A crucial part of dental SEO is the keywords you select. Keywords can be one more word that you focus on when improving a dental practice’s SEO. These keywords will be the words that potential patients will use when searching for their dental health solutions. These words will be used in search engines to produce results, both paid and organic. To improve the overall SEO for a dental practice, these keywords need to appear throughout the content of its website. With that said, these words can not be plastered in every sentence of every paragraph of every page. “Keywords stuffing” is frown on by search engines and will not help Dental SEO, and may result in ranking penalties. The keywords must also be relevant to the topic of that page. For example, if your dental practice offers dental braces, the keywords used on that page should relate to dental braces and not another service, like root canals.

As for the words that a dental practice should choose for its keywords, they should focus on the words potential patients will most likely use in their search. If you can match the exact words and phrases they use in their search query; the more likely your website will appear in organic results. These keywords should include everyday words and terms for dental services and the official medical names to improve your site’s authority. The keywords you select should contain both short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are keywords that are three words or less and tend to be very general and broad. Long-tail keywords are four or more words and are usually very specific. Short-tail keywords typically get a lot of search volume but with lower conversion rates, while long-tail keywords are the opposite. Both types of keywords should be focused on. Some examples of them are:

Short-Tail Keywords

Dentist Near Me
Dental Services
Dentist Open Today

Long-Tail Keywords

Dentist near me that accepts blue cross blue shield
Dentist that offers self-pay options
Nearest Dentist that uses anesthesia

Question 2. How does the content of a dental practice impact dental SEO?

Your website can not be made up entirely of SEO keywords. The content that fills in the rest of your website is going to be vital. A dental practice wants to strike a nice balance when it comes to the length of a page. It can not be too short, and it also does not need to be a novel. A factor that impacts dental SEO is the amount of time a patient spends on a website. If you write 50 words, that will not keep their attention for very long. If you write 5,000 words, they are likely to take one look at that, click on the back button, and then find a competitor. All in all, a page should have at least 500 words, if not at least 1,000. That amount of content will generally give the website visitor enough to read, educate them, and spend a decent amount of time on your site.

Content marketing, another area of digital marketing, also plays a role in Dental SEO. The content on a dental practice’s website should be continuously updated, refined, expanded, and more should be added throughout the year. Search engines like a website that is up to date, so continuously updating a site will boost the SEO value. Updates should be made incrementally throughout the year. Try to review content pages at least once a year to make sure they are relevant, up to date, and nothing needs to be rephrased. You may find a random grammatical error or that a sentence could be written better. If all of your content is perfect, consider starting a monthly blog to talk about specific dental health topics. Written in your own words, this is a great way to put unique, authoritative content on your website.

Question 3. How does the site speed of my dental website impact Dental SEO?

How fast your website loads completely for website visitors to explore is known as site speed. Site speed plays a significant role in the organic rankings of a dental website. Search engines strive to provide their users with the best, relevant results and the best experience. A website visitor does not have an excellent experience if they have to wait and wait for a site to load. You lose website visitors every second it takes for a site to load. Search engines will also see that visitors quickly click back and look at other results, indicating your site is not relevant. When search engines crawl websites better to understand the content on it for their search results, they will also examine the site speed.

While there could be any number of reasons why a site is slow, there are three general culprits:

Imagines Not Optimized For Web – The images on your site need to be optimized for your website. Do not use large high-resolution photos on your site. While these are certainly preferred for traditional marketing items like flyers, they will only slow down a site’s load time. Reduce them in size, so they still look good on your site but are quick to load.

Videos Hosted On-Site – Videos are a great way to market to potential patients, but these files are larger in size than the photos. They should not be hosted on your website. It will take a significant amount of time for that movie to load, making it harder for your site to load fully. It will likely impact the user experience. Instead, load your video to a video hosting site like YouTube or Vimeo. These sites allow you to embed videos on to a dental website and quickly load them without impacting the site speed of the website.

Code Interference: What someone sees on a website is not everything a website has to offer. Behind the scenes, there are codes for analytics, tracking, and marketing all working on a site for various purposes. Even embedding a video into a website involves installing code. Sometimes codes need to be updated or they become obsolete and a security risk. The updating of one code can impact another. Codes need to be monitored carefully to ensure they function correctly without slowing down the site speed.

Site speed needs to be monitored constantly. Just because your site was speedy one month means it will continue to be that quick. Monitoring site speed can help you get ahead of any problems that might crop up. To check the speed of your dental website, Google has a very good tool, https://web.dev/measure/

Question 4. Why does my dental website need to be mobile-friendly, and does that impact Dental SEO?

Your dental practice’s website must be mobile-friendly. This means it needs to have every function it would have with a visit on a desktop computer, load quickly, and be easy to navigate. Many dental practices will see most of their website traffic come from mobile devices, not desktop computers. Mobile devices are generally considered to be smartphones with internet access. Tablets are sometimes grouped into this category and sometimes kept separate. This means more people are likely to see your website on their phone than their computer, which is why you need to have an excellent mobile site.

Google also has a separate search database for those using mobile devices. Your website may rank very well in desktop searches, but it may not rank at all if you have a poor mobile website experience. A dental practice can not assume good SEO results on desktop computers will automatically mean good mobile results. A good mobile experience will help your site rank higher in mobile results.

Ideally, your dental practice should have a responsive website. This type of website automatically rearranges itself depending on the size of a screen it is displayed on. Another approach is to have two sites, a desktop and mobile version. This is not recommended as it is time-consuming to keep both sites up to date, and mistakes can happen. A responsive site is a preferred way to ensure a website displays correctly.

Question 5. How do referral links improve my dental SEO?

When a search engine decides how relevant and authoritative a website is, a factor it considers is what other websites are linking to it. If other websites link to a dental practice’s website, that shows some trust that dental practice is relevant and trustworthy. The more sites that link to it, the more important it will look. With that in mind, not every link to a dental website is a valuable one. Some sites are considered to be “link farms.” These sites have little to no content and only links to other sites. These links often hurt SEO value and should be disavowed by a website to prevent being penalized.

While it is unlikely that another dentist will link to your website, you can find local directories, business clubs, or medical associations that will have a list of members and their websites. These are often great ways to build referral links and referral traffic to your site. Blogs can also be a great way to obtain links from other sites, especially bloggers. If you write an excellent blog about a dental health topic, another writer may link to it as a reference to what they are writing about. They will link to it to show people where they can find more information or link to it to prove a point they are making.

Referral links are among the hardest things to obtain, but they are very valuable. While many sites that link to a dental practice will end in .com, be on the lookout for opportunities to get linked on a .edu, .gov, or .org website. These websites are considered more authoritative than other.com websites. A link from there can help boost overall SEO over time.

Question 6. Does offline or traditional marketing impact a dental practice’s online dental SEO?

While it may seem strange to think about it, actions a dental practice takes in its offline marketing strategies can impact dental SEO. There are several different ways a potential patient can find their way to your dental website. If they use a search engine and click on an organic result, this is known as organic traffic. If they click on an ad, this is categorized as paid traffic. If they come to your website due to a link from another website, this is known as referral traffic. The final type of traffic, often not fully appreciated, is direct traffic. Direct traffic is when someone types in the URL of your website. The more website visitors who do this, the more authoritative a website appears to search engines.

Direct traffic can come from frequent patients who know the URL by heart. Another source of direct traffic can be through traditional or offline marketing. For example, direct mail marketing remains popular among some dental practice owners to reach people in the community. These mailers, be it postcards or flyers, will often have the website URL listed with a call to action. It would be unwise for a mailer to say “Google Dentists Near Me!” and hope the right website appears. When patients in their home type in a site’s URL, this will appear as direct traffic. Direct traffic is also an excellent way to tell if your offline marketing efforts are working. While it will be hard to tell, spikes in traffic after things are mailed out are usually a good indication.

The experts at PatientGain.com can help you improve your dental SEO on your website. Speak to our team today, and let us show you what we have done for other dental practices across the country.