How to Optimize Your Dental Practice Website for Local SEO

When you own your own dental practice you’re constantly looking for ways to get more patients. While there are many different marketing strategies to help you do this, we think Search Engine Optimization (SEO is one of the most effective. It can really make a difference in your bottom line and best of all, once it’s in place, it’ll keep working.

What is Dental SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of optimizing your website to get the most organic traffic from search engines. Appearing at or near the top of search engine results can increase your website traffic and patient load drastically. Local SEO is optimizing your site for the area(s) you serve.

Making Local SEO Work For Your Dental Practice

Optimizing your website for local SEO is just one more step in the optimization process. Here are a few ways to make sure your site is attracting local patients:

Keywords

If you’ve ever done any SEO work, you know keywords are important. For local SEO, this includes your location. To optimize for local SEO for your dental practice, you’ll use your services in conjunction with your location(s) in your content. For example, “Cosmetic Dentist in Raleigh” or “Pediatric Dentist in Cary.”

Be careful with this, though. You don’t need to mention your location a dozen times on a page to signify your location to Google. In fact, mentioning it too many times can result in a penalty for your site, not to mention it creates a bad user experience. Just mentioning your location a few times per page is plenty.

Google My Business

You can also get more dental patients by making sure your Google My Business listing is optimized. Google My Business is a huge part of local SEO.

First, the information in your Google listing should be accurate and up-to-date. We’ve seen a rise in people that rely on Google My Business to contact dentist offices, so it’s important to give them accurate information. The information should also match what’s on your website. An information mis-match doesn’t look trustworthy.

You also need to make sure you include all relevant categories within Google My Business so Google can more easily categorize you and, therefore, help people find you. Your business description also needs to be well-written with appropriate keywords. You can also add photos to your listing so that people can get an idea of what your practice looks like from the inside out. This increases trust and helps people feel more comfortable visiting your office.

Create Your Yelp Profile

People look for all types of businesses on Yelp, not just restaurants! In addition to Google My Business, it’s important to create profiles on popular review sites, particularly Yelp. And when people search for businesses on an iPhone via Apple Maps, it brings up your Yelp listing. Being on Yelp gives prospective patients more opportunity to find you.

You can make this easy for them to find Google My Business page and provide them a direct link. You can generate a short link with our Google Review Link Tool! We recommend either putting this on the back of your business card or creating separate cards with this information on it.

Tags: Dental Marketing • Search Engine Optimization