When you own your 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. Dental SEO can 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.
It’s All About Location for Dental Practices
When looking to enhance your dental practice’s online marketing presence through local SEO strategies, one of the most important aspects to remember is that patients need to know where your specific dental practice is located in relation to them.
If your dental practice’s website doesn’t currently have Google Maps embedded within it, then it’s about time to change that.
Leaving dental SEO value aside for a moment, this tool gives your website visitor the ability to have an interactive view of your local office and to get a better understanding of where your dental practice is specifically in relation to other local landmarks and businesses.
Google Maps embedding is a key component to a quality dental web design layout and should not be overlooked for the amount of value it provides to both patients and your dental SEO strategy.
Lastly, consistent up-to-date address information is also essential to any dental SEO strategy, especially when it comes to brick-and-mortar businesses such as dentistry locations.
Whether your offices only have one location or multiple, any information mismatches could make your business look untrustworthy and could likely confuse past, present, and future patients alike. So it always pays to check your local directory listings from time to time to verify that all of your addresses are correct and current.
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.
<H3> 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 who rely on Google My Business to contact dentist offices and find directions to their offices, so it’s important to give them accurate information.
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.
Social Media
Social media’s usefulness for dental SEO marketing is perhaps one of the most under-utilized opportunities for your local dental practice to stand out from other offices. While it may seem like there’s not much worthwhile to post about on socials, the only limit is your imagination.
Office updates, new services and staff, lobby renovations, employee pets, and more are all relevant forms of content that are informative and engaging for both current and prospective patients alike.
Even if you were to only post once a month on each of your socials, you’d still be providing valuable content and updates about your dental practice. And let’s not forget that social media accounts provide additional links to your office, which carries a lot of weight as far as dental SEO marketing is concerned.
Current social media platforms to add your dental practice profile into (if you don’t have all of these already) include:
- Facebook Page – Great way to keep customers updated on your dental practice as a whole.
- Instagram – Share photos/videos of new staff, office space changes, relatable content, and more.
- Twitter (X) – Quick and easy way to give brief updates on any current office news.
- LinkedIn – Connect with other local professionals and find quality talent.
- Reddit – Great for answering general questions relating to dentistry as a whole.
- YouTube Shorts – Give a behind-the-scenes view of what the company culture within your dental practice is like in more of a fun, less formal method.
Create A Yelp Profile for Your Dental Practice
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.
Get Reviews
You can also improve your dental SEO by encouraging positive reviews. If you know a patient has had a good experience, ask them to leave a review.
Many patients will be more than happy to do this. Online reviews can help your dental practice rank higher on local maps whenever people are searching for local dentists in their area.
Make TheeDigital Your Dental SEO Partner!
Want to learn more? Get started by giving us a call at 919-341-8901 or by sending us a message!
