Content
SEO for Dentists: 8 Essential Techniques to Achieve Top Google Ranking
April 11, 2024
15 mins
Today, Promodo healthcare marketers are sharing core search engine optimization (SEO) benefits for dental practices. You are welcome to learn feasible optimization approaches that will boost your website ranking. There’s lots of SEO homework to make your dental service competitive, so keep on reading…
Dental SEO is a digital marketing strategy to optimize a dental website for search engine optimization to improve its visibility and wider outreach in organic search results.
With over 1.2 m. monthly searches for the “dentist near me” on Google in the United States, SEO plays a crucial role in competitive dental practices.
That said, if patients do not find your dental practice when they search for relevant keywords, you’ll lose much of your potential profit to your competitors.
Now is the time to dive deeper into the dentist search engine optimization with Promodo healthcare marketers.
As an essential part of your search marketing strategy, you’ll pursue dental SEO. That’s how you’ll optimize the online presence of your dental practice and get wider exposure in unpaid search engine results.
Take dental SEO as a strategically vital marketing approach to:
🦷 Match dental services with patient search intent
🦷 Get your website higher on search engine results pages (SERPs)
🦷 Acquire new patients.
Fundamentally, dental SEO is about earning higher Google rankings by matching your services with popular local search queries like "dentist in Cherry Hill," or “walk in dentist in Cherry Hill”. Typical long-keyword phrases like these reflect patient intent for dental services like yours.
If your dentistry practice provides "tooth extraction," Google organic search results will match relevant user queries with your offers. That’s how more patients will visit your website and make appointments with your practice.
Regardless of your dentistry type, company size, or location, dental SEO is equally important for:
🦷 Endodontists
🦷 General dentists
🦷 Orthodontists
🦷 Pediatric dentists
🦷 Periodontists
🦷 Prosthodontists
🦷 Oral surgeons
A prominent ranking is critical while some 34.2% of users click on the top organic result, whereas a mere 2.6% would spot you organically when you rank in position 10.
Here’s a list of the proven SEO dental tactics that will help you boost your digital marketing performance in 2024 and beyond. Unlike other businesses, the focus of dental SEO is bound to the physical location of your practice.
Leveraging the best on-page SEO practices will help you optimize your webpage.
This way, you’ll rank higher for relevant keywords and bring more new patients. Most of all, you’ll want to get qualified leads (SQLs) by encouraging your dental website users to take a desired action or book an appointment at your dental practice.
Our best advice here is to add your primary keyword, the one you would like to rank for to your:
✅ Title tag
✅ Meta description
✅ H1 tag
✅ The first paragraph of your body content.
Fill your content with relevant keywords, though do not overplay it. Learn how your competitors mix short-tail and long-tail keyword combinations in their blog posts and follow the average industry’s benchmarks.
We’ve generated relevant samples of long-tail keywords for your dental practice:
🦷 Advanced dental implant surgery options in [location]
🦷 Dental crowns and bridges for restoring smiles in [location]
🦷 Emergency dental care open weekends in [location]
🦷 Emergency tooth extraction services available 24/7 in [location]
🦷 Family dentist for children in [location]
🦷 Painless root canal therapy near [location]
🦷 Preventive dental care for seniors in [location]
🦷 Teeth grinding treatment options in [location]
🦷 Teeth whitening specials for new patients in [location]
To level up your search engine optimization performance, use trusted online tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.
Semantic HTML will help Google understand the purpose of the contents of your pages. In particular, semantic HTML tags: header, article, and footer will clearly define the meaning of the content on your website for Google algorithms and users seeking dental services like yours.
Inserting Schema Markup tags for your local dentistry business is the surest way to let your potential patients find all useful data related to your performance:
- Name
- Address
- Phone number
- Opening hours.
This data will also let Google enhance your visibility in rich snippets in SERPs. Special result snippets include extra information about your dental practice beyond your website's meta description.
Building internal links between your pages is another on-page practice that will help patients browse smoothly through your site.
To keep up with harsh rivalry and gain competitive advantages, benefit from Website SEO Health Checker. This will help you compare your website performance against your closest competitors and top-ranking counterparts, and optimize your pages to get higher rankings in the SERPs.
Technical SEO concerns full optimization of your website performance, including speed and security issues.
At Promodo, we deploy core web vitals audits to make your site rank higher in SERPs and ensure enhanced user experience (UX).
In the case of dental practice SEO, we optimize our clients’ sites so they can reach more patients and make bookings.
We deploy cutting-edge website audit tools to mitigate maximum errors and hazards, including
✅ Slow page speeds
✅ Invalid structured data
✅ Missed title tags
✅ Broken links
✅ Outdated security certificates.
Diving deeper into local keyword research, you’ll find relevant queries browsed by your target.
You should know what your potential patients are seeking online, so be sure to explore the most popular searches and match your dental content accordingly. This practice alone will improve the SEO effort for your local dental practice.
Furthermore, adding local dentistry-related keywords to your website content and Business Profile will make your practice rank higher on Google search results and win more clicks from potential patients:
🦷 Affordable dental care [location]
🦷 Best dentist in [location]
🦷 Cosmetic dentistry services [location]
🦷 Dental emergency [location]
🦷 Dentist near me
🦷 Emergency dental care [location]
🦷 Family dentist [location]
There are three main features to match while generating local keywords for your dental practice:
User intent indicates what exact result patients want to get from you
Keyword search volume stands for the average number of monthly searches
Keyword difficulty (KD) is the score that measures a keyword for how hard it is to rank high.
Search engine results pages (SERPs) analysis will let you spot patient intent behind each query and understand how competitive are the keywords you are using on your dental website.
On December 15, 2022, Google added Experience to Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The E-E-A-T framework places competitive requirements on content quality on your dental practice website.
Dentistry falls into Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) agenda, which means that patient health and well-being are of prime importance.
Our expert says: Recently, with each Google’s core update, dentists have significantly increased organic traffic. Compliance with the E-E-A-T factors is of paramount importance here; otherwise, dental businesses risk getting a negative impact during a core update. Kseniia Vasilyeva, Team Lead at SEO Department.
Essentially, E-E-A-T success is all about:
🦷 Displaying your professional accreditations
🦷 Providing transparent data about your dentists and their qualifications
🦷 Showcasing your expertise with quality dental practice content
🦷 Including peer reviews and credible sources.
First off, leverage all the benefits of Google Business Profile as a free online tool that will help you lets you manage your business listing on Google.
Setting a Google Business Profile (GBP) for your dental practice is the best way to:
🔎 List your local dental practice
🔎 Get wider exposure and rank higher in Google search and Google Maps.
Whenever potential patients search for the nearest dentist, they usually refer to Google Maps. That’s when your Google Business Profile comes into play by highlighting your:
🔎 Location
🔎 Opening hours
🔎 Contact details
🔎 Staff photos and profiles
🔎 Dental practice images and description
🔎 Patient reviews
Having a Google Business Profile is more than decisive for the ranking success of your dentistry. There are three core pillars here:
Visibility: patients are turning to Google Maps to spot the nearest dental offices, especially in times of emergency. So, having an optimized GBP will empower you with a comparative advantage for local searches.
Trust: You’ll build greater patient trust and enhance Google ratings for your dental practice owing to patient reviews. The more transparent you are, the higher the likelihood of attracting new patients to your dentistry.
Engagement: Make sure to update your GBP data like post updates, photos, services, seasonal offers, and live events among others to engage more with your potential and existing patients.
Insights: GBP’s in-built analytics will help you understand the way new patients find your practice and the places they come from.
After claiming your GBP, go the extra mile to update the listing with all possible information related to your dental practice to make your listing rank higher on Google.
Keep all the data like name, address, and phone (NAP) accurate and up-to-date. You may additionally align your NAP with the US Postal Service (USPS) requisites:
🔎 State
🔎 City
🔎 Corporate street address
🔎 Zip code.
There’s also a bunch of niche-specific advice for optimizing your Google Business Profile:
🦷 Instead of “dental clinic” insert “dentist” in the primary category
🦷 For the secondary category choose no more than2-3 dental services
🦷 Fill the Services section with all your services
🦷 Apply all twenty location slots
🦷 Make posts twice a month with a link to your dental website
🦷 Once you have a scheduling link for appointments, add it
🦷 Update information on the insurance types you accept
🦷 Add the first 50 eye-catching images, and do it continuously.
All in all, with an optimized Google Business Profile, you stand a higher chance that Google Maps will match your dentist's website whenever a potential patient is browsing with a local search query like "walk in dentist in Cherry Hill.”
And that’s only one way of improving your dental website SEO over time.
The higher your dental practice ratings on Google, the higher you’ll rank in local search results and get more inquiries from potential patients.
Google Business Profile is a perfect place to ask your patients for reviews. Objective feedback will prove your dentistry is a reputable and reliable spot to make appointments.
As a follow-up to appointments, ask your patients to fill in the loyalty form where they will provide their e-mail addresses. You will further use them to send review requests with a direct link to your Google reviews page.
Take the practice of patient reviews as an indispensable part of your daily appointments. You’ll get the sincerest feedback by asking patients to comment on the quality of your dental treatment here and now.
Make sure to respond to Google reviews timely. This will best prove you do care about patient feedback. Timely responses will also let you fill the gaps related to negative experiences.
Beyond gathering reviews on Google Business Profile, encourage your patients to leave reviews on your corporate website and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as on the above mentioned listings.
Available Review Management tools online will help you generate patient responses, including AI options. The same tools will help you compare patient review metrics with those received by your closest dentistry rivals.
We recommend adding reviews to your core dental services as separate web pages. That’s because users are often querying for "dental service + review" with a unique URL optimized for such queries.
There’s much more to the Google Business Profile listing. The more you list your dental practice in acknowledged online directories, the more patients will potentially discover your company while searching for the “best dentist near me.”
The more up-to-date information you add to local listings, the more comprehensive you’ll get for Google, and that will result in higher rankings in local search results.
Where appropriate, list your dental practice in the directories offered by reputable:
Various Listing Management tools and platforms will help you get your dental practice listed among top local directories:
🦷 Dental associations
🦷 Dental programs
🦷 Healthcare providers
🦷 Insurance providers
🦷 Local business directories
🦷 Healthcare review platforms
🦷 Dental booking platforms.
Building a decent backlinks profile is crucial for Google as it treats various external sources as votes of confidence. The more you align with such web resources, the higher your SEO rankings.
Building backlinks is also about driving referral traffic to your dental website. With a sound backlink profile, you’ll ensure sufficient backlinks pointing to your website. This is essential to your Google rankings while the search engine is crawling through the web seeking quality links.
Building a sound backlink portfolio will help you stay on top of the search results. Therefore, at Promodo, we highly recommend:
Ensuring link bait by publishing value-driven content that will be wanted across the dental industry. Other sites might want to share your research and hands-on videos with their audience.
Deploying a skyscraper technique by spotting rival content that receives many links, creating better content versions, and offering it as the best ones.
Reviving broken links by spotting competitor backlinks that are not working properly and linking them to your website instead
Regardless of the backlink building technique you apply, always comply with Google’s guidelines for link spam. Otherwise, harmful backlinks will ruin all your SEO efforts.
Strategically bet on high-quality sites within the dental niche to acquire trustworthy links back to your website.
It’s also a good idea to deploy available link-building tools to analyze the target keywords against the ones used by your competitors and benefit from the finest backlink opportunities.
There are more than 50 factors, namely the Authority Score (AS) of the prospect site’s domain.
All in all, SEO optimization is about improved local awareness of your dental practice. Simply put, the more locals will spot your website online, the more patients you’ll have.
Connecting with patients in the initial stages of the customer journey will shorten the time through which your site visitors transform into actual patients willing to book appointments with your dental practice.
With permanent SEO optimization in mind, you’ll better understand the user experience of your potential patients and their behavior on your website.
The best SEO practices are also about optimizing patient experience at every touchpoint to win more loyal patients and increase their lifetime value for your dental business.
SEO optimization is extremely important for reaching new patients searching for a local dentist and likely to book an appointment with you.
You are welcome to benefit from a client-oriented approach pursued by Promodo marketers.
Our highly customized dentist SEO services and follow-up recommendations will surely add to the visibility of your dental website and boost its rankings across search engines.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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