Mastering SEO for your Dental Practice
It isn’t enough for your dental practice to have a website, you need to get in front of potential patients to show them the services your practice offers. The best way for new patients to find you is online, particularly when they’re searching for a dental office on Google. When someone types “Dental Offices Near Me” into Google, it’s important that your practice is at the top of the search results page.
To help you understand how important landing on the first page of Google search results is, 91.5% of Google traffic is on that page. If your dental practice’s website is on the second page you only get to share 4.8% of the traffic along with all other websites on the page. With page 3, it shrinks lower to 1.1%.
Even landing on the first page doesn’t guarantee more traffic to your website. While being on the first page usually means your website is in the top 10, it’s still critical you land at the top of that page. Being #1 gets you an average share of 32.5% of the traffic, with #2 getting only 17.6%. So, while you may hit the first page, you should do everything you can to reach the top of the results page. This will increase your dental practice’s chances of attracting new patients to your business.
How to Improve Your Website’s SEO Position
We’ve put together this list of the top 3 ways to increase your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking on Google to help your website get more traffic. By following our advice, you’re much more likely to attract patients who are in your area, looking for the services you offer. Also, the great thing about this list is it can be applied to most industries. So, if you work in a different field and want to increase your ranking, you can still use these tips:
Creating High-Quality Content
When you create content for your website, you need to keep your audience in the front of your mind. You should never write for a search engine, but rather the information you’re putting online needs to address the concerns and needs of your target audience. When you provide useful content, visitors stay longer on your website to consume the information. This is why you need to focus your writing on the actual content and not just the keywords.
Although word count isn’t the most important consideration to make when crafting content, no one is going to read your posts or website if the information isn’t useful to them. Long content gives you more opportunities to provide that value, include more keywords, and incorporate additional outbound links. In fact, Google’s quality guidelines spell out what they’re looking for:
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines
- Don’t deceive your users
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging
The biggest takeaway for when you create content for your dental practice is to do it for the right reasons. You need to provide value to your audience through information that they’d be interested in sharing and bookmarking for later. Your website’s ranking will organically improve when you create high-quality content that your target audience cares about.
Formatting Your Content
It isn’t enough to create useful content that your audience will enjoy, they also need to be able to find it through the volumes of information available online. For Google to properly associate your content with what users are searching for, you have to make sure to properly format the information in a way that the search engine giant understands. This includes a lot of elements of content that most people don’t think about such as:
- Header tags
- Image optimization
- Keywords
- Page titles
- Content layout
Google looks at different parts of your content to categorize it as an appropriate result from someone’s search query. If you don’t create website or blog content that takes SEO into account, you’re guaranteeing that most people won’t see it. In today’s digital world it’s essential that you optimize your content with search engine’s in mind, Google in particular.
Properly optimizing your content for Google is a matter of having a basic understanding of how the search engine works and what it’s looking for. An important rule of thumb to remember is that if people have a hard time finding what they’re looking for, so will search engines.
Optimizing Your Website
Throwing a website that explains your services and pricing isn’t enough anymore. Outdated and broken websites are buried on Google because the search engine knows that it’s users aren’t going to be pleased with their experience on it. This includes websites that have confusing layouts, missing pages, old content, slow-loading multimedia, and a lack of information. Your website is the showcase of your dental practice and anything but the best is a missed opportunity to attract new patients.
When it comes to optimizing your website, there are a lot of considerations you need to take into account. From making sure it’s responsive for viewing the site on different-sized screens to taking advantage of sitemaps, you need to think about every element of your website and make it as user-friendly as you can. You also have to include enough content that Google understands what your business’ website offers.
Some pages you should include on your dental practice’s website include:
- About us
- Contact us
- FAQs
- Our services
- Blog
Having these sections on your website increases its functionality to both your existing patients and potential new ones. You should also make sure you update the content regularly because that helps to improve your ranking on Google. This update could include a new blog post, some revised services, or a new question on your FAQ page.
This isn’t a complete list of ways to improve your dental practice website’s SEO ranking. However, the information we’ve supplied is an excellent starting point for anyone to begin with. By taking these tips into consideration, you’ll notice an improvement from where your ranking currently stands.
The most important piece of advice we can give when it comes to your ranking on Google is to put the user’s experience first. If you create content they’ll appreciate and do so in a format they can easily navigate, you’re going a long way towards creating a platform that attracts new people to your business.