It doesn’t matter if you’re already a well-known dentist or if you’ve just launched your private practice – you need a strong digital marketing campaign.
About 80% of consumers begin their purchase decisions with online research. They want to know more about all their options and research different providers before they take action. This applies to all businesses, including dentistry.
You can’t expect to get new clients through word of mouth or random walk-ins anymore. You have to meet consumers where they are by building a good online presence. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to grow your client list and retain the clients you already have!
Not to worry, though. Dental SEO is easier to manage than it seems.
Here are 13 tips to help you boost your online organic search performance.
1. Use Short and Long-Tail Keywords
Keywords are at the heart of a successful search campaign. It takes a lot of careful research to find the right keywords to target.
But, as you’re picking which phrases to focus on, make sure you have a good mix of short and long-tail keywords.
Short keywords are too basic, but they do contribute to your search performance. Long-tail keywords help you better reach your target audience.
Don’t forget to include local terms like “near me” or “nearby.”
2. Create Custom URLs
To get the most out of your targeted keywords, you have to use them wisely. Think beyond your landing pages.
Find ways to incorporate your keywords into all the digital content you produce – email campaigns, social media captions, and ads.
More importantly, create custom URLs for all of your landing pages! Not only is this a great opportunity to plug in an extra keyword, but it makes site navigation much easier for potential clients.
3. Write Engaging Meta Tags and Descriptions
Meta tags and descriptions are other great places to plug in a keyword.
You have to make sure the results that come up on Google are engaging and interesting. It’s not enough to be amongst the top 10 results.
Going the extra mile with the right meta tags and descriptions will increase your chances of beating competitors.
4. Name Your Images and Use Alt Tags
This is a dental SEO tactic far too many people overlook. Yet, it’s one of the easiest to implement!
All you have to do is go through each picture on your website, name it, and caption it with an alt tag. This only takes a bit of time, but it can make a big difference in your SEO rankings.
5. Improve Your Site’s Load Time
Another simple-yet-powerful change you can do to your website is to fix the load time. People don’t have the patience they once did during the days of dial-up.
They want the links they’ve clicked on to load in 3 seconds or less. They’ll go to another site if yours doesn’t load.
6. Put Internal Links on Your Landing Pages
Keep in mind that not all the links people click on will come from Google. Sometimes, they end up on one of your landing pages from social media or from another page on your website.
Internal linking is essential for not just better dental SEO performance, but for better conversions. Once you get people to your site, you have to keep them there and guide them through the buying cycle.
7. Clean Up Your NAP
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. If all of your contact information isn’t consistent on every single landing page, you have a problem.
Something as simple as “Street” vs “st” makes more of a difference than you might think.
Clean up all your contact information on your landing pages and display it the same way on your social media handles and email campaigns, too.
8. Create a Google My Business Page
Having a Google My Business page does wonders for your local dental SEO performance. It makes it easier for potential clients to find you when they’re on the go and it helps current clients review your services.
This all contributes to how well you rank – and the satisfaction level of your customers, too.
9. Build a Strong Social Media Presence
Believe it or not, people will follow your social media handles if you make it a point to offer relevant, important information. They want to know more info about your office and the services you offer.
They’re curious about staff members that have come and gone and special treatments or hours you may be running.
Create Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts to make all of this information easy for your clients to access.
10. Learn to Recycle Old Content
One of the easiest ways to keep up with your social content calendars is to recycle your content.
You can’t recycle everything you post. But, there are certain social media posts you can re-create to use in an email campaign and vice versa. You can also use old blog posts as social content and even enter the world of video content.
11. Develop Infographics
Another way to recycle content is to develop infographics. People love infographics for how easy to read and understand they are.
You can create them about things happening in your office, dental habits patients should practice at home, and everything in between.
12. Ask for User-Generated Content
Instead of just focusing on the content you can offer your users, spend a little bit of time thinking about all the user-generated content you can get out of them, too.
Ask your patients to write an online review for you when they come in. Run a social media contest that involves having patients post and tag you in photos.
This will strengthen your connection with your audience and build a better online presence for your brand, too. It adds to the amount of content that Google crawls and uses to rank you.
13. Invest in Reputation Management Services
The thing about user-generated content is that it has to be positive in order to benefit you. It only takes a handful of bad reviews to start hurting your dental SEO rankings.
Thankfully, reputation management can help maintain and improve your online performance. Such services keep you in good standing with your clients and with Google bots, too.
Make Your Dental SEO Performance Better Than Ever
It’s one thing to read about how simple dental SEO can be, but it’s another to actually put in the work. Take the time to go into your website’s backend and make some SEO-savvy edits.
Notice how your meta tags are showing up on SERPs and find a way to make them more engaging. Before you know it, all of these simple changes will create huge results in your rankings.
For more marketing tips and tricks to help you succeed, click here.
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