SEO for Dentists

A Step-by-Step Dental SEO Guide

Are you ready to attract more patients to your dental practice through organic search? Keep reading to learn how a targeted SEO dental marketing strategy can help you get found by potential patients online.

In this guide you will learn:

Chapter 1
Intro to SEO →

Chapter 2
Keyword Research →

Chapter 3
On-Page SEO →

Chapter 4
Off-Page SEO →

Chapter 5
Best Practices →

Chapter 6
FAQs & Resources →

What is SEO for dentists?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website or web page to increase its visibility in search engines, like Google and Bing.

SEO is an important factor for any dentist looking to get more patients, as the higher a website appears in Google, the greater the chance a potential customer clicks through to your website.

Think of it like dental hygiene for your website.

Just as dental hygiene involves cleaning your teeth, SEO involves making sure your website is ‘healthy‘. Or in other terms: to ensure it is easily found by search engines so you get more traffic to your site.

A person searching for a dentist on Google may use a search query like “dentist near me” or “best dental clinic in [city name]”

They may search for specific services such as “emergency dental care” or “dental implants”. Or they may even include their insurance information in the search query such as “Medicaid dentist in [city name]”.

In order to benefit from SEO, you want your website to rank for these kind of searches.

Why is dental SEO important?

Here are some of the benefits of using SEO for your dental practice:

• Increased visibility: SEO helps to increase the visibility of a dental website on search engines, making it more likely that potential patients will find you when searching for dental services.
• Cost-effective: Compared to traditional advertising methods like print or television, SEO can be a cost-effective way for a dentist to reach new patients.
• Targeted audience: SEO allows a dentist to target specific keywords that align with their services, products and offerings.
• Local SEO: Local SEO helps increase a website’s visibility for people searching within a specific geographic location. This can be particularly beneficial for dentists as it allows them to target people searching for services in their local area.
• Building trust: SEO can help a dental website to establish trust and authority with search engines and potential patients by providing high-quality, relevant content. This can also help to attract new patients and build a strong reputation in the community.

How do search engines work?

Search engines work by crawling billions of webpages with their own web crawlers, known as search engine bots or spiders. These are then stored and saved in an index.

Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines)

The Google Search Essentials define the actions that webmasters can take to make their websites better indexable or crawlable.

Read them here: Official Google Guidelines

The guidelines are based on three central aspects:

1. Crawling – webmasters should support Google in finding websites.
2. Indexing – webmasters should help Google to classify and “recognize” the content.
3. Usability and user experience – webmasters should support the users of the websites in their use (usability and user experience).

Essentially, according to these Google guidelines,  a website should support the search engine in crawling and indexing and ensure a good user experience. 

Before you get started with SEO, there are a few prerequisites you want to check off first:

SEO Basics

At a bare minimum, you want to make sure you cover these basic standards before embarking on doing SEO:

• Website Speed – Have a fast loading site so potential customers don’t get tired of waiting for things to load.
• Mobile Friendliness – Make sure your site works on mobile as over 50% of users browse on mobile devices
• Analytics – Setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console & so you can understand what is and isn’t working.
• XML Sitemap – search engines use this to get your site’s URLs
• Robots.txt – tells search engine crawlers where they can (and where they can’t go) on your site.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of making website and server optimizations to help search engines to crawl and index your site more effectively (and therefore help to improve organic rankings).

Technical errors can hurt a website’s ability to rank. There are potentially a lot of errors, but here are some of the most common that will have the biggest impact when fixed:

• 404 errors
• Broken backlinks
• Poor URL structure
• Duplicate/thin content
• Poor internal linking
• Poor website architecture
• Missing metadata (page titles & meta descriptions)
• Missing H1 tags

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What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that people use when searching for specific products or services:

Once you understand the keywords your target audience is using, you can optimize your website to appear for these in search results.

Think of it like a diagnostic test for your website. Just as a diagnostic test helps a dentist to understand what is happening inside a patient’s mouth, keyword research helps you to understand what people are searching for online when they are looking for dental services.

This information can be used to optimize your website, so that it appears higher in search results when people search for those keywords. This way you can attract more patients who are searching for the services you offer.

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research is important for dentists because it helps to:

• understand what people are searching for when they are looking for dental services, and to optimize their website accordingly.
• identify the specific needs and pain points of their target audience, which can inform the content they create and services they offer, ultimately leading to more conversion and better patient experience.
• identify the competition in the local area and understand what they are doing, so they can create a more effective SEO strategy.

What keywords are best to target?

Understand that there’s no “best” keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it’s up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic.

The best keywords for your SEO strategy will take into account relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on:

• The level of competition you’re up against.
• Your ability to produce content that exceeds in quality what’s currently ranking.

How to do keyword research for your dental practice

To start keyword research: put yourself in your customers shoes.

What words, phrases and terms might they use in order to find solutions to these problems? These are the keywords you want to find and target.

Here is a simple process to follow:

Step 1) Make a list of broad topics

Create a list of general topics related to your business. These might correspond to product categories, services or anything you believe your target audience would be interested in.

For example, broad topics like:

• Dental Implants
• Teeth Whitening
• Orthodontics
• Dental Crowns
• Dental Cleaning

Step 2) Expand topics into a list of phrases

Now you want to take those topics and expand them into a list of related phrases to target.

Imagine yourself as a buyer looking for your product or service and ask yourself: what would I type into Google?

Whilst keyword research tools are useful here, you can do this for free by Googling your keyword.

For example, Google “dental implants” and you’ll get a list of related questions people ask (which you can answer with blog content):

As well as related searches which may uncover other keywords to target:

Step 3) Analyze your keywords

Once you have a list of potential keywords, you need to gauge which terms are worth targeting.

You’ll need to use a keyword research tool here to pay attention to the following keyword metrics:

• Search volume
• Trends
• Search value over time
• Difficulty
• CPC
• SERP features

But most importantly, you want to consider relevancy and search intent:

Relevant keywords:

For relevancy, you want to ask yourself:

• Are these keywords relevant to my business?
• Do I have a chance of ranking for these terms based on the competition?
• Is ranking for these keywords going to have a positive ROI?

If you can answer YES to the above questions, chances are you have picked a relevant keyword

Search intent:

Search intent is the goal and purpose of a search query in Google. When someone searches for something, they are typically looking for more information before performing an action.

Search intent falls in four buckets:

• Informational – Searchers looking for information, they’ll use words like: how, what, why, when etc.
• Navigational – Searchers trying to find a specific site, they’ll use words relating to the service/product/brand
• Transactional – Searchers looking to purchase, they’ll use words like: buy, cost, pricing, cheap etc.
• Commercial investigation – Searchers researching prior to making a purchase, they’ll use words like: best, review, comparison etc

Not only is it important to select good keywords, but also to pick keywords you have a chance of ranking for.

For example, if you want to rank for the keyword: “Oral Hygiene Checklist” but your page doesn’t feature a checklist, you are not meeting a searchers intent so may struggle to rank for it.

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What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO describes specific elements of the pages on your website that you control, such as:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Header tags
• Internal linking
• Images
• Content

Why is on-page SEO important?

On-page SEO is important for dentists because it helps to ensure that their website is easily found and understood by search engines, which can increase visibility and drive more traffic to the website. This can ultimately lead to more patients for the dental practice.

For example, if a dentist offers a service called “Invisalign” and that service is not mentioned on the website or not prominently mentioned, it will be less likely for the website to appear in the search results when someone searches for “Invisalign” or related terms. On the other hand, if the dentist has optimized his website with the service “Invisalign” as a focus keyword, it will be more likely to appear in the search results when someone searches for that term, and hence, more likely to attract patients looking for that service.

Additionally, on-page optimization can also help to improve the overall user experience of a website, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates. For example, having a well-organized and easy-to-navigate website with clear calls to action such as “Book an Appointment” will be more likely to convert visitors into patients.

On-Page SEO Checklist

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What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO refers to specific actions done outside of your website, such as getting backlinks from other websites or social media.

What is link building?

Link building is the practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving SEO. Common link building strategies include content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building and guest posts.

Why is link building important?

Link building is important for dentists because it helps to increase the visibility of a website on search engines. Google, for example, use links to a website as a way to determine the authority and trustworthiness of a website.

The more high-quality links that point to a website, the more likely it is to be considered an authority in its field and be given higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results page).

This increased visibility can drive more traffic to a website, which can lead to more patients for the dental practice.

Additionally, link building can also help to establish a dental practice as a reputable and trustworthy provider of dental services, which can be a key factor in attracting new patients. High-quality links from reputable websites in the dental industry can be an indication to potential patients that a practice is well-respected in the field.

Link building can also help to increase the referral traffic to a website, where visitors are directed to the website through a link on another website. This can help to increase brand awareness and reach new audiences who may not have otherwise found the website.

In summary, link building is important for dentists because it helps to increase visibility, establish reputation and trust and drive more referral traffic to their website, which can lead to more patients.

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Dental SEO Best Practices (+ 4 Tips)

4 Actionable Dental SEO Tips

Here are some things your practice can do to begin the process of developing a good dental marketing strategy.

1. Add relevant keywords
2. Optimize for local searches
3. Start blogging
4. Earn links

1. Add relevant keywords to your website

People looking for dentists also look for specific services like teeth whitening or annual checkups for kids. Long-tail searches, typically have fewer searches, but the traffic that comes from them is often highly targeted and ready to turn into real customers.

For example, instead of just focusing on optimising your website for “dentist” or “dental services,” you could add keywords like “dentist in [your city]” or “children’s dentist in [your area]” or “broken tooth repair in [your city], [state]” to it.

2. Optimize your site for local searches

If your SEO plan doesn’t use local SEO to target specific areas, you’ll likely miss out on some great leads. Adding the name of your town and nearby towns to your website copy is the easiest way to get better results.

But don’t forget about things on your site besides writing copy. You should also add places to the titles and URLs of your pages.

Also, make sure that your business is listed on Google Maps and local directory sites. This will help your business show up more in local searches.

3. Start writing useful content

The main goal of dental SEO is to get more patients by making your website more visible in Google.

One way to do this is to write a blog. If you write a blog with tips on how to take care of your teeth, you’ll start to get interested readers and possible patients. As your traffic grows, so will your search rankings, and people looking for a dentist in your area will turn to you as a reliable source.

4. Earn quality links

How high your site ranks in search results for keywords and phrases related to your business depends on how many and how good the links are to it. This means that you need to get good links if you want to keep your rankings.

You can do this by making good content and reaching out to bloggers and leaders in your field to ask them to share it. This will not only help you move up in search results, but it will also make your dental practise look like a leader in the field.

Backlinks are a very important part of SEO for dentists. They are like a vote of confidence for the content your practise puts out. Because of this, links are one of the most important ways that search engines like Google decide how to rank pages.

How does dental SEO work?

SEO for dentists means making sure that your website is optimised for both search engines and users. This makes your website more visible in relevant and organic search results.

Optimizations include:

• on-page SEO
• link building
• technical SEO review
• content audit
• local citation audit

Why do dentists need marketing?

It helps you set your practise apart.

Your patients are your customers. A marketing plan not only helps you find your target market, but it also helps your patients understand why they should choose your dental clinic.

A good dental marketing strategy should bring in new patients, keep the ones you have, and make more people aware of your offering. The main goal is to get possible patients to call or schedule an appointment online.

How long does dental SEO take?

Typically, dental SEO takes at least six months to deliver results.

In some cases, practices may start to see results like increased traffic, phone calls, and appointments, in faster timeframe than this.

Although typically 6 months is a good benchmark as SEO is a long-term strategy vs. a short-term strategy like PPC.

How much does SEO for dentists cost?

Prices for dental website SEO depend on multiple factors, but the average cost for dental SEO is $1500 – $5000 per month.

If you’re looking to partner with a consultant or dental SEO expert, the average rate is $100 – $300 per hour.