This article will teach you how to improve the visibility of your dental clinic with SEO. If you already have a website or wish to have a dental website, this article is for you.
Without proper SEO, even the best content and websites will fail. You need to know what search engines and your users want and then be able to offer it to them. More importantly, search engines do not understand the human language. SEO is how you speak to search engines and tell them why your content is worth ranking.
The right Dental SEO techniques will help you increase your website traffic, clients, and revenue.
Let’s get started then.
Table of Contents
Keyword Optimization
Users search for everything on search engines using “keywords”. Even when they’re using voice search or something else, search engines display results based on the searched “words”.
Hence, keyword optimization is how you tell Google and other search engines what your website/article is about.
Keyword Optimization consists of two parts:
- Keyword research
- Optimizing the researched keywords.
Keyword Research
Before you can optimize the keywords, you need to know which keywords to optimize. Some keywords are almost impossible to rank for (e.g. “dental clinic” ) while their other versions may be much easier (e.g. best dental clinic in Atlanta).
Keyword research is how you find the keywords that you should work on. Each keyword generally has two primary components you should look at:
- Search volume: This is the number of searches your keyword gets. Without people searching for it, it doesn’t make sense to use the keyword. Does it?
- Difficulty: This tells us how easy/hard it is to rank for these keywords.
- Related keywords: You can hop from one keyword to another to find other similar keywords.
You can use tools like Semrush or even Ahrefs to enter a keyword and check its potential.
Pick the keywords that have a high search volume and low difficulty.
Start with your primary keyword. If it’s too difficult for you, scroll down and you’ll find other variations, questions, and even a keyword strategy!
Optimizing the keywords
Once you’ve found the keywords you will target, they now need to be optimized. Here are some tips you can follow:
- The keywords must be placed naturally. Keyword spamming is a major red flag.
- The article should be at least >1000 words. Very short articles naturally mean less information and less quality.
- Ensure your keyword appears in the 1st and last paragraphs of your article, naturally. Do not force it if it’s not a natural occurrence.
- The keyword should also appear at least once in an H2 heading in the article.
- Your URL, heading, and meta description must have your keywords.
- Images should contain your keywords as well. You can use the keywords as Alt text or alternative text for your images.
You can use Yoast SEO for keyword optimization. It helps you place your keywords right.
Optimize your Local SEO
Dental Clinic is a hyper-local keyword. You probably do not care about ranking at the top in some other country, or even your neighboring state. Your focus is (and definitely should be) ranking for your locality. By locality, I mean any distance that you think you may get customers from.
To get started with local SEO, get listed on Google My Business. Doing this will list your business on Google. You will then start appearing for searches such as “Dentist near me”.
Getting listed on GMB has tons of other benefits, such as:
- Increased exposure: Over 96% of people learn about a local business online which results in increased brand awareness.
- 80% of all your local searches will convert into paying customers.
- Users can leave reviews about your dental practice easily.
- You can reply to these reviews which helps clear confusion, and problems and increases overall trust.
GMB listings also help your customers learn about your working hours, call you directly, services being offered, etc.
Try and fill in as many fields as possible when signing up on GMB.
Post frequently and relevant information
Updating your post regularly with new articles has multiple benefits. For starters, you can include more keywords on your website in these new articles. New articles also tell Google that your website is active. More importantly, new posts mean updated content, all of which Google loves.
Your articles also need to offer relevant and truly helpful content. Your target should not only be SEO but also a user’s benefits. How a user reacts to the website plays a major part in your SEO as well.
Your content needs to be relevant and informative because:
- This will increase a user’s “time on site”. The more time they spend the more this goes up, the better it is for your website.
- It will reduce bounce rates.
- It also reduces pogo-sticking (users hitting the back button and then going to other results).
These aspects help improve your SERP rankings.
To create high-quality content, you may employ the following tips:
- Do not use AI or copied articles. This is the most basic rule for creating high-quality content.
- Make your articles as descriptive and informative as possible. Instead of simply describing problems, discuss their solutions, preventions, and everything else. If possible, link to medicines/equipment and other items that may be helpful for your reader.
- Include data and sources. Everyone values well-researched data. Hence, if you include stats, numbers, and research papers it makes your paper more valuable. Outgoing links do not have direct SEO benefits but it does help search engines understand your content better.
- Use very simple language and sentence structures. No one likes having to Google for meaning.
- Update the content every other week or whenever new information comes up relevant to the topic.
Build relevant, high-quality, do-follow backlinks
Backlinks are probably the most important improvement you can make after keywords and content for your dental clinic SEO improvement.
They tell Google that your article and website are important and worth linking to.
There are several methods you can use to increase the visibility of your dental clinic.
For starters, you can use Semrush’s backlink analysis tool. It will show you the backlinks your competitors have but you don’t. You can then pitch those backlink sources directly with:
- A very high-quality article.
- And/or an Infographic
You can also manually search for your primary keywords on Google and then analyze your competitors’ backlinks manually.
The core goal should be to get backlinks either at websites with the same authority, or higher as your competitors. Of course, the links should be do-follow if you wish them to pass their link juice over to your website.
Mobile & speed optimization
Google has publicly stated that it will prioritize mobile-friendly content. They call it mobile-first indexing.
The goal is to make your website more mobile-friendly. Ensure that the template you’re using is responsive. What this means is, that the website should auto-adjust the elements on the screen to display them correctly on a mobile device (or any other device).
Speed optimization is another crucial ranking metric. According to Google, your website should load <2 seconds for the best results.
You can reduce your website’s loading time by:
- Using fewer images in articles.
- Using lightweight (in size) images.
- The theme should be well-optimized. Avoid going for free themes. You can get a good theme from Themeforest or simply use Genesis Framework.
Technical SEO
This is the technical side of things. It almost directly influences how your website functions and is perceived by Google.
There are a few basic optimizations you can make to make your dental site more SEO friendly:
- Server optimization: You must have a good server. If you cheap out on the server, the few bucks you save will add up to many lost visitors and potential conversions. You can also use a CDN which helps make the site fast for people regardless of their location and keeps your site safe from attacks.
- URL Structure and navigation: Your website should have a clean interface and linking structure. It should have clear internal and outbound links. Linking multiple times to the same pages or having a roundabout linking structure where the same page is hopped twice before the destination aren’t good ideas.
- Robots.txt and .XML file: You must have and optimise a robots.txt file. This tells Google what areas of the site should or shouldn’t be crawled. Here’s the official guide on how to create a robots.txt file. Similarly, you also need to create a .xml sitemap which helps search engines navigate your site and submit it.
- Find broken pages using Semrush’s Site Audit tool. Simply enter your URL and go to “site audit”. The two primary issues you need to fix are 404 Error pages, and duplicate content. You can directly search for “404” or “duplicate content” to find URLs with the specific problems.
There’s a lot more you can do when it comes to technical SEO. However, these are the basics and generally suffice when it comes to getting noticed by Google.
Conclusion
All in all, you need to ensure high-quality content, backed by backlinks. It’s best to start with keyword research > craft an article outline > fill it with major data/facts/research > write the actual article > and start building backlinks.
Of course on the side, you must ensure your local SEO is as updated as possible. Even the URL structures need to be taken care of. Keep your URL structures as direct and simple to your topic as possible.
The core of SEO in 2024 is patience. No matter what you do, you will not rank within a few hours or days. You must wait and allow the content to age.
Overall, I’ll still say that simply hiring a Dental SEO expert is one of the simplest ways to achieve rankings.
