Dental SEO: SEO for Dentists and Dental Professionals

Components of Great SEO for Dentists

Regardless of your industry, good SEO should be focused on a few core areas. These include proper keyword research, technical optimization, content, and link acquisition. For dentists looking to compete in local markets, they will also need to pay close attention to local factors and signals in order to associate themselves with the local market.

Let’s visit each of the core components to see how it applies to the dental industry and your business.

SEO Keyword research for the Dental industry

Depending on what services you specialize in, this area of research may vary. There are a few categories of keywords we like to look at for the dental industry, which include “who we are”, “what we do”, “where we do it”, and “who we do it for”.

1. Who We Are Keywords

This group of keywords is the higher volume, more general keywords that you will target with SEO for dentists using the homepage. These include very specific dental and dentist terms.

Dentists

Dentists Near Me

Dentists in [Location]

[Location Dentists]

It’s important to note that these are the higher competition keywords when doing SEO for dentists and are usually the ones we have our sights on for the long-term game.

2. What We Do Keywords

This group of keywords is more service-oriented and will include the types of services you offer at your dental practice. If you only compete in one local market, it’s best to have these keywords geo-modified with a specific location; however, if you compete in many locations, these may be more general or even state-specific.

Some of these will include dental service keywords such as:

[location] teeth whitening

dental hygienist appointments [location]

dental implants [location]

[location] Invisalign

[location] veneers

These terms will be a core part of any dental SEO plan and will likely be mapped to the specific service pages. If you do not have service pages already on your dentist’s website, you will need to get these created to best target the above service-oriented keywords.

3. Where we do it Keywords

This Dental SEO strategy is used if you want to target multiple suburbs with a single location or you have multiple physical locations and is a very common practice for most SEO services. It includes targeting keywords such as:

dentist in [suburb]

[suburb] dentist

With a separate service area or location page. If you’re in a major city and your typical client is able to travel to your practice from another location, this is a great strategy.

4. Supporting long-tail keywords

These keywords can form an excellent local content strategy and a basis to help educate your potential clients and establish yourself as an expert. Think of these keywords as very early in the buying decision usually during the research phase. Getting in front of potential clients during this stage can help increase your brand awareness and trust during their buying journey.

Some of these keywords might include:

What is the recovery process for dental implants?

Is it possible to get braces as an adult?

Braces or Invisalign? What’s the best option?

At what age should I bring my child to the dentist?

Someone who searches for one of these might not be immediately ready to call you or make an appointment, but they are actively looking for information in the Dental industry. Identifying these opportunities and building out content will establish you as an authority in your industry while helping to improve overall visibility for other keywords.

After you’ve gone through proper keyword research, be sure to follow our advice for mapping those keywords and prepare a master document to follow that will help both on-page optimization and content creation.

Technical and Website Optimizations for Dentists

While the above keyword research will help dictate some of the optimizations we do to the website, identifying technical issues and limitations to the site may uncover some low-hanging fruit that can be quick wins for visibility. This is part of SEO best practices and any SEO company will be able to help with this as it is often the first step in SEO campaigns.

There are literally dozens of tools that you can use to do this type of analysis. We love using the tool Sitebulb as it allows us to dig deep into the data while visualizing it nicely so that it’s actionable.

Based on the technical audit and your keyword research, you should now have a fairly robust keyword mapping document that you can use to add page-level optimization information in addition to some technical optimizations that can be done on the website level to help improve visibility.

Don’t devalue or skip this step in the process. Having good SEO audit information and optimizing the technical aspects of your site can significantly improve your visibility and set you apart from your competitors in the Dental SEO space. This process is also going to help you better understand how much of an investment in SEO services you want to make based on the current state and what other dental practices are doing.

Optimizing and Adding Website Content to Support SEO

This is likely one of the biggest problem areas we see when working with Dental SEO. Having good service content with good keyword placement is necessary for increasing your visibility.

Taking this a step further and building out a content strategy that includes writing on the topics identified in your keyword research will differentiate you from your competitors.

We don’t mean just write for writing’s sake. It’s important to note that if your piece of content doesn’t add value to the website visitor then get it off your website. Make sure your content is top-notch, answers the questions your clients have and is engaging in a way that will make them take action.

Don’t feel stressed about content. Start by chipping away at the optimization or mapping document and optimize your existing content, fixing and optimizing titles and metadata, adding relevant internal links, and including keywords when natural and relevant. You’ll be surprised how well you can do by just optimizing existing content before ever writing more.

Almost all good digital dental marketing efforts, including search engine optimization and paid advertising, will benefit from a well-optimized website and website structure.

You don’t have to invest in ongoing blogging and content marketing if you don’t want to, but you do have to have well-structured service pages that can be leveraged to target patients looking for these services in your local market.

Link Acquisition, Citations, and Website Promotion for Dentists, Orthodontists, and Other Dental Practices

Let’s be honest. Everyone has either been burned or knows someone who has been burned by outdated SEO tactics and short-term thinking. There are a lot of different ways to acquire links within the dental industry. When it comes to ranking for local search terms here is how you should start your approach:

1. Get local, national, and if possible industry-specific citations. Citations are basically instances of your business’ name, address, and phone number that appear across the web. Getting your business into the top national, local, and industry-focused directories and citation websites is basically the ante for local SEO. It’s not going to move the needle considerably if the competition is stiff, but it’s a must-do for local optimization.

I’m not sure what else to say about this one. If your business isn’t already on Google My Business, Bing Maps, Apple Maps, etc. then you need to do this before considering other aspects of link building. All SEO Companies are going to start here with link building and it’ll be a core process for any local SEO services you may invest in.

2. Leverage your existing partnerships. After you feel comfortable with where you are sitting in terms of citations and brand visibility, it’s time to move to obtain the low-hanging fruit links. These are usually links from partner companies within your industry. Know an orthodontist that you refer business to? Have a friend who’s a doctor? Connect with these people and ask for a link to your website – it could be as simple as a link from a resource page on their site. You’ll be surprised just how many links you can acquire through this method. This is a great way to not only build your link profile but also establish your practice as an authority with links from other experts. Your patients will notice.

3. Resources for industry partners. Continuing on the partnership theme, we’ve seen a lot of success in creating valuable local and shareable resources that you can give away to your industry partners.

This could be something like the ultimate guide to brushing kids’ teeth that you offer to doctors and parenting groups and have them feature it on their website with a link back. This can be beneficial in more digital marketing areas than just SEO, it’s a great way to connect with other experts in your industry online.

4. Industry associations. Your national, state or local level Dental Associates are a great source for links. Whether it’s as simple as a member listing or as robust as arranging guest posting opportunities, these associations are often looking for great high-quality content to feature on their website or for their members – trading this content for links and visibility can often be well worth the effort.

5. Broken link building. This is likely one of the most popular methods of link acquisition in the SEO space today, and for good reason – it’s about as safe as it gets, and it’s effective in getting results.

There’s a lot that goes into a good broken link-building process that we won’t cover in this post, but at a high level, you crawl through high-authority industry websites to identify any broken links they may have. Then, create resources for these sites and present them as an alternative link to the broken one – resulting in great authority with often very minimal work.

Most Dental SEO Services provided by an SEO company are going to include some level of link building. If there is any advice we can give on link building, it is not to be afraid of it. Acquiring links works for local dental SEO services as a way to improve visibility and acquire new patients for your business.

How much do search engine optimization services cost for dentists?

Here at SEO Brothers, we provide a variety of options to help our dentist clients establish themselves as experts online while improving the visibility of their practice websites in the search engine.

As an SEO agency, we have a team of SEO experts dedicated to helping your practice acquire new patients every single month.

Our pricing starts at $900 per month in this industry and can range to 10x that, depending on how aggressive you want to be and how competitive your local markets are.

How many new patients Can I expect from my investment in SEO?

The short answer here is, it depends. We will look at your existing cost to acquire new patients along with how competitive the local market is and the overall search volume to give you an estimated number of net new patients based on estimated website visitors.

It’s important to note that search engine optimization is not the same as paid traffic, and it is not a funnel we can turn on and off. Therefore, in the beginning months of a dental SEO marketing campaign, we are likely to see less client acquisition, but the cost per acquisition will get better and better as the visibility improves.

Will I Need a New Dentist Website or Can you Use My Existing Site?

We aren’t in the habit of redesigning your website if we don’t have to. While sometimes it might make sense to overhaul a site, usually, some tweaks to help improve conversion rates are all that will be needed.

However, if your site does not have individual service pages, then we will need to include content as part of the dental marketing strategy in order to get the best return on your investment, as the SEO strategies used will require we have specific service pages.