If you run a dental clinic, you should invest in its online marketing. One of the most efficient techniques that it’s essential to master is SEO. It’s affordable and it delivers impressive results in any geographical location. Read this article to find out how to make the most of SEO for dentists!
Importance of SEO for Dentists
Here are some informative statistics that you might want to remember:
- 80% of people rely on search engines to recommend the best dentists to them
- Only 10% of these customers open the second page of the search results — others choose from what the first page offers them
The goal of your SEO efforts is to make sure that Google and other search engines display the information about you on the first page.
Key Factors of Dental Website And Market Audit
When auditing a website, the best SEO companies for dentists pay attention to these factors:
- Domain age and history. The older the website, the easier it is to promote it to the top positions of search rankings.
- Platform, hosting and CMS. The technical basis of your website impacts its possible optimization extent.
- XML Sitemap, analytics tracking and schema markup. All these elements allow Google crawlers to properly examine your website as well as locate and categorize your business.
- Tags, descriptions and subheadings. They’re instrumental in driving up your rankings. A perfect dental website is aesthetically appealing and informative for clients — and is properly structured for search engines.
- Site performance optimization. A website that loads slowly will never land a top position in Google search results. It’s crucial that navigation on each web page is intuitive and visitors can quickly find what they’re looking for.
- Content uniqueness. All the texts, images, videos and other types of content on your website should be unique. It’s not necessary to get 100% uniqueness of texts — 95% should be enough.
- Improper category and tag configuration. It would be a big mistake to copy content from one page of your website and post it on another one. Even if you don’t do so, the default configurations of your CMS might mislead search algorithms — and the latter will think you don’t bother to create unique content.
- Redirect problems. From time to time, you’ll be upgrading and restructuring your website. It might happen so that some pages aren’t available anymore — but links from third-party sources still lead to them. This will drive your ranking down.
- Social media setups. SEO professionals know how to configure your socnet settings to attract the largest number of clients.
- NAP consistency. The NAP acronym stands for “name, address and phone number”. These details should have an identical format on all the websites that mention them. For instance, “Junior” and “Jr.” are perceived by Google as two different words in this case, which is classified as inconsistency and deteriorates your website’s position.
- Penalties. They can be either manual or algorithmic. As soon as your site is penalized, its position drops. An SEO agency will help you identify why this happened and take measures to regain your previous results.
- Backlink profile. The more third-party sites share links to yours and the higher their authority, the better.
- Page interlinking. The pages of your website should provide links to each other.
- Keyword research. The list of the most popular keywords differs from one area to another. Your website should rely on the words and phrases from the city or town where the majority of your customers come from.
- Top competitor research and analysis. To outperform your competitors, you should be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. That’s why an SEO agency will scrutinize not only your website but those that have better search rankings.
On the Internet, you can find tools that will automatically audit your website. However, the results of such an analysis won’t be too detailed and comprehensive. A manual audit serves as a much more helpful foundation for actionable insights.
Dental SEO Pricing
The price of dental SEO services depends on the following factors:
- Your location
- The competition in your area
- Your current search engine rankings
- Result of your website’s audit
- Urgency of work
- How much time top SEO firms will need to spend on your project
On average, be ready to spend from $500 to $2500 per month. With the help of experienced SEO professionals, it will take you around half a year or maybe less to achieve the desired results. The price is calculated individually for each client.
After achieving the initial results, you should constantly stay in touch with the SEO agency. Search engines frequently update their algorithms. You’ll need to systematically fine-tune your SEO to keep staying ahead of the game.
How to Select a Top SEO Agency for Dentists
An ideal SEO company for dentists meets the following criteria:
- Has experience in catering to the dental market and understands its specifics
- Provides full-cycle service — you won’t need to hire or outsource anyone else to complete SEO-related tasks
- Never offers generic solutions but drafts a tailor-made plan for each client
- Allows customers to pay once per month and avoids long-term contracts with large expenses
- Carries out the initial analysis of your website at no cost so that you immediately see your strong and weak sides
The trickiest aspect is competition. Probably, you don’t want your SEO agency to promote your competitor whose clinic is located on the same street as yours. Some SEO companies mention it in their contracts that they’re ready to work with only one dental client per street or area.
Final Thoughts
Dental clinic owners should invest in SEO to attract a lot of clients from search engines. Your goal is to make sure that the link to your website is displayed on the first page of search results. To select an ideal SEO agency, focus on those service providers who have already worked in the dental market and offer tailor-made solutions for each client. The best companies avoid long-term contracts and enable their customers to pay them once per month.
