Given the impact of search engine optimization for dentist across the nation, it is imperative that you engage in proper dental SEO in order to remain competitive. With the way the search engines are currently structured, you can actually benefit from certain, specialized methods of optimization.
Because of the low cost to entry – when compared to the kinds of advertising to which you were relegated in the past – you stand to gain a huge return on investment with an SEO-optimized website, where the site’s layout is easily-navigable. Your dental practice will show up whenever people in your geographical area type in keywords related to dental SEO, allowing you to corral most of the traffic in that region. To that end, let’s check out a few changes you can make right away to put your dental SEO into overdrive.
1. Local Dental SEO is the Way to Go
Since the last update to Google’s search algorithm, local marketing has become a prominent indicator of industries such as dental SEO. This means you should find ways to incorporate the city and state of your dental practice into your content; this is very important, and the search engines will pick it up and value it highly. Put your address online everywhere you can find; if you’ve got a Google+ page, make sure the full address is listed onsite. It can be quite powerful letting the search engines know your practice doesn’t only exist in cyberspace.
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2. Interact with Social Media
This strategy is similar to portfolio diversification in the stock market; you don’t want to have all of your chips in one spot. Create a Pinterest board showing your handiwork, and invite collaborators to add before and after images of their teeth to really rocket your dental SEO into the stratosphere. Pinterest gets hundreds of millions of viewers every month; it would be nice to capture a fraction of that. Also, remember that Facebook is the king of social media; create a Facebook Business Page and use some of the techniques of local marketing to geo-target; you might incentivize some of your former patients – or simply ask them via email – to join your friends list and comment on your page.
3. Offer Quality Content to Other Sites in Your Niche
If you provide good enough information on your own site, then there’s always a chance that other sites will automatically link to it as an authority post. Perhaps you wrote the seminal post on dental implants; backlinks from social media profiles and other websites will cause your website to move up in the search rankings. You can also approach media news sites, social media sites such as Stumbleupon and Tumblr; offer blog posts such as “Top 10 Ways to Clean Your Teeth,” and see if they’ll accept a well-written article. This helps out dental SEO tremendously, if done correctly. Make sure your on-page SEO is in good shape; use title tags, menus, meta descriptions and more to point the search spiders to your keywords and site title.
4. Internal Linking
As a result of the Google Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates, internal linking has emerged as one of the most important aspects of general SEO, which can transform your site into an industry leader. Luckily, it’s also one of the easiest things you can do to enhance your dental SEO. Simply go back through your site and find judicious places to link posts together. Make sure your home page shows up on the menu of every page – this is for both ease-of-navigation, and search engine optimization credit. Use Google Analytics to locate your best posts, and use internal linking to make sure they are easy to find from the other pages.
