In years past marketing your dentist practice was pretty simple and you could list your business in things like the Yellow pages or local business directories. Word of mouth would also really help maintain your clientele – families would typically stick with the same dentist and they would then recommend your services to others.
This still works to a certain extent but the increase in competition and transformation to a largely digital world has meant dentists must rely even more on their websites to attract new patients. The simplest way to make a viable dentist website is to implement SEO and in the below guide, we explain what it is, and four basic tools you can use to get started.
Dental SEO - The Basics
- Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website content so that Google can index it and rank it higher when people search for specific words and phrases.
- In dentistry, this is incredibly important to attract people who are looking for dental treatment or who want to register with a new surgery. Someone might search for “dental surgery in XXX”, or “dentists in XXX” for example, where XXX is a region, city, or town.
- If your dentist’s website is optimized for those keywords using SEO, when people search for them on Google, you have a much greater chance of ranking higher on the results page. This should theoretically translate to more website traffic and increase business for you – perfect!
- Dental SEO helps you stand out from other local surgeries and makes sure that you have a strong online presence.
4 Fantastic Tools for Dental SEO
You should now be itching to implement SEO for your dentist website, but how do you do this, and where do you start? SEO is an entire industry in its own right so eventually, it could be beneficial to enlist the help of professional dental SEO services. To start, however, these four tools will help give you an SEO boost and for the most part, they are easy to use.
1. Google Keyword Planner
To have effective SEO you need to optimize your web content around keywords and phrases. These are the things people will search for on Google like “dentist surgery in XXX”. Google Keyword Planner is an excellent and free tool that helps you research appropriate keywords for your dental surgery.
2. Google Business Profile
You have probably searched on Google for a business and noticed that some have a special box on the right-hand side that shows things like their location, star rating, and opening times. Wouldn’t that be fantastic to have for your dental practice? Of course, and it is possible if you use Google Business Profile. By signing up for this free service and listing your business you can naturally improve your SEO but also look more professional when people find your surgery online.
3. SEO Site Audit by Ahrefs
How can you expect to implement SEO improvements if you don’t even know what’s wrong with your website to start with? Well, there is a simple tool you can use to remedy this – Ahrefs SEO Site Audit. This free tool analyses your website and checks for common SEO weaknesses like missing HTML tags, slow loading speeds, duplicate content, and issues with JavaScript and images. By using this free auditing tool you immediately have a starting point for your dentist SEO.
4. Google PageSpeed Insights
How irritating is it when you open a website only to be waiting for minutes as the images slowly load? This is incredibly frustrating but it is also detrimental to SEO. Google doesn’t like slow loading times! Because they are such a nice company though, they provide a free analysis service in Google PageSpeed Insights. This is a simple tool that assesses your page loading times and shows areas for improvement.
Increase Your Online Presence With Dental SEO
These tools are all free to use and are a fantastic starting point for your practice’s Dental SEO so why not give them a try today and start boosting your online presence? With a list of local keywords to target the region your surgery covers and optimized web content, you should be able to increase website traffic and keep a steady flow of new patients registering at your practice.
