8 Dental Website SEO Tactics to Increase Keyword Rankings
- You have a hard time attracting new patients
- You don’t have an effective digital marketing strategy
It’s time to fix this.
Quick refresh — what is dental SEO ?
For example, when a potential patient opens up Google and searches “dentist near me” or “emergency dentist” or any other combination of dental search terms, you want your practice to appear in the top results. That might include…
- Your website
- Information about your practice (phone, hours, directions)
- Reviews of your practice
- Your name in dental directory sites
But the internet is a crowded, competitive place. Without adopting a dental website SEO strategy, your practice can never hope to rise to the top and be found by potential patients.
How does dental website SEO work?
There’s no one magic SEO formula for getting on the first page of Google (if anyone says differently, they’re lying). But to get in the running at all, you need to play the game and follow the rules.
Here at Delmain, we take a deliberate and ethical approach to dental SEO by combining industry best practices, meticulous attention to detail, and in-depth research. Our process has worked for dentists in major cities, college towns, and suburbs from coast to coast and everywhere in between. And it can work for you, too.
Today we’re sharing a few of the best dental website SEO ideas straight from our playbook.
1. Add your practice to Google Maps
Is your practice listed on Google Maps? Not sure?
To show you what I’m talking about, let’s take a quick look at the Google Map results for the search, “dentist Salt Lake City.” Here’s what shows up for me on a desktop computer:
See that highlighted green box? That’s a Google Maps search result (we like to call it the “Local 3-Pack). Most patients rarely look past these first few results, so it’s crucial to make sure your practice is not only added on Google Maps, but optimized to rank as high as possible on this list.
To give your practice the best chance of ranking in that Local 3-Pack, we recommend:
- Claiming your Google Maps business listing
- Add as much information about your practice as possible
- Use a local phone number or even better, a tracking number
- Add photos of your practice
Ready to get started? Learn how to add your dental practice to Google Maps.
2. List your practice on local citation sites and directories
A local citation is any mention of your practice on the web. These citations don’t necessarily need to link to your website, but it must include your name, address, and phone number. For example, Healthgrades and ZocDoc are 2 of the most popular local citation sites for dentists.
Making sure your practice is listed on these and other similar directory sites is very important for improving your local search results. Why? The more mentions of your business, the more Google thinks you are a reputable practice. It makes you more trustworthy and can help with your local rankings.
3. Build relevant and high-quality links to your site (backlinks)
There are 3 types of backlinks:
- Natural backlinks — This is when a blogger, news article, or other publication finds your website and content and decides on their own to include a link to your page within their own content.
- Backlinks through outreach — This involves contacting relevant professionals in your field and coming to an agreement where they link to your website from their own.
- Self-created backlinks — A link from a local citation site would be considered a self-created backlink. (Note that not all citation sites allow you to link to your website — that’s okay!)
There are a lot of great strategies for building backlinks and it might take you a bit to find the right approach for your practice. Just remember that this isn’t a “set it and forget it” SEO idea. Make a plan to continuously monitor your backlinks, seek new links, and ensure any links to your site aren’t broken.
Speaking of broken links…
4. Avoid broken links to your website
Have you ever landed on a website page with a 404 error message? This is what’s known as a broken link and it can happen if you:
- Move pages around on your site
- Change URLs
- Delete old parts of your site
- Have a spelling error in your link
Not only is a broken link frustrating for potential patients, but it also stops Google and other search engines right in their tracks. And that is very bad for SEO.
How do you find out if there are any broken links within or leading to your site? Use a broken link checker like this one. If the report identifies any broken links, talk to your developer to fix them. If the broken links are coming from another site, you’ll need to reach and ask them to fix the links.
5. Write compelling meta information
Every page on your website should have a meta title and meta description. These details are part of your website’s HTML code and provide a brief summary of each page. Google will often display your meta information in search results, so the words that show up should be focused on convincing a potential patient to click through to your website.
Here’s a great example of a compelling meta title (green box) and meta description (red box):
- A patient searches Google for “dentist near me”
- Google decides to show your practice’s website and meta information in their list of results
- Compelling copy in your meta title and description (like the example above) convinces a patient to click on your website
- Google makes a note that showing your website was a good idea
- The more people who click on your website, the better you look to Google. Over time, your site may slowly start to rank higher in search results.
Win-win!
6. Optimize your website content
Every page on your website should have a primary keyword as well as a collection of closely related secondary keywords. This is an important part of dental SEO and will help your website rank highly in Google search. Some people even refer to identifying and incorporating keywords on your website as the gold standard of dentist SEO!
What are keywords? The words or phrases people regularly search for that describe your practice. Choosing the right keyword for each page isn’t’ too hard but does require time, expertise, and some good old fashioned research.
Once you’ve identified your keywords, even more important is knowing how to integrate them into your website content. Here are some tips:
- Ensure your first keyword mention appears as close to the top of the page as possible
- Include your keyword in page headings
- Avoid keyword stuffing — 14 mentions per page is more than enough
- Pay attention to user experience — your sentences should still read naturally and make sense
7. Make sure your site loads quickly
Google loves it when your site is easy to access — and so do your patients — so make it as easy as possible for both of them. First things first, test your page load time. Ideally, your website should load in 1-3 seconds, tops. The faster, the better!
There are various online tools available to check your page load time. Two good ones are GTmetrix and Pingdom. If your site is lagging, talk to your site developer about ways to improve your score. There might be several factors at play, but the most common is that your image file sizes are too large and need to be compressed.
8. Add image alt text
In addition to ensuring that your images aren’t slowing down your site, we also recommend naming your images and adding alt text. Not only does this help Google understand what your image is all about, it’s also an important part of improving your website’s accessibility.
- Naming images — Before uploading an image to your site, make sure to give it a unique, specific file name. If possible we recommend including a keyword.
- Adding alt text — When you upload an image to your site, always fill out the alt text field. Just like your image name, the alt text should describe what’s happening in the image and include a keyword or two, where relevant.
…and that’s just the beginning!
There are countless other dental SEO and advertising ideas that may be worth exploring for your practice, depending on your goals. But while dentist SEO is a no-cost marketing strategy with huge returns, it does require a lot of attention. We’ve found that most dentists just don’t have the time, or frankly, the desire, to learn more than they need to about SEO.
Why not leave it to us?
At Delmain, we’ll help you focus on what you do best — providing great patient care. Our team of dental SEO experts will work in the background using our years of experience to keep your practice ahead of the competition and ensure new patients can easily find you online.
If you want to learn more, schedule a 30-minute no obligation call with us. We’d love to hear from you.
Ready to grow your practice?
Turn your website into your #1 source of new patients. Let’s talk.
