In the old days, dental marketing was done by advertising in print, TV, and radio, as well as distributing brochures about one’s practice and mailing postcards to existing and prospective customers.
While all of the above remain legitimate ways of marketing a dental practice today, the advent of the Internet has added search engine optimization to the list. Most, if not all, dental practices today have their own websites to promote their services and products, and it’s SEO that’s making sure that these promotional activities actually reach their intended audiences.
In an age where competition among dental practices is fierce, SEO deserves to be an indispensable part of any dental marketing strategy. It is, after all, the best way to achieve visibility on Google and other search engines. Of course, you have to observe the best dental SEO practices available for a much better chance of success. Here are some of the SEO practices that will surely benefit your dental marketing.
Link building
One of the primary aims of SEO is to get a website to rank well in the search engine results pages or SERPs. Building links can help you achieve that. By getting external sources or websites to link back to the website of your dental practice, you will have more authority in the eyes of search engines, and your site will get the ranking it deserves in search engine results.
Guest posting, creating infographics, press releases, and creating citations on dental practice-specific local directories are just some of the many techniques that can help you with your link building efforts.
Keyword research
Keyword research is an essential part of any SEO strategy. You need to know which specific keywords in your niche you can target so you can rank for them, which will, in turn, drive traffic to your dental practice website, among other things. Google Analytics is one of the many keyword research tools that you can use for free.
Creation of relevant and useful content
You can optimize your site all you want, but without content that is relevant and useful to your audience, your chances of achieving encouraging results will be slim.
If you can write articles that provide tips that help them with common dental concerns, then that would be great. You can also create original videos where you can explain and even demonstrate some of the services your offer. Infographics are also proving to be an excellent and popular way to give your audience helpful dental-related information as they can digest them within minutes, or even seconds in some cases.
One really good thing about having high-quality content for your dental practice website is that it allows you to position yourself as an expert in the field of dentistry. People will regard you as an authority site, and so will search engines.
Internal linking
By linking your pages within the same domain with one another, you are making it easier for visitors to navigate your site. They will be able to access more of your content better, and the time they spend exploring your pages would bode well for your SEO.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile users have long overtaken the number of desktop users, and the gap is widening by the day. Your dental practice website must display well on smartphones and tablets. You must also work towards improving your mobile SEO. You can achieve that by optimizing images, increasing your site speed, improving readability, and reducing redirects, among other things.
With the above SEO practices, your site will stand a better chance of getting more traffic and higher rankings, which can lead to more patients for you.