SEO for Dentists: How to Get Your Dental Clinic to Show Up on Google

Starting a dental practice is far from easy – getting licensed takes years of education and experience, and once you finally open your clinic’s doors, there’s no guarantee patients are going to show up. To be successful, dental practices need every advantage they can get.

In recent years, not only do people shop online, but they also research clinics and book appointments online as well. Being visible online is one of the main ways you can introduce your services to patients. In this piece, we’ll go over what SEO means for your visibility online, why it is important, and how your business can excel in it.

What’s SEO and Why Is It Important for My Dental Clinic?

If you’ve stumbled on this article, chances are you have already heard about SEO. But what is it exactly? The concept, despite being simple, is sadly fuzzy to many.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to steps one can take to make their website more appealing to search engine algorithms in the hopes that your services/content/web pages rank higher on search results pages.

Although this all might sound quite abstract, it has a profound impact on the amount of traffic your clinic’s website receives. According to the latest data, as of 2022, there are more than 130,000 dentists in the United States, and according to a 2018 poll by Doctors.com, 63% of respondents will choose one healthcare provider over another based on their online presence. In this landscape, it is very difficult for your clinic to attract patients and grow without a robust online presence.

One of the key ways to establish and grow your online presence is by ranking higher in search engines, and that’s where SEO can help. With proper search engine optimization, your clinic can become visible to thousands of patients looking for a dentist online.

Why Should You Trust What We Have to Say? What’s Our Healthcare SEO Expertise?

With over 10 years of experience in the SEO space, we’ve helped companies of all sizes and shapes expand their reach and find new customers. Giving particular attention to the healthcare space from the very beginning, we’ve worked closely with healthcare providers and clinics to gain visibility and tune their messaging to serve their patients better.

We’ve put our expertise and experience to use to come up with the simplest and most effective actionable solutions you can use to make your dental clinic more visible. And if you still want more, we’ll go over how we can work together to transform your online presence and help your clinic reach many more patients, both local and international.

The Two Sides of SEO: Content and Technical Optimizations

Not only is SEO important, but doing the basics of SEO to make sure your clinic’s website is doing better is relatively simple.

To simplify the concepts involved, it is good to think of SEO as two relatively separate parts: content and technical optimizations, and in the sections below, we’ll delve into each part in detail.

How to Create SEO-Compliant Content for Dental Clinics?

As someone setting up a dental clinic, you’ve probably already made sure to have a professional-looking website ready for your clinic, but the content on it is equally as important as the design. Not only does the information on the website need to be relevant to your patients, but it also needs to satisfy Google’s algorithms as well.

The text on your website is the primary way Google decides whether your web pages detailing your services are relevant in regards to certain search queries or not, and you must get it right, and the tips below will help you do just that!

1. Make Sure Your Content is Focused

By the very virtue of being a dental clinic, the content you put out should already be focused on specific areas: expanding on the services you provide, offering useful information to potential patients, and detailing your experiences as a dentist. These are all excellent pieces of content that generally do well both with visitors and the algorithms.

But, focused content also carries a different meaning in SEO: your content should have a clear purpose in mind and target specific keywords. Do you offer teeth implants? You need to make sure you have a landing page that not only delves into the topic but specifically makes sure it mentions keywords like ‘teeth implants’, ‘dental implants’, etc. Explicit and repeated mentions of these keywords are how the algorithms know that your clinic’s website has relevant information if users were ever to put these queries in Google.

2. Keep the Quality of the Traffic in Mind

It isn’t only important to drive traffic to your website, you have to be conscious about the type of traffic you drive to your website. As a dental clinic, you offer highly specialized services for a small subset of people. Traffic from the general population will net you very few calls and appointments.

That’s why it is important to produce content that’s directly related or adjacent to dental care – traffic from this content will net you a much more engaged audience that might be interested in the services you offer.

3. Produce Regional Content

Most dental clinics generally service people in a specific city or town, so traffic outside this area is not very valuable. You want people to see your services, true, but you need to prioritize people who live close by and can visit your office much more.

Producing regional content is an excellent way to do just that. By adding the location’s name to the content you produce, you can signal to both readers and search engine algorithms that the content is made for them. This helps you rank higher for Google queries in your area.

How to Make Your Business Website SEO Friendly Technically

While creating the right content is a vital part of SEO, making sure algorithms can find it, load it, and parse it is even more important. This is where we get to the technical side of SEO. This, sadly, can be difficult for non-tech people, and it is generally a good idea to let an agency take care of it. But if you want to do it yourself, here are some pointers:

• Make sure your key pages are indexed properly: indexation is vital for Google to find your content, and you want to double-check that all your pages are indexed properly.
• Make sure the clinic’s website is fast: this is not only a UX issue, but it also impacts search engine performance. By compressing images, shortifying the code, and a few other simple optimizations, you can increase the loading speeds an impressive amount.
• Make sure you properly format the content: using proper headings not only helps structure your content but also signals to the algorithms which key phrases are the most important. This is important if you want your web pages to rank for specific dentistry-related phrases.
• Make sure you use meta descriptions: meta descriptions refer to the short paragraph that appears under a search result describing what the page is about. As dental care can be complex, writing appealing and simple meta descriptions describing your services will help attract more visitors.

Sounds Complicated? Neadoo Can Help Increase Your Clinic’s Visibility

If this sounds too technical, we understand. Optimizing your business website for search engines can appear complicated, and it does include a lot of small, menial jobs that a dentist would simply not have enough time to dedicate to. So, why not let us take care of everything? Here at Neadoo, we offer an extremely extensive SEO service tailor-made for clinics and care providers.

Our campaigns can be as comprehensive as you want, and these are just some of the services we offer:

• Full website audit: we do a thorough check of your clinic’s website to gauge how friendly it is to search engines, how fast it loads, and which technical issues it has that might affect your patients’ experience and/or your search engine ranking. In our detailed report, we’ll provide actionable solutions to each problem we find.
• Local SEO: Do you want local patients to find your clinic? You’ll love our local SEO services. We craft a campaign specifically designed for your local market, analyzing the current state of your business website, detailing how your competitors perform, and coming up with a robust plan to make your clinic more visible to locals in your area.
• International SEO for your medical practice: Medical tourism is a growing industry, and there’s a growing hunger for good dental services worldwide. If you want to gain visibility worldwide and massively expand the pool of your potential patients, then our excellent international SEO campaign strategies are for you. Here, we go beyond the local context and detail ways your clinic can be relevant internationally.
• Advertising campaigns for your clinic: Per-pay-click (PPC) ads on search engines like Google are an excellent way to quickly make your clinic visible and attract patients without much prior investment in building your online presence, but running a successful PPC ad campaign requires careful targeting, constant calibration, and successful messaging. Here at Neadoo, we can take care of your ad campaigns from A to Z, and we’re sure you’ll see results.
• On-site and off-site optimization: The ranking of your clinic’s website on search engine searches depends on a variety of factors about the design, content, and performance of your site (on-site) and a variety of other factors off your site (off-site), and both need to be optimized if you want your clinic to rank high in local and international searches. And here at Neadoo, we offer comprehensive on-site and off-site optimizations, including fixing technical issues on-site, link building off-site, etc.
• Medical content building and marketing: we have a saying in SEO circles — content is king, and this is certainly true of clinic websites as well. Our talented team at Neadoo will help produce original, accurate, and SEO-optimized content for your website, helping you rank for relevant search terms and increasing your visibility.