Do you want to be the first one when someone looks for a dentist on google? Here’s your practical guidelines for optimising your website for search engines!
These 10 points can help guide your in-house team or assess whether your website has been optimised to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs) of Google, Bing, Ecosia, etc. The goal is to position your dental practice’s website among the top results for the most important keywords in terms of volume and relevance.
1. Build Your Team
If you have decided to take charge of your dental practice’s online presence, you must be aware of the resources you need to stand out:
- Technical and development skills: important for designing a dental website, configuring hosting, and ensuring a high-performing and fast website. Any changes you want to make should be developed by a webmaster or someone who handles these technical aspects (dental marketing agency).
- Strategic and SEO skills: positioning on search engines is an investment that yields continuous results over time. Initially, the investment may be significant, but you will be rewarded with high traffic of potential patients visiting your website, which means visibility, credibility, and acquisition opportunities.
- Graphic design skills: once your site gains visibility, ensure it is also visually appealing and easy to navigate. Remember: there is no second chance to make a good first impression!
- Content creation: images, texts, infographics, and everything necessary for the success of your communication project.
All these aspects are subject to SEO optimization; read this article for further in-depth information!
2. Choose Keywords
The keywords your clients use to search for you can refer to:
- Navigational searches: your dental practice’s name, e.g., “Dr. Tizio Dental Practice.”
- Commercial searches: specific services, e.g., “Teeth Whitening.”
- Informational searches: general queries, e.g., “Stained Teeth.”
- Local searches: location-based references, e.g., “Teeth Whitening in London.”
Don’t forget the importance of long-tail keywords that respond to very specific intent (long-tail keywords). These generate less traffic but are highly qualified. For example:
- Dentist London (more general)
- Paediatric Dentist London (more specific)
3. Define Your Strategy
Once you have classified all the keywords by intent and volume, you need to establish how to use them within your dental practice’s SEO strategy.
- Use local searches for the local SEO strategy.
- Utilise commercial keywords to optimise treatment pages.
- Incorporate more general keywords for informative pages or dental blog articles.
4. Optimise the Website Structure
An SEO-optimised structure takes into account user search volumes and intents:
- Keywords with higher volume and more general intentions are used for category pages.
- More specific keywords are used for treatment pages.
- Informative keywords are used in blog articles.
Remember: a single web page can be optimised (and rank on search engines) for numerous keywords that share the same search intent.
5. Optimise Page Content
Web page content primarily consists of text and images, both of which can be optimised for SEO:
- Texts must be written with an SEO perspective (SEO copywriting): follow a hierarchy of headings and subheadings for paragraphs, link internal and external pages, strategically use keywords without overdoing it.
- Images should be original (avoid purchasing stock images) and optimised: check that the dimensions are not excessive, reduce the file size to around 100 KB if possible, use keywords in the file name and alt text (alternative text).
6. Optimise Page Meta Tags
Each web page is a resource that search engines scan to decide whether to index and rank it. It is important to optimise certain essential aspects:
- The title: give the page a meaningful name that contains the selected keyword.
- The meta description (a snippet of text that search engines show as a preview): use the main keyword and/or a related one. Remember that with these few words, you must convince the user to click on your result, so provide information consistent with the type of search and content offered.
7. Develop an Editorial Plan for the Dental Blog
If your website has a blog, remember to optimise it for a potential patient audience:
- Investigate the most frequent and general searches, doubts, and questions about dentistry.
- Organise themes into categories and tags.
- Prepare a quarterly editorial calendar to regularly publish content for your patients.
8. Optimise Blog Articles
Blog articles are, in essence, pages of the website. Each article must be optimised for both technical aspects (title and description) and content (text and images).
Remember that good optimization starts with text coherence:
- Write with your potential patients in mind.
- Present dental topics in a simple and understandable way (without being oversimplified).
- Address your patients’ doubts and questions.
- Sign your articles: both people and search engines consider the authorship an aspect that denotes professionalism and authority.
9. Acquire Links from the Dental Industry
Network: you can acquire links from other dental practice websites operating in different cities but sharing similar techniques. You can publish your articles on external blogs or even in journalistic publications for events or editorial advertising (pay attention to regulations on advertising for dental practices).
The number and quality of links pointing to your website are important for SEO. The more links you get, the more search engines will consider you credible and authoritative, thus providing more visibility to your site.
Outbound links are also essential: be careful to link to authoritative and high-quality external resources.
10. Monitor Your Rankings
After doing all this work, it is important to measure the results:
- How many keywords has your website intercepted? Are they all relevant?
- How many keywords are on the first page? And how many are in the first position?
- Which rankings do you want to improve?
In summary, monitoring your dental practice’s website SEO is a delicate matter. It provides you with information on achieved and missed objectives, what to do to improve and maintain a competitive position over time (if you have already achieved your goals). Other dental practices may emerge or decide to compete for the same keywords.
All these aspects are fundamental activities in dental practice SEO, as you can see, involving many aspects surrounding the creation of a website. A beautiful website is useless if no one sees it, so remember to pay proper attention to all these aspects. Strategic and optimization mistakes can be costly in terms of time, resources, and energy. Don’t improvise; rely on dental communication professionals.
Do you want to stand out from the crowd? Be unique? Have an effective and engaging brand identity for your audience? Attract clients and grow your dental clinic’s business?
Ideandum has helped more than 1000 professionals since 2013 to grow their business through strategy and digital marketing.