A Step-By-Step Guide To Dental SEO (Template Included) 

Today dental SEO is all about optimizing your overall website with local SEO best practices.

Those strategies would help you push your website higher in the SERPs and attract more patients to your clinic. 

However, dental SEO could be a little confusing, especially to those experts, who wish to provide top-class dental services and are not willing to invest something in SEO. 

Here is what you need to know, you just cannot avoid SEO in this Digital World. 

No worries! Having a little knowledge about this topic will help you understand the importance of SEO in dental services. 

And, above all… we have a Dental Scorecard for you to help you track your Dental record, which we are going to provide you soon. 

That’s why we have this dental SEO guide. 

What Is SEO For Dentists?

SEO for Dentists or Dental SEO is an act of optimizing your website to rank higher and make it more visible to get more patients at your door. 

Dental SEO could be beneficial for:

• General dentists 
• Orthodontists 
• Pediatric dentists 
• Periodontists
• Prosthodontist 
• Oral surgeons 
• Endodontists

Then, comes a question…

Why shouldn’t you use PPC and paid ads, rather than just SEO., here are some things that only SEO can do. Paying ads can bring you traffic till when you are paying them. Once you stop investing in it, it will also stop giving you leads, and patients.

But, with SEO you can get organic leads and traffic to your website and drive more patients. Want to know the best part? The best part is, for SEO, you have to invest but it will give you results that would last long and not like PPC, once you stop paying, it will stop 

showing results. 

Dental ScoreCard

Before you start performing dental SEO on your website, it is better, if you check out this scorecard. 

Click on the download button and you will have a dental scorecard before you.

The purpose of this dental scorecard is to help you calculate your leads and manage your patients. 

It is going to be amazing! I promise!  😉

Why do you need SEO for dentists?

Okay… so now you know what SEO is for dentists. But, then, again the question that arises is, why is it so important for dentists? What makes it so necessary to get leads?

Here, I would like to answer it with data:

When searching for a new dentist online, 70% of people will click on one of the top 5 suggestions in a dental search engine results page. Over 90% of people will never go beyond the first page.

I hope, this data would be enough for you to understand why is SEO so much important for dentists. 

Let’s see some other reasons below:

Builds Trust And Credibility

Once you start using SEO for your dental practices, your website will start appearing high in SERP. And there is a reason why people click on the Top 5 results in SERP. 

They click on those websites because they trust them. 

Otherwise, Google doesn’t rank any website idle. Google only ranks the website that has authority and is worth ranking high. 

Higher rankings and credibility are directly proportional to each other. The higher you rank, the more people will trust you and see you as an expert in the industry. 

Read More: Local SEO Hacks: 8 Ways To Increase Local Website Traffic

SEO Gets More Traffic To Your Website

A recent study found that 53% of the traffic comes organically to the websites and the data could be much higher in local SEO. 

And, this is important for you, mainly because of two reasons:

1. It makes the patients organically come to your website and SEO helps them find you when they need services. And of course, it brings high-quality leads. 

2. The second reason is, the more traffic you have, the more chances you have to convert that traffic into leads. 

It Makes Users Come Back Again To Your Website

SEO will make users come back to your website again and again. Users do come back to the websites they visit once they feel a good user experience. 

SEO enhances the user experience by adding the best practices for dentists like

• Improving the page load speed 
• Creating mobile friendly design 
• Creating original content 
• Making site navigation easy for users

How Can A Dentist Rank No.1 In SERP?

Here, you must keep one thing in your mind and that is, the No.1 position is not guaranteed. Nobody in the whole world can guarantee you this position. 

However, with the right SEO practices, it is possible to get this position. After all, you can see, there are so many websites ranking at position No.1 in many different keywords. 

If they can rank on position No.1 so can you!

To understand how can SEO help you rank higher, you need to understand how SEO works first. 

Let’s understand how can you optimize your dental website with SEO.

How To Optimize A Dental Website?

A question here arises is, how do search engines rank your website in SERP? 

Here are some of the ways you can use dental SEO to get more patients. 

Add Relevant Keywords

As you are performing dental SEO and needs to get dental patients at your store. Many patients would search for services related to dental.

And, of course, this is one of the most popular facts to add relevant keywords to your blog. 

But, then the question is, what are those perfect relevant keywords that would bring patients to your dental clinic door? 

Patients do search for some specific services related to your business like, teeth whitening, teeth cleaning, braces, and other long-tail keywords, that has lower search volume and lower competition but the traffic to such keywords is high converting. 

In simple words, rather than just targeting your website to rank in “dentist” or “dental services”, try to optimize your website for keywords like,  “dentist in (your location)” “child dentist in (your location)” or “teeth whitening in (your location)”. These are some of the long-tail keywords. 

50 Dental Relevant Keywords

Keyword	Search Volume (US)	Competition (US)	Competition (Google Search Results)
affordable dentures	110000	Medium	8,850,000
aspen dental clinic	590	Medium	7,720,000
children dental care	1000	Low	373,000,000
cosmetic dental bonding	390	Medium	9,470,000
cosmetic dental care	260	Low	153,000,000
cosmetic dental clinic	260	Low	73,200,000
cosmetic dental treatment	110	Low	79,800,000
cosmetic dentistry	40500	Low	526,000,000
cosmetic dentistry teeth whitening	90	Low	29,100,000
cosmetic dentistry veneers	390	Medium	19,400,000
cosmetic dentistry whitening	70	Low	28,000,000
cosmetic teeth whitening	590	High	35,800,000
dental assistant	60500	Medium	246,000,000
dental care	14800	Low	716,000,000
dental care center	14800	Low	716,000,000
dental care clinic	90	Low	373,000,000
dental cleaning	8100	Medium	964,000,000
dental clinic	40500	Low	1,890,000,000
dental implant clinic	70	Medium	36,500,000
dental makeover	320	Medium	19,400,000
dental orthodontics	880	Medium	27,000,000
dental professionals	2400	Low	263,000,000
dental specialist	8100	Low	249,000,000
dentistry for children	74000	Low	195,000,000
denturist	6600	Low	869,000
emergency dental care	14800	Medium	493,000,000
emergency dental treatment	110	Medium	297,000,000
emergency dentist	110000	Medium	165,000,000
emergency tooth extraction	5400	Medium	16,200,000
family and cosmetic dentistry	1600	Low	96,700,000
family cosmetic dentistry	1000	Low	98,100,000
family dental care	8100	Low	526,000,000
family dental services	390	Low	634,000,000
family dentistry	74000	Low	1,150,000,000
general and cosmetic dentistry	210	Low	95,300,000
general dental care	50	Low	670,000,000
general dentistry	14800	Low	167,000,000
laser dentistry	9900	Low	39,900,000
laser teeth whitening	5400	High	13,500,000
oral sedation dentistry	1000	Low	11,300,000
partial dentures	22200	High	10,500,000
pediatric dentist	165000	Low	1,320,000,000
permanent dentures	5400	Medium	15,100,000
smile makeover	2900	Low	564,000,000
teeth alignment treatment	10	High	9,350,000
teeth whitening dentist	12100	Medium	60,700,000
teeth whitening system	880	High	14,600,000
teeth whitening treatment	880	High	45,800,000
urgent care dental clinic	110	Medium	36,600,000
wisdom tooth extraction	18100	Low	23,500,00

After applying this, also add the keywords that describe your services like tooth filling, root canal, and other procedures that you implement.

Optimize Your Website For Local searches

Dental services are local services usually, the locals would search for your business. That’s the reason you should be ranking higher in local searches. 

And, of course, you are missing a lot of opportunities, if you are not using geo-specific keywords. The easiest way to rank higher is by adding the location or city or town in your keyword. 

However, you must not forget the other ranking factors. Use the power of copywriting and add locations like your city name or the town name in your heading and in the page URL.

Don’t Underestimate The Blogs

What’s your ultimate goal as a dentist? To get more patients through the website. Right? 

Blogging is one of the ways to get more customers to your doorsteps. By writing blogs on dental healthcare, you can easily get more traffic and hence, more patients. 

As the traffic grows on your website, your rankings in SERP will also grow, and hence, you will become an authoritative source and dental patients would choose you before others. 

Get Backlinks

Do you know, the number of backlinks on your site directly impacts the traffic and rankings you have in SERP?

That simply means, to have a good ranking in SERP, you must have high DA (Domain Authority) backlinks.

However, it is very easy to generate. You can simply get backlinks by writing a good piece of content or reaching out to bloggers and asking them to share your content. 

You can also use, HARO, Guest Posting to get backlinks on your site. 

Backlinks would also help you have an image of an expert. And, of course, links are important for dental SEO. they act as an endorsement for your website. That’s why Google has made it one of the ranking factors. 

Take Care Of Your Headings

Make sure you use the right heading tags (H1, H2, H3…)  in your content. This makes your site easily scannable for search engine crawlers. 

Also, it creates a user-friendly experience and makes them stay on your site longer. 

See the example below, how I have used heading tags in my blog posts. 

I have used the heading tags correctly to make it appealing to my audience.

Work On Internal Links

Internal links are helpful in retaining the user to your dental website and improving engagement. Not only this, but it also helps Google crawlers to reach other pages of your site easily. 

Let me explain, if you have a blog post about, teeth cleaning and plaque, don’t forget to add a service page for “teeth whitening” 

This will help the audience reach your service page very easily.

Don’t Forget The Other Important SEO Elements

There are also some important Dental SEO elements that need to be taken care of. Here is the list of things that needs to be optimized.

1. URLs

Make sure the URL of your webpages are SEO optimized with the right keywords and make sure they are not too long. 

Let me show you an example:

Here is the blog of one of our dental clients

And now, check out the URL of the page:

The URL has the same keyword blog has in it.

2. Take Care Of Meta Tags 

Make sure you use the right meta tags for your dental business, it’s appealing, and not more than 50-60 characters. 

See the example below:

3. Image Alt text 

Image Alt text is important because Google can’t read images that you put on your website. 

Google and other search engines read the image’s alt text and with the help of alt text, the crawlers try to understand what is the purpose of a particular image. 

Make sure you perfectly describe the image and have your target keyword present in it.

Tracking the results

After applying all the SEO strategies, it is important to measure and track the outcomes to know if everything is going in the right direction or not. 

Here is how you can measure the results

You can check out the results with the help of some tools:

1. SEMrush 

Everyone knows SEMrush is best for keyword research and site audit, but there is one more feature in SEMrush that would help you to track your results i.e., position tracking.

Position tracking shows you what keywords you are ranking on along with the positions. 

It is one of the easiest ways to track what keywords you need to optimize in order to drive more results. This doesn’t finish here. You can even track which content on your website is ranking on featured snippets. 

2. Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is also one of the tools to measure and track your results. It is a must-have tool for all SEO experts. It is even free of cost provided by Google.

With the help of Google Analytics, you can simply check out which landing pages are bringing you conversions and which are not and in the position for further optimization. 

Also, you can even integrate it with call-tracking software.

Conclusion

These were some of the steps that you can take on your dental website to achieve some patients and conversions. 

There is no issue in hiring an external team for SEO, but why hire an external team when you can do this on your own with some simple steps? 

Also, don’t forget to use the dental scorecard that I have given you above. You must understand, having an understanding of what makes your website successful will actually make your website successful and bring you more conversions. 

And, if you have any doubts or queries, you can comment down below in the comment action and I am going to reply for sure. 

FAQs

1. Do dentists need SEO services for their clinics? 

Yes, of course. You need SEO for your dental clinic. In this Digital world, people are searching for things online. Even medical services too. And, you must know that 40% of patients search for medical services online and schedule an appointment online. 

2. How long does SEO for dental practices take?

SEO will take more than 6 months to deliver results. You must understand that there are lot of competitors for your business, and many websites already ranking higher than yours from years. So, of course, it will take time. 

3. How to choose the best dental SEO company?

Choosing the right dental SEO company is very easy, you just have to follow some steps like, 

1. Check the review of that dental SEO company 

2. Check out if they provide custom SEO services

3. Check out if they have already worked with some dentists

4. Ask them what results they can bring you