Top Ninja SEO Tactics That Work for Dental Services

Implementing SEO tactics for dental services is crucial to the long-term success of any dentist. It’s the Internet marketing gift that keeps on giving. Work really hard to rank your dental services for common keywords your future dental patients are looking for and combine that with the names of local cities in your area (including the one in which your office is located), and get traffic you don’t have to pay for. This can last for months or even years on end without you having to do any extra work or continue paying a digital marketing agency for the long run.

It’s for those reasons that you owe it to yourself to invest in these top ninja as SEO tactics that work for dental services. Now don’t be fooled, a solid search engine optimization strategy requires consistent effort and implementation, and it will be harder to rank for keywords in a major city where there are lots of other dentists working on their search engine optimization game.

In the short term it probably is best to hire a digital marketing agency to do all this for you. The reality is that the world of business (and yes, working as a dentist is still about improving the bottom line at the end of the day), self-employed individuals are supposed to spend 70% of their time on marketing and only 30% of their time fulfilling work.

Odds are the dental college you went to didn’t teach you that and they didn’t teach you search engine optimization or other internet marketing tactics like content marketing, pay per click advertising, graphic design, social media or reputation management.

Consider this blog post your primer for all of that. Welcome to the exciting world of search engine optimization for dental services. Even if you only implement a few of these tricks on your own, the ninja tactics you’re about to learn will help your business grow tremendously.

The Number One Principle in SEO for Dental Services

Any robust as SEO strategy starts with the basics. The number one principle that a good search engine optimization strategist needs to master is the idea of keyword planning. Keywords are the words that your future patients type into Google and other search engines to try to get information. Many keywords are just about doing research. For example somebody struggling with pain in their tooth that wants to avoid going to the dentist might look up phrases like ‘dental gel’ or ‘how to numb a toothache’. While those keyword phrases signal that the prospect is looking for dental care, they’re actually not looking for a dentist. They just want to do their own research and fix their own problem. That doesn’t help bring more people through the doors of your dental office.

That’s why there’s another kind of keyword that you need to be focused on. Buyer keywords. Buyer keywords are just what they sound like. They indicate a high level of intent to make a purchase or actually take action. Somebody looking for Invisalign braces can’t get them without working with a dentist. As most dentists know, cosmetic dentistry is also lucrative and puts money in your pocket. So ranking for a keyword like Invisalign, assuming that you offer that product or a similar version, is definitely worth it.

Google Keyword Planner

So the question then becomes, how do you find more of these keywords? You do what everyone else is doing. You Google them. Not in the traditional sense, but rather you use Google’s keyword planning tool. Google’s keyword planner shows you how much it costs to bid on certain keywords. It also shows you related keywords. It also tells you whether the competition for those keywords is low, medium, or high. Sometimes a keyword can be searched much less frequently than others, yet be highly competitive. The whole point of bidding on keywords in investing in pay per click advertising is to be seen not just by as many people as possible, but by as many highly intent buyers as possible.

Fortunately for dentists everybody needs oral health care, so as long as you bid on the right keywords, you’ll get business. It doesn’t take much to convince people why they need to keep their teeth clean and their mouth healthy.

Another Keyword Tool: UberSuggest

Another keyword tool worth exploring is UberSuggest. UberSuggest is also free, but it gives users a more visual representation of how difficult it might be to rank for certain keywords or get ads for those keywords displayed in front of eyeballs. The tool is owned by famous digital marketer Neil Patel. He knows what he’s talking about in his tool is great.

Why Dentists Need Google My Business

Any instance of a company’s name, address, telephone number and website listed properly on well-known websites is invaluable to increasing the Google ranking of any dentistry. Listing this information is what collectively known as a local citation. Google gives businesses credit for listing this information not just on its own platform, but on other directories large and small. These directories can be big brand names like Bing, a search engine competitor, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps or other big citation/review sites. What better place to list that information than Google’s own platform, Google My Business?

All of the above websites allows you to list your citation and collect customer reviews. That second part is important to. It falls under an umbrella term and Internet marketing called reputation management. The customer review is a chance not only to show off that your dentistry is getting testimonials from very happy customers. It’s also an opportunity for you to please customers that may not be happy with your services. Being proactive in reaching out to customers for reviews is an opportunity for you to get their honest feedback and be proactive and satisfying their needs.

Google My Business and its competing citation sites offer you the chance to show off a map to your office, post photos and videos of what you’re doing, create blog posts that don’t live on your own website and ultimately rank higher for clicks when people experiencing dental issues really need help. They will be the ones looking at your Google My Business profile.

Don’t Forget Other Local Directories

Most digital marketing companies will preach to the importance of being listed in the above directories. There the big brand names and they get the most traffic so it makes sense. That being said there’s also a lot of value in pursuing smaller directories that relate specifically to dentistry. Having links from these directories pointing back to your website is invaluable, even if most people have never heard of the directories.

The bottom line is it easy for a website to brag about its own services, but what other people are bragging about it, Google and other search engines take notice. As a dentist working on their marketing strategy, that’s what you need. You need to get other people (and by people we mean websites) talking about you.

Here’s a quick list of dentist related directories. It’s not a complete list but it’s a good start:

NOTE: most directory sites will list your information for free, but some charge money. Let an experienced digital marketing firm advise you as to whether you should be paying for certain directory listings or not. In general though if you have a budget for it, do it.

The Website for your Dental Services

Even though we just finished saying that dentists need third-party credibility in order to rank on Google and other search engines, properly designing and optimizing the website for your dental services is still very important. Aside from paying for advertising or putting content up on social media platforms, the website is really the first instance of brand awareness your patient sees the you actually have 100% control over. Talk about your services. Speak to your ideal patient. Offer promotions. Post pictures of your staff that make everybody look human and show your prospect that you really care about their dental and oral hygiene.

From a technical standpoint there are a bunch of things you can do to make your website the best it can possibly be.

Optimize Your Landing Page or Homepage

You probably haven’t heard of the term landing page too much throughout your dental career. Don’t worry, it really just means any page your prospect lands on when they arrive to your website. If you’re focused on building an email list of potential prospects and customers, you’ll want to collect your prospect’s email address right away. This gives you the opportunity to communicate with them on a regular basis even if they haven’t walked into your office yet. If you’re not going to do that, you still need a good-looking homepage. Aesthetically a good web designer or web development service can take care of that for you, but you also need help with the technical side of things.

Google and other search engines like when you’re website’s pages have proper page titles and meta-descriptions. The meta-description is the snippet of content that describes a Google search link when a user is searching for it. Without it, Google doesn’t know how to describe your content and won’t give you the credit you deserve when it comes to ranking.

Building Detailed Service Pages

Odds are most new patients coming to your dentistry for an initial appointment to come in for a checkup or a cleaning. Those services aren’t worth the most money in the dentistry world, but they are invaluable services for exposing people to your brand of service and your knowledge as a dentist. The service pages of your dental website are what Internet marketers call “money pages”. Fulfilling services for patients is how you put money in your pocket after all. A digital marketing agency working with you on your website needs to make sure the content is properly written. This means employing all the strategies that make up good copywriting. Explaining features, advantages, and benefits. Using a clear call to action. Offering promotions that get the patient excited about coming in or at least get them motivated.

You also need to get other websites talking about your services and linking back to your service pages. This is called backlinking. The same driving force that makes local citations valuable is what will move your dental website up the ranks. One way to make sure that other websites are talking about yours is to regularly update a blog that gives away free valuable content to prospects on a regular basis

Why You Should Blog Consistently

Blogging consistently shows search engines that you’re committed to your brand and consistently offering prospects and patients value. It gives third party websites a reason to link back to you which over the long run helps increase your Google ranking. It also allows you to establish yourself as an authority in the realm of dental services. It instills confidence in your patients before they even show up for their first appointment. And it turns a first-time patient into a lifelong friend that comes to you whatever they have needs surrounding their oral health.

A good dentist looking lots of appointments and making lots of money can just pay someone to handle blogging and newsletter writing for them, but if there is any aspect of your marketing that you want to control yourself or at least have a voice in, it would be the blog. That’s the thing about blogs. You don’t have to be a master writer or storyteller to make an impact on your patients. They don’t even have to be sitting in your dentist chairs.

Blogging is a great way to show off your personality, inform prospects and show them how much you know about dentistry and how much you love it as a passion. Blogging and all of the other things you can do with content are collectively referred to as content marketing, but it’s also important for your SEO.

Other Strategies for Ranking Dental Service

The reality is search engine optimization is just one part of a broader strategy for ranking your website and making it stick in the minds of future patients. In the long run, a dentist that really cares about the marketing of their brand needs to employ a social media strategy, use pay per click advertising, engage in content marketing, manage their reputation online and be involved in the whole process of marketing their business even if a digital marketing company is taking care of the heavy lifting.

Hopefully this blog post has helped clear the air on the tactics that work in ranking your dental services. Now get started and rank above the competition.

Photo by Ani Kolleshi on Unsplash.