This article is meant as a comprehensive primer to SEO keywords for dentists and how to use them to skyrocket demand for the dental services you have to offer.
Today, having a digital presence for your dental clinic is absolutely vital; digital marketing and social media have become the new word of mouth. In other words, if you want your dental practice to grow and prosper in the 2020’s, you have got to get on board with how to use dental SEO to attract potential patients. It doesn’t matter whether you are a pediatric dentist, a cosmetic dentist or a an emergency dentist – using the right keywords and optimizing your website’s content so that it is attracting a constant stream of new potential customers to your dental office is the way to go.
If you are completely new to the concept of SEO, it can all seem rather daunting and opaque. But learning about content marketing and SEO is the best investment you can make in your dental business today.
If you want to learn the basics of how to do keyword research and how to use these keywords to make your dental practice appear in search engines, then keep on reading.
The basics of dental SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it encompasses everything that helps your dental website appear in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo.
When it comes to ranking in search results, you want your website to be as high up and near the top as possible. After all, do you ever scroll past the first page of results when you search for something on Google? If you are like most people, the answer is probably no. This is why SEO is so important – the top search results are bound to receive a disproportionate amount of traffic, which means potential new customers, while the results on page 5 are languishing in obscurity.
So, what does SEO consist of? SEO is determined by a great number of different key components including domain name and age, site loading speed and layout, target keywords, meta descriptions, headlines, bread text and blog posts.
The basic building blocks of a great website that is likely to be favoured by Google and other search engines are a well-aged domain with a domain name that is relevant to your niche, lightning quick page loading time, a sleek and easy-to-navigate layout, and plenty of relevant, high quality content that uses all of the right keywords.
How SEO gives you an unfair advantage over competing dental practices
It is a cold, hard truth that the dental practice that are thriving and attracting a steady flow of new patients are not necessarily the clinics with best dentists but the clinics that know SEO and content marketing.
Of course, you still need to be a highly competent dentist if you want to do well, as just a few scathing Google reviews or negative word of mouth shared on social media can be enough to hurt the reputation of your dental clinic for good. Still, it is true that traditional advertising methods have not aged well, and the dentists who still rely on them are falling further and further behind in the race while dental practices that have embraced social media and digital marketing are thriving like never before.
The art and science of making your dental clinic show up in search engines
As already mentioned, there are so many things that go into a SEO optimized website. In this section of the article, our focus is on dental keywords, how to find them and how to leverage them to your advantage.
How to do keyword research
It all starts with finding the right dental keywords to use. To put it simply, the right keywords for dentists are the ones that prospective patients are putting into Google and other search engines every day when they are looking for a dentist near their location, or when they are looking to learn more about a specific dental procedures that they may be considering. A few examples of such searches could be ’emergency dental clinic Colorado Springs,’ ‘pediatric dentist NYC,’ ‘teeth whitening’ or ‘tooth extraction recovery tips.’
What you essentially want to do is figure out which keywords, key phrases and questions people are putting into search engines, so that you can use them to attract more traffic to your own dental website.
Use a SEO keyword research software to find keywords
Doing keyword research manually is a tremendous undertaking, and one that inevitably relies on a lot of guesswork. You could try typing various dental SEO keywords into Google to see what suggestions and search results come up, but the smarter way to do keyword research is to use a software like Ahrefs or Semrush.
A SEO keyword software will enable you to see how many monthly searches are done for any particular keyword, phrase or question. Needless to say, you want to go after keywords, key phrases and questions that receive large search volumes every month. If the search term ’emergency dentist near Brooklyn’ is put into Google ten thousand times a month, ranking highly for that term could be invaluable to your business – provided, of course, that you are a Brooklyn based dentist.
Gage the competition
Another thing you will be able to see when using a keyword research software like Semrush are the sites that are currently ranking for any keyword, phrase or question that you are wanting to turn into content. This allows you to determine in advance whether or not you are likely to be able to rank highly in the search results.
Let us say, for example, that your website has a domain rating of 30 and the website that is currently in the number one spot for the keyword you would like to rank for, let us call it ‘cosmetic dentistry LA,’ only has a domain rating of 20. This tells you that you would be able to put a well-written piece of content about ‘cosmetic dentistry LA’ up on your website and would be likely to supersede the other website’s position in the search results.
If, on the other hand, all of the websites that are currently ranking highly for ‘cosmetic dentistry LA’ all have higher domain ratings and significantly more backlinks than your site, writing a piece of content about ‘cosmetic dentistry LA’ is likely to get buried deep down among the search results where very few prospective clients are likely to find it.
In other words, doing keyword research is not as simple as finding great SEO keywords for dentists. The second half of the equation is researching your competition and whether or not you are likely to be able to redirect some or most of the traffic that is currently going to their website’s content and their business.
Keep a keyword list
Keeping a keyword list can be helpful, as it allows you to write down your keyword ideas and research them later. A keyword list can also function a reminder to yourself of which short and long tail keywords relating to your dental practice that you want to remember to use in your SEO content.
Including SEO keywords that are specific to your location and/or the dental services you have to offer is a great idea, as it helps you generate not just large volumes of traffic, but traffic from prospective clients that are looking for your services specifically. For example, while ranking highly for ‘teeth whitening’ is bound to draw thousands of hits to website on a weekly basis, a long tail keyword that is more pointed and specific, such as ‘teeth whitening New Orleans’ is likely to draw in fewer but much more qualified leads.
Maintain a key phrase optimized blog
Your dental website should have a blog, and this blog should have as many keywords embedded in it as possible. Think of them as magnets that are constantly drawing potential dental patients to your clinic. Some of the keywords will be drawing lots of traffic every month, while others many be drawing smaller streams of traffic.
When it comes to maintaining a SEO optimised blog on your website, quality and quantity are both king. Not only do you want to be publishing high-quality articles on your blog, you want to keep doing so on a regular basis. The more quality and the more quantity you have, the more traffic your website is going to draw.
Writing a SEO optimised blog is a long-term strategy. Initially, it is going to require a lot of work and effort on your part before you begin seeing results in the form of increased traffic to your website. This can be a rather frustrating truth, but writing ten high quality pieces of content and leaving it at that is not going to cut it.
The best dental SEO strategy involves building up a vast catalogue of high-quality written content in which countless dental keywords that prospective patients might be searching for are embedded.
Over time, a blog with a large volume of high-quality SEO content is going to work like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering more and more momentum. Initially, the progress will be slow and incremental, but over time it is possible to build up a vault of quality SEO content that attracts more and more prospective clients each month.
Leverage the power of ‘dentist near’ searches
The power of local SEO cannot be underestimated.
No matter where your dental clinic is based, you will have target customers searching for dental services in your specific geographic location, meaning in your state, in your town, in your neighbourhood. This is why local searches are so important and so powerful when you are running any type of brick-and-mortar business, and dental clinics are no exception.
Leveraging local SEO is going to be priceless to your business. After all, dental services can only be offered in person, so even if your website is receiving a lot of traffic from all over the country or internationally, it might not be of much practical use to you. The highest quality website traffic a dental practice can get is from local searches.
To rank in local searches, you need to find and create content around location based keywords for dentists. This should be your goal: When someone types in ‘dental clinic near,’ ‘cosmetic dentist near,’ or ’emergency dentist near’ followed by their location, you want your clinic to be the one that shows up at the top of the search results.
To generate local inbound leads, find and make a list of all of the best local dental SEO search terms that you might be able to rank for. If you want to dominate the local search results, you essentially want to hoover up all of the local dental SEO search terms. Let us say, for example, that your dental practice is based in Phoenix, Arizona. You essentially want to hoover up al of the local dental SEO keywords, from ‘dental implants Arizona’ to ‘best dentist near Phoenix AZ.’
Another powerful way of making your business show up in local search results is to use local maps searches. Businesses that show up on Google Maps are bound to receive more business than businesses that do not. Adding your dental practice to Google Maps instantly puts you on the map – so if you haven’t already done so, this should be a priority.
Grow your domain rating and backlinks
Growing your domain rating and the number of links leading back to your website is another long-term strategy which, combined with using all of the right SEO keywords for dentists at volume and scale is inevitably going to lead to your website soaring in search results.
Bumping up your domain rating cannot be done overnight. Your domain rating signalises to Google and other search engines how authoritative your website is. To illustrate, Wikipedia.com is a high authority site, whereas a small new website that has only been up for a couple of months is a low authority site.
Search engines are built to always bring up the most authoritative and useful search results, which means that a Wikipedia article is always going to come up near the top of search results, versus an article on the same topic published on a low authority site.
Increasing your domain rating is a matter of time and effort. The longer your website has been around the more reliable it will seem to Google. The more useful, high quality content your website has, the more valuable it will become, and the more likely it is to soar in search results.
Building backlinks should be yet another aspect of your strategy. Backlinks are links on preferably high authority sites that lead back to your website. The more of these you have the better.
Our SEO services
Now that you understand what a great SEO keyword strategy for dentists entail, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed. After all, it is not nearly as simple as publishing a handful of well-written blog posts on your website and hoping for the best. Besides, you are a dental professional with a practice to run – finding the time to also write extensively about your services may be a challenge.
This is where we come in. Here at INTJDC, we are expert at writing high quality content for dentists. With our help, your dental website could soon be ranking higher and generating more qualified traffic than ever before.
We provide comprehensive SEO services, including SEO keyword research, content writing and one-on-one consulting on how to skyrockt your dental business online. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you and your business thrive.
Takeaway
A SEO strategy is no longer optional but vital if you want your dental practice to thrive in the 2020s. But using the right target keywords is a long-term game, one that requires a lot of effort and a lot of work, particularly in the beginning and until you have managed to put your dental practice firmly on the virtual map.
The key ingredients to success are using software for your dental keyword research, dominating local searches and building a blog with an abundance of relevant keywords that attract increasing numbers of prospective new clients.
When it comes to how many new clients the SEO keyword strategies mentioned in this article can bring into your clinic, the sky is truly the limit. Thousands of dental practices all over the world are already winning disproportionately as a result of implementing them. Your practice should be among them.