How SEO for Dentists can Change Your Dental Practice Forever

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SEO for dentists – how important is a solid SEO strategy really for growing your dental business and going beyond merely surviving in today’s competitive climate? Moreover, what does a powerful SEO strategy involve, and how exactly does it attract new clients to your business?

Whether you are brand new to the concept of SEO or have a little experience, this article was written for you.

Chances are, you are a highly skilled and experienced dentist or orthodontist, but SEO might be a foreign concept, or something you simply know little about. And why should this be any different? After all, SEO and content marketing are not part of your job description.

But what if we told you that SEO – Search engine optimization – can take a robust dental practice and make it thrive like never before, or bring a rush of new clients to a struggling oral health clinic?

SEO is fertiliser, the pipeline that connects a professional with prospective clients – much more on this later on this article.

It is very much worth it for dentists and other professionals to learn about SEO, as SEO is a fertiliser that can make a business or a practice grow. If you’ve got the skills as a dentist, all you need is for new patients to be able to find you so they can come to you for the services you provide.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is an umbrella term that covers a number of different strategies that, when combined, push a website up higher in the search results in Google and other search engines.

Ranking highly in the Google search engine is vital if you are hoping to attract visitors your website, and as a natural extension of this, new patients to your practice.

There are a vast number of factors that play into SEO for dentists, and in this article, we are going to look at all of them. The most important factor, however, is written content that prospective new clients can search for by putting specific keywords or questions into the Google search bar.

Just think about how you yourself use Google. Google is a search engine that people all over the world – including people in your local area looking for the best dental practices, teeth whitening treatments, veneers and other dental services – are using to find answers to their questions.

Let us say, for example, that you are visiting an unfamiliar town and want to find a great restaurant – what are you looking for, and where do you look for it? Chances are, rather than pulling over your car, rolling down the window and asking a local for recommendations, you do a Google search instead.

Pages and pages or results come up, but if you are like most people, you are probably only going to look on page one, and at the top results at that. If you scroll further down in the search results, it is extremely unlikely that you are going to scroll past page two, three, four at a stretch.

This illustrates perfectly what SEO is and what it does. At its best, SEO can help you appear at or near the top of Google search results, and at or near the top of other search engines as well. What this means, of course, is that SEO is the determining factor in how much internet traffic search engines lead to your website, and via your website, to your business.

Not all of the traffic that lands on your website is going to convert into paying clients, but provided that your website gives them with the information they are looking for in a user-friendly way, you can expect at least some of that traffic to translate into new patients for your dental practice.

What is SEO for dentists and how can you use it to transform your dental practice?

SEO for dentists or dental SEO is SEO that specifically relates to the dentistry niche or industry. After all, your online presence should be focused on the services you are able to provide as a professional dentist, as this is what you have to offer the visitors to your website.

Dental SEO involves all of the same ranking factors that SEO experts recommend you focus on if you want to rank well in search engine results (We will cover all of these ranking factors later on in this article) but using keywords that are specifically related to dentistry, dental services and treatments, and what new potential patients are searching for in Google. Such keywords and key phrases could include ‘dentist near me,’ ‘best dental practices in Las Vegas,’ ‘how much do veneers cost,’ and ‘does insurance cover Invisalign.’

Search engine optimization makes your visible in search engines and helps new clients find you

Prospective dental patients are searching for dental treatments, from veneers to teeth whitening treatments, all day, every day using Google and other search engines.

If your dental practice’s site has been optimised for SEO and contains pages and blog posts with SEO-rich dental keywords and search terms embedded in them, it will show up in the search engine when a prospective new patient is using these keywords. This is the very function of keywords – to help people find what they are looking for.

When you keep this in mind, it is easy to see why ranking well in search engines is a vital aspect of running a modern dental clinic successfully. After all, you might be a highly competent dentist or orthodontist – but if nobody knows, how are they supposed to call up your dental practice to enquire further about the services you offer or book an appointment?

Dental SEO builds credibility

Increasingly, people are using Google and other search engines to ask their questions and to find the products and services they are in the market for. It follows that a dental clinic, lawyer practice or plastic surgeon with a substantial online presence has an unfair advantage over their professional counterparts who do not.

Being visible and easy to find online does more than drive numbers to your dental website – it also builds credibility. It makes perfect sense why prospective new patients are more inclined to trust a dentist whose website is full of useful and insightful information, not only about the dental practice itself but about dentristy and orthodontic treatments.

Having an extensive and well-written blog on dentistry on your website is a powerful business-building tool, not only from a SEO perspective but also when it comes to building credibility and getting known as an expert in your field. You may not actually be a better dentist than the dentist practicing a few doors done the street from your clinic, but if you have a better online presence and a SEO-optimized website, the perception is going to be that you are the better dentist.

Dental SEO builds trust

The old adage is true – people buy from people they trust. And in the field of dentistry, trust cannot be underestimated. Everyone wants a dentist they can trust, and in this regard too, dental SEO is helpful.

Why? Because SEO for dentists does more than drive traffic and help you establish credibility, it also helps you gain the trust of prospective patients. Your SEO strategy should involve your practice’s website being jam-packed with articles that thoughtfully and concisely answer the questions and allay the fears potential patients have about dental care and treatments, from veneers to clear aligners.

It goes almost without saying that if a prospective new patient is facing the choice of seeking dental services from a dentist whose practice website has a blog section full of well-written articles talking about dentistry – including the specific treatment the prospective patient is currently considering – versus from a dentist without much of an online presence (if any), it is obvious which dentist the new patient is going to choose.

Why SEO is the best dental marketing strategy

There are no two ways about to – dental SEO is the best, most powerful deltal marketing strategy there is. And not just in the short term either.

But what exactly is it about dental search engine optimization (SEO) that makes it such a vital piece in making dental websites and practices grow and thrive in the long run? Well, let us take a look.

SEO is evergreen

Unlike an ad, which runs its course over a limited period of time, SEO is an evergreen marketing strategy. SEO has the potential of paying dividends for years or even decades, provided that you continually stay on top of it.

While an ad expires and continually has to be paid for, SEO content is forever. Each SEO-rich page and article found on your dental website helps drive traffic to your website and new patients to your practice in the long run.

There is also something to be said for building a social media presence, but doing so requires at least as much effort as building a SEO-rich website for your dental practice, and unlike social media, which is always subject to the platform’s terms and conditions, and is also not owned by you, you own every piece of dental website SEO on your practice’s site. A social media post quickly becomes irrelevant, while dental SEO articles have a much longer shelf life.

Sure, you should be adding new content to your dental SEO blog now and then, but once you have a solid backlist of SEO optimised articles, these will be driving organic search results to your dental website on a continual basis. In other words, every dollar and every minute you spend on your dental SEO is going to be worth so much more to you and your business in the long run than any social media post.

Your competitors are already using dental SEO

Has it occurred to you that your competitors might already be using dental SEO to drive new patients to their practices? And, if they are not, they will be soon?

Many dental professionals are not yet fully aware of the possibilities that good SEO can help them unlock – but more are awakening every day, which means that the competition to appear on the first page of results in search engines is intensifying.

With that being said, it is still relatively early days in the internet revolution and there is still a huge competitive advantage to be gained for dental websites starting out today.

The same is not going to still be true in a few year’s time, so don’t delay making dental SEO the cornerstone of your dental marketing efforts.

SEO decides where new patients go for dentistry

It is true now, and it will only become more true as the months and years take us ever deeper into the digital age. Appearing among the top search engine results is key to growing and sustaining an influx of new patients in the years to come. Dental Search engine optimization will enable your business to stay relevant and merely survive but thrive.

It is impossible to predict exactly how things are going to play out, but it is extremely likely that the next few years are going to see dentists and other professionals who don’t leverage either social media or search engine optimization being put out of business by the ones that embrace and roll with the changes.

How to rank #1 in Google search results

All right, you now have a very clear understanding of how important dental SEO is if you want to make sure your dental practice’s website appears on the first page of results in search engines like Google.

But how exactly is Search engine optimization done – what are the different factors that play into whether or not search engines recognise your website as relevant when someone does a Google search for the key phrase ‘best dental practices near me’?

On-site ranking factors

Whether your dental website comes up in the search engine results for any given search keyword or phrase comes down to a number of factors, both on-site and off-site. Let us look at the on-site ranking factors before moving onto the off-site ranking factors.

The number of on-site ranking factors that affect how well your website performs in search engines is astronomical, so let us narrow things down to the most important ones.

The first thing search engines determine when bringing up results for a search is the content on your website, most importantly the presence of relevant keywords embedded in your website’s page copy, blog posts, as well as URLs, meta titles, descriptions and even photo file names. Content is so much more than just the articles on your blog. Search engines are even able to determine the length and quality of the written copy on your website, and will filter out results that are poorly written or spammy. In other words, simply writing a lot of content for your blog is not going to cut it – you should always aim for quality as well as quantity.

Another important ranking factor that many are not aware of is the age of your website. The older the better! The reason for this is that an older website has been around for long enough for Google and other search engines to begin recognizing it as a high authority site, whereas a new site seems much more dubious from the point of view of search engines.

A perhaps surprising on-site ranking factor is whether or not your website is well organised and easy to navigate. If search engine robots have an easy time accessing, understanding and indexing your content, they will consider your website more relevant. A messy, badly designed or clunky website on the other hand is akin to a deadweight.

Page load speed is another key factor in determining how well liked by search engines your website is going to be. Ideally, your dental website should load in a second, and no more than two. If your website loads slowly, it will have a much harder time making its way int search engine results. Usually, if your dental practice’s website is slow, it is often related to your hosting provider or the web design template or theme you have used to build your website. Unfortunately, while all-in-one website solutions like Wix and Squarespace are easy to use and come with a host of beautiful pre-made templates, they are not as fast and effective as WordPress.

Yet another on-site ranking factor you should be aware of is whether or not your website is mobile-friendly. In this day and age, it really needs to be as many browse on their phones, iPads or other small devices rather than laptops or stationary computers.

How long people spend on your website is another key ranking factor. Needless to say, once you have got a prospective new patient’s attention, you want to hold onto it. Google and other search engines know this, so if the search engine robots learn that people are quickly clicking away from your website they will consider it evidence that they are not liking your content and will start directing your potential patients elsewhere, to better content that is more likely to engage them.

Off-site ranking factors

In addition to all of the on-site ranking factors we have just discussed, there are also a great many off-site ranking factors that influence how well your website performs in search results.

Off-site ranking factors essentially boil down to links, and the number of pages and platforms on the internet that either mention or link to your website. The reason why having links on other websites, blogs and social media that all point back to you is so important is that this is yet another way of showing Google and other search engines that your website is relevant, talked about and considered an authority (Why else would other websites be linking to it?)?

When it comes to your lnikbuilding strategy, quality and quantity both matter. Quantity is simple – it’s about getting as many links back to your website as possible. But which factors determine the quality of a link?

The most important thing to consider is how you have earned the link, and whether the link is natural, manual or self-created. The linking site’s popularity and domain authority are also vitally important. In other words, there is a world of difference between you sharing a link to your own website on your own Twitter account, and The Academy of General Dentistry doing a writeup about the teeth straightening treatment you provide and linking to your website.

This brings us to another key thing to be aware of in terms of lnikbuilding, and that is how related the linking site’s subject matter is to the website being linked to (In this case, your dental website). A link from a high authority dentistry blog is going to be much more valuable to you than a link from a high authority tech blog, or a more general link from a social media profile.

How recent the link is is also relevant. In this case, a newer link is better because it indicates that your dental care website is relevant, right now. An older link is still valuable, but not quite as much.

Sometimes links break, and it is a good idea to regularly use a broken link checker tool to ensure that all of your links are still working, as broken links can harm your SEO and drag down your website’s authority. 

Synthesis

It is the combination, or the synthesis, of both on-and-off page ranking factors that determine how relevant your website is going to seem to search engines.

To put it in the simplest terms possible, search engine optimization is nothing more or less than making your dental website imminently desirable to search engine robots, and the way to do this is to make sure that your website is brimming with genuinely helpful, valuable, high-quality content, and that the website itself is fast, easy to navigate and trustworthy. It’s simple, really.

How to get started with SEO for dentists

Now that you have a sweeping understanding of what’s involved, how should you go about getting started with SEO digital marketing? With so much to be done, it can be difficult to know where to begin.

Let us walk you through the steps, the important boxes that will need to be ticked in order for your dental website to begin climbing in the search engine results. We will assume that you are an absolute beginner, starting from scratch and working your way up with a completely new website.

Build your website on WordPress

It is always better to lay a solid foundation and build it right from the beginning, than to have to turn back later and correct your earlier mistakes. With this in mind, we recommend that you build your website on WordPress. WordPress is the recommended website builder platform if you want your website to be both fast and favoured by Google.

Unfortunately, WordPress is not the most beginner friendly website builder there is, so if you are not a particularly technology savvy person (and the idea of spending hours sweating at your computer, trying to figure out how to work with WordPress), opting for one of the simple and intuitive drag-and-drop website builders instead can be incredibly tempting. We warn you though, please don’t do it.

While website builders like Squarespace and Wix are quick and easy to use, the finished website results are practically guaranteed to be slower and more clunky than a WordPress site, which makes it harder to rank well in search results.

Make your website imminently user friendly

Deciding which platform to build your website on is just the beginning. Once you get to the actual web design, there are plenty of decisions to make and things to keep in mind along the way.

As already mentioned, one of the most important aspects of website design is how fast your page loads. If you have built it on WordPress, it should load lightning fast. Choosing a lightweight theme or template and keeping your page neat and simple is also helpful.

You should also make sure that your new website is mobile-friendly, since a lot of potential patients are going to find you by making search engine searches on their phones, rather than on a computer. Fortunately, WordPress has a feature that allows you to see how your website looks on both mobile devices and tablets. In other words, you have no excuses not to make your website work well on all devices.

While building your website, consider how it would be to navigate as a prospective patient. Is your content compelling and useful? Is the site smooth and intuitive to navigate, and are all of the headings and subheadings all the same sizes and colors? Hint: They should be. You want to your website to look as sleek and professional as possible.

Start blogging on a regular basis

We are finally getting to the real meat of this article: Creating the dental SEO content itself.

If you have gone through the process of creating your website, you should already have some text on there, including headers, subheads and bread text that signals to the search engine robots what your site is all about.

From here, it is all about building a massive dental SEO content vault, i.e. a blog full of articles about dentistry and the specific services and products you provide.

Use relevant keywords that prospective clients are searching for

Don’t just blog about anything dentistry related either – it is important that you use the keywords, key phrases and search terms that people are actively searching for and putting into Google. 

Writing relevant content is key, and relevant content comes down to embedding the precise keywords, phrases and questions that your prospective new patient are searching for within the pages of your websites and the articles on your blog. If you are not using relevant keywords, and plenty of them, your content is not going to show up in search results.

Tip: Keyword research

The key to using the right keywords is doing keyword research before you begin writing. If you don’t do keyword research, you only have your own guesstimates to go by in terms of what people are typing into Google.

Fortunately, there are several software tools available that take the guesswork out of SEO keyword research and turn it into a relatively straightforward process. Two of the best SEO keyword research tools are Semrush and Ahrefs, both of which allow you to discover the search volume for any search term, word or phrase that people are putting into Google. Both softwares have a keyword explorer tools that lets you see how many times any given word, phrase or question is being searched for on a monthly basis. The software is also going to show you the top results that are currently ranking for the keyword you put in. You will be able to see the top websites’ domain authority scores, which tells you how easy or difficult it is going to be for you to take their position in search results.

Let us say, for example, that your dental website’s authority score is 30, which is a very respectable score but not enough to compete with the true heavyweights. And let us say that you put the key phrase ‘best clear aligner brands’ into the search field’ and that the top pages that appear in the search results have low domain scores, or merely scores that are lower than your site’s score. What this indicates is that you can write a piece of content on the topic of ‘best clear aligner brands,’ share it on your website and have the result appear at or near the top of the search engine results.

Optimise for local searches

In addition to filling your dentistry blog with SEO-rich articles, another thing you can do to optimize your website and make it easier for prospective new patients to find you is to focus on ways of drawing local search traffic. 

When you are a brick-and-mortar business, or in this case, a brick-and-mortar dental practice, drawing local search traffic is much more important than drawing traffic globally. After all, even if someone in Shang Hai comes across your dental practice website and find it fascinating, they are unlikely to fly out to San Francisco to get their teeth straightened by you.

What you want to do, instead, is to focus on becoming visible, not just in a general sense but specifically to people in your local area. There are a few different ways for you to easily do this.

Add your practice to Google Maps

If you have not already done so, you should add your dental practice to Google Maps straight away.

Have you noticed how, when searching on Google for a local business or service, the first results that come up are usually Google Maps results? What this should indicate to you is that adding your dental practice to Google Maps is a quick win for your business.

Here is how to do it: First, head on over to Google Maps and claim your business listing. In addition to claiming your business, you can and should also add as much information about your business as possible, add a local phone number (preferably a call tracking number) and a few professional-looking photos.

List your practice on local directories

Once you have claimed your business on Google Maps, you should also think about adding it to local directories, forums and citations. 

A few good citations to list your dental practice on include Healthgrades, ZocDoc and Yelp.

Add patient reviews

Real patient reviews of your dental practice and services are a wildly underestimated source of credibility and good SEO karma! 

Patients can share reviews on multiple places, including Google, Yelp, Facebook and so on. The best place to get positive reviews is on Google, as reviews of your business on Google counts for pure SEO gold. You can also add some of these reviews to your website, which has the dual effect of boosting your SEO further and making you look trustworthy to potential patients who are browsing your website. 

As a dentist, you should make asking patients for reviews a core aspect of your marketing strategy.

Don’t forget link building

Some aspects of SEO marketing are one-off and others are ongoing. Linkbuilding belongs to the latter category. 

Even after your dental practice’s website has started performing well in search results, you should still be looking looking at ways to grow your linkbuilding, as it is akin to having several red threads leading back to you and your dental practice. You want your website to continue to grow in authority, rather than stagnate or decline, and a link building strategy is vital to keeping your website at the top of search results, even if you are no longer adding new content to it as regularly.

Patience + consistency are key

Dental SEO is not a magic pill that is going to transform your business overnight. Rather, it is a slow-moving, slow-growing but lasting approach to growing your business and helping it thrive.

If you are just staring out with a brand new website, your domain authority is inevitably going to be low to start with. There is no away around this (Unless you are able to purchase an expired dental website with an existing domain authority score), and so patience is key.

If you want your dental SEO strategy to succeed, you have to fully commit and accept that you are in this for the long haul. It will usually take a couple of months before you start really seeing the results of your efforts, so when you are initially spending untold hours researching SEO keywords and writing blog posts, it can seem like you are shouting into the wind. The trick is to stay with it, to keep adding to your blog and improving the user experience on your website until you start seeing the results. 

When your SEO strategy starts yielding results, you will notice that the results grow exponentially. Even if you are doing everything right, at first nothing much is going to happen. Then you will see a trickle of traffic to your website, and then a flood.

How to know if dental search engine optimization is paying off

The real question is, how do you know whether your dental SEO strategy is paying off?

After all, you cannot spend numberless hours or thousands of dollars on optimising your website for SEO forever without seeing any results. And while you should not expect to see much in the way of results right away, it is both valuable and useful to know how to measure the success of your efforts.

The first and most obvious yardstick you can use to measure how well your dental SEO marketing is working is to look at your website traffic. You can use Google Console, a fantastic free tool, to look at bot the column, the quality and the source of your website traffic.

Another metric worth looking at is keyword rankings. Again, you can use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to see how well your page or site is ranking for each SEO keyword you have created content around. When you first publish a blog post on the topic of ‘best clear aligners’ it is not going to rank at all, but if you check back in after a while it will have climbed in the rankings.

Conversions is perhaps the most important metric to consider. A conversion is a digital marketing term that describes a desired action you want visitors to your website to take. For dentists, the desired actions might include calls, chatbot conversations, form submissions and online bookings.

Finally, reviews are a good metric to contemplate, since a growing number of reviews is a clear indication that people are finding your dental practice and are happy with the services you provide.

How to calculate your ROI

If you want to get even more specific in determining whether or not your dental SEO strategy is paying off, there is a way of crunching the numbers that will tell you precisely how well you are doing.

The formula is simple: Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment = ROI (Return of investment).

You set the parameters for what constitutes ‘gain from investment’ and ‘cost of investment.’ The cost of your investment is either the hours you spend working on your dental SEO (Doing SEO keyword research, writing blog posts, building and optimising your website, link building etc.), and the return of your investment includes the increased traffic to your website, form submissions and chatbot conversations, but most importantly the revenue that comes in from new patients who have found you and made calls or booked appointments through your SEO-optimized dental website.

How we can help your business thrive with dental SEO services

As you can tell from reading all of the above, SEO for dentists is a vital component to helping your practice thrive in today’s competitive market. Search engine optimization is not all there is to running a successful dental practice, but it is the most effective marketing tool any dentist could wish for.

If you’ve got a good dental SEO strategy in place, the results will soon start trickling and then pouring in. The catch is that getting your dental practice’s site to show up on the first page of results in search engines like Google can take a lot of time and effort, particularly if SEO isn’t your area of expertise and feels like a foreign language to you. Not to mention, you have probably got a dental practice to run in the meantime and might find yourself struggling to find the time you will have to dedicate to implementing your new SEO strategy.

But why do it all yourself?

As comptent as you are at dentistry, search engine optimization is not your area of expertise. Fortunately, it happens to be ours.

There are plenty of SEO marketing agencies out there who will be happy to take you on as a customer, and some of them are bound to be rather good at what they do. The catch is that no many of them are highly experienced with dental website SEO and instead cater to a broader audience.

We, on the other hand, are expert not only at search engine marketing, but dental SEO marketing specifically. Dental Search engine optimization is our forte, dental marketing our home field.

The proof? You are reading this right now. You put a question or a search term into Google or another search engine, and it brought you here. We can make this magic happen for your dental website.

With our help, your dental website could soon be soaring in search engine results, without you having to lift a finger. If you are able to, why shouldn’t you cut the hours spent painstakingly climbing the steep learning curve involved in learning marketing SEO from scratch?

If you are interested in working with us to get your dental practice’s website up to where it could be in search results, we invite you to reach out to us and initiate a conversation.

We offer dental SEO services and packages that can be tail0r-made to accommodate your website needs, goals and budget. Simply send us an email at editor@intjdc.org or scroll to the bottom of this page where you will find an option to ‘Contact us.’

SEO for dentists FAQ

Do dentists need SEO?

In one word: Yes!

Many dentists and orthodontists are already using SEO and social media to build their practices and to spread awareness about their services. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is what drives traffic to websites – and new patients to the dentists and orthodontists who are using it. As a results, these dentists and orthodontists are thriving disproportionally. Why shouldn’t you be one of them?

Dental SEO is only going to become a more important aspect of marketing in the months and years to come, and there are only advantages to getting on board now.

How do dentists do SEO?

There are many different factors that play into a solid SEO strategy for dentists. 

Search engine optimisation involves many different ranking factors, both on-site and off-site. The on-site ranking factors include all of the written content, such as headers, subheaders, bread text and blog posts and even image file names. The text on your website should include as many relevant keywords and search terms as possible, since they are what people are searching for on Google and other search engines. 

Other on-site ranking factors include page load speed and ease of navigation – so the first thing to do if you are a dentist wanting to optimise your website is to make sure it is lightning fast and easy to navigate. Using a simple layout or theme is always better than using a more complex, clunky one. Another pro tip is to build your website on WordPress, rather than any of the (granted, very titillating) drag-and-drop page builders out there such as Wix or Ionos. WordPress remains the fastest and most reliable platform for building websites, and gives your website a better chance at being considered a high authority site by search engine robots. The age of your domain name is also important to whether or not Google is going to favour your website and bring it up in search results – the longer your site has been around the more weight it will carry from a SEO perspective.

Off-site ranking factors revolve around links. You should aim to get as many links as possible leading back to your website spread across the internet. But it is also important to know that search engines don’t consider all links to be of equal quality. For example, a week-old link is more valuable than a link that is five years old, as search engine robots might think it has decreased in relevance over time. Similarly, a link from a high authority website in your niche is considerably more valuable for SEO than a link someone has shared on their private Facebook wall – but they all count. Even broken or expired links count, and can in fact have a negative impact on your SEO, which is why you should be using a broken link checker tool on a regular basis to discover and get rid of any broken links to your dental practice’s website.

How much does dental SEO cost?

Why do all of the Search engine optimization (SEO) work yourself, when you can pay an expert or an agency to do it for you?

SEO can take a tremendous amount of time and effort – time and effort that you might have a hard time finding in your busy schedule. There is also a learning curve involved, one that can be rather steep if you have no pre-existing experience with SEO.

The average cost if a fully done-for-you SEO solution is between $750 and $2000 a month, and if you want to take more of a hybrid approach, you should expect to pay somewhere between $80 and $200 per hour to consult with a SEO expert, who will be able to provide you with the guidance and insights you need to be able to ramp up your dental SEO strategy and start seeing real results.

What is dental SEO marketing?

Dental SEO marketing is the most evergreen form of marketing for dentists. It involves optimising your dental practice’s website and creating SEO-rich content designed to generate organic search traffic from search engines like Google.

SEO is a much better and more sustainable long-term strategy than either advertising or social media. In both cases, the ROI is much lower than with dental SEO marketing, where you only have to create or pay for the content once to have it work for you forever.

A fast-loading website full of relevant keywords and well-written, useful content that addresses your prospective new patients’ questions and needs is always going to be a valuable asset to your business and is worth investing in.

How long does dental search engine optimization take?

The honest answer is that search engine optimization is a long term strategy rather than a quick fix, and so you are not going to see fast results.

Depending on how much time and effort goes into optimising your dental practice’s website, it can take a few months or longer to begin to see real results. 

In closing

Are you already leveraging SEO to ramp up your dental marketing and draw hordes of prospective new patients to your practice?

If not, you are currently missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime. With a powerful SEO strategy in place, there is no doubt that you will be able to reach and attract more clients to your practice than you ever have before.

What’s more, the competition for the best keywords is only going to intensity as more and more of your competitors are awakening to the possibilities of SEO. In other words, yesterday was the perfect time to get started with dental SEO marketing, but the next best time is today.

SEO involves a large number of both on-and-off page ranking factors, and it is the combination of both that determine whose dental website is going to turn up at the top search results when potential patients type ‘best dentist near me’ or ‘teeth whitening treatment Colorado’ into Google.

Learning everything that is involved in SEO for dentists can seem overwhelming, and finding the time to figure it all out can seem like an insurmountable chore. After all, you also have a dental practice to run and only 24 hours in the day.

But no one said you had to do it all on your own. Our dental SEO marketing experts are available for consultations as well as fully managed dental SEO solutions. If this has your interest, we invite you to get in touch to find out more.

Dr Febin Mary George - Editor

With more than 10 years as a dental surgeon, Dr Febin Mary George is passionate about educating consumers around the world to help look after their teeth.

She completed her Bachelor of Surgery at the Century Institute of Dental Science and Research Centre in 2010.

Alongside editing the International Journal of Dental Clinics she has also written for major publications including Thrive Global.