Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website and other online elements in efforts to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). For a dental office, the right SEO strategies help bring in more patients. Here’s how SEO for dentists works.
What Is SEO for Dentists?
Dental SEO is the process of optimizing your dental practice’s online presence to rank higher in organic search results without paying for ads. By using on-page and off-page optimizations—such as keywords on your dental practice website and setting up Google Business Profile—you’re helping search engines like Google better crawl, index, and rank your content. In this process, search engines learn what your website, blog, social media, or local citation is about and which queries it should appear in. Because dental SEO strategies help rank you higher in more relevant searches, you can more easily attract new patients and grow your dental practice.
Why Is SEO for Dentists Important?
SEO for dentists is important for two main reasons—it helps you gain more patients without paying for leads and it makes (or keeps) you more competitive with other dental practices in your area.
Our client Pratt Dental experienced a 71% increase in monthly calls and a 50% increase in clicks through Google Business Profile when they used our SEO recommendations. That’s because when people are looking for a new dentist, 71% search online as their first step, even before calling or scheduling an appointment. Without an optimized online presence, your business won’t show up in front of potential patients when they’re searching for dental services in your area, and they’ll likely choose one of your competitors instead. But if your dental practice appears high in Google search results and Google Maps, you’ll have a 75% better chance of being noticed and turning them into new patients.
Besides the incredible results, following SEO techniques for dentists is important if you want to start competing with local dental practices who have already claimed their Google Business Profile (64%) or designed a website (73%), as well as outperform the ones that haven’t.
Dental SEO Strategies
Whether you’re starting your dental practice SEO from scratch or you have an initial strategy you’re trying to refine, here are a few important dental SEO tips that can help you land new patients.
Research Dental SEO Keywords
The first step to dentistry SEO is researching keywords that’ll appear in your written content. These dental SEO keywords are a big part of what tells Google and other search engines what your dental practice website and other content is about. There are two main types of keywords that are important to dental practice SEO:
- Service Keywords: Any keyword that relates to the services you offer (e.g., dental work, dental check-up, teeth cleaning, dental x-ray, orthodontist, oral surgery, etc.)
- Geo-Targeted Keywords: Any keyword that relates to your location or location-based searches (e.g., dentist in [CITY], dentist office near me, dental services in [NEIGHBORHOOD], etc.)
Your keyword list should also include a combination of these two keyword types, like “teeth cleaning in [CITY]” or “dental x-ray near me.”
The main place these dentistry keywords come from is common search terms, which search engines use to rank webpages. You can conduct dental keyword research in a number of ways, but here are some tried and true methods:
- Use free SEO tools or other keyword research tools like Moz, KWFinder, or Semrush
- Look at high-ranking competitor websites to see what dentistry keywords they use
- Use Google search auto-complete or “People Also Ask” terms
Claim Your Google Business Profile
Claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile is essential to getting found online since it allows you to rank in the local pack on Google Maps, which 86% of customers use to find local businesses. In fact, Google Business Profile is one of the biggest local SEO ranking factors, making it a crucial part of any dentist’s local SEO strategy.
In order to claim your Google Business Profile, all you’ll need is an existing Google account and some basic information about your dentist office. Make sure you have accurate NAP (name, address, phone number) data for each of your dental practice locations, a complete business description that uses your target dental SEO keywords, the right business categories, and a few high-quality photos. Then, claim and verify your business on the Google Business Profile site or from Google Maps.
To make your Google listing even better for converting new patients, Alexi Wilt, Hurrdat Marketing’s Local SEO Director, shares two dental SEO tips:
“Add your services as products on your Google Business Profile, and answer frequently asked questions, such as what insurance your office accepts, by including Q&As on your listing.”
Manage Local Listings on Dental Directories
Google Business Profile is an example of a local business directory, but it’s not the only one you should get your dental practice listed on. While many of your potential patients might conduct a search on Google, plenty will also use specialized dentist directories or healthcare directories to hone their search. Listing your business in these places lets you cast a wider net that can capture and attract more patients.
There are plenty of general local listing platforms, local directories for healthcare professionals, and dentist directories where you should claim and manage your business citation. When creating local listings, use the exact same NAP data from your Google Business Profile to maintain consistency across the internet—another important local ranking factor. These are some of the best local directories for dentists:
General local listings:
Healthcare local listings:
Dental local listings:
Collect Positive Reviews
Dentist reviews are incredibly important for convincing new patients to choose you over another provider, and a certain amount of positive reviews can even help boost your rankings. More than 75% of potential patients regularly or always read online reviews when looking for local businesses. Even negative reviews can be useful—if you know how to respond to negative reviews effectively, they can actually serve to help build trust with your customers.
When it comes to dentists, or any healthcare professional for that matter, trust is essential to establish as early as possible with prospective patients. If you’ve claimed your dental practice on Google Business Profile and optimized your listing on Yelp, you already have places to collect dentist reviews. However, you can get more reviews by asking current patients who have recently had good experiences with you to leave your dental practice an online review.
Optimize Metadata on Your Dental Website
Metadata refers to the content under specific HTML tags, used primarily to communicate with search engines as they crawl and index content. Here are your most important pieces of metadata:
These three should feature your most prominent dental keywords and the name of your dental practice, as they’re what will be featured on the SERP. Make your SEO and H1 titles as specific as possible and unique from each other and from every other page on your dental practice website.
SEO titles and meta descriptions also have character and pixel limits, and going past these limits will result in truncation in search results, which can cause searchers to lose important details about your business. Use a tool like the Mangools SERP Simulator to check how your dental SEO title and meta description will appear to desktop and mobile users.
Create Service & Location Pages on Your Dental Practice Website
Each of the dental services you offer, as well as each of your locations, should have their own webpages. This dental SEO best practice not only lets you describe your locations and services to potential patients in more detail, but it also gives you opportunities to rank in more search results. While people may not search for “dentist” or “dentistry” phrases, they might be typing more direct services they need (like “teeth cleaning,” “cavity fillings,” or “tooth extractions”), and service pages put you in the running for those queries when your homepage may not.
To create effective service pages for a dental website, each should go in depth on what the service is, what patients should expect of the process as a whole, why your staff are qualified for the procedure, how others rate the experience, visual transformations, and answers to commonly asked questions about cost, post-op care, insurance coverage, and more.
To write optimized location pages, provide accurate and complete NAP data (which you should already have on hand after claiming your Google Business Profile). List the services you offer at specific dental practice locations on these pages so they’re easily found by searchers. Follow internal linking best practices to keep people on your website longer, increase your website’s authority in the eyes of search engines, and help search engine crawlers understand your website navigation.
Optimize Your Dental Website for Mobile & Site Speed
57% of local searches are done on a mobile device or tablet, so your website needs to be optimized for mobile. Mobile optimization and faster site speeds not only improve user experience for people visiting your site, but also cater to Google’s Core Web Vitals—metrics used to ensure your dental practice website offers a good user experience.
Here are some optimizations to keep in mind for mobile SEO and site speed optimization:
- Optimize images using the WebP file format
- Make sure fonts are easy to read
- Avoid large blocks of text
- Remove pop-ups
- Optimize button size for mobile touch screens (usually fingertip size)
Craft a Dental Blog Content Strategy
Only after you build a great website and optimize your local listings should dentists consider publishing relevant blog content. Blogging is a great strategy for dentists because there are plenty of highly-searched topics related to dental services that people have questions about, but can’t be covered on your service pages. Kennedy Martinez, Hurrdat Marketing’s Content Director, adds:
“Dentists should use their blog to educate patients and enhance brand awareness. By focusing on keyword research around common dental care questions, you can create blog posts that directly address what patients are searching for. Incorporating authorship and insights from dental professionals will not only strengthen your content, but also help boost your authority, experience, expertise, and trustworthiness (Google E-E-A-T) with search engines.”
Your dental blog will also offer more opportunities to rank for related keywords, and if you make content useful to your audience, it can become an additional way to drive traffic to your website. Start your dental blog content strategy with topics and advice that are most relevant to your main services before branching out and finding new, engaging blog content ideas that are more niche. Here are a few broad dental blog topic ideas to get you started:
- Guide-style posts (e.g., “Everything You Need to Know About Cavities” or “Guide to Wisdom Teeth Removal”)
- List-style posts (e.g., “10 Tips for Daily Dental Care” or “15 Best Products for Dental Health”)
- Dental industry news
- News releases from your practice
- Case studies
- Staff spotlights
Build Backlinks
Once you’ve built a dental website and dental blog with useful content, it’s time to build a quality backlink profile. Backlinks are links from other domains to any page on your dental practice website. They help build your website’s authority with search engines. Each link is like a vote of confidence for your site, showing search engines that people are finding your content useful. Ideally, these backlinks help improve your search ranking.
You can follow some backlink-building strategies by doing active outreach to other businesses for an expert feature or interview on dental care topics, but you can also build backlinks in a more passive way by producing quality content that other websites will want to feature. Creating tools like a calculator for the cost of dental implants or the price of wisdom teeth removal, sharing original research on important dental care topics, writing a guide to dental insurance coverage, or publishing breakdowns of common dental procedures are great ways to produce useful content other sources will want to link. Whatever you do, don’t buy backlinks and aim for quality sources (those with high domain authority) more than quantity.
How to Measure Dental SEO Success
You’ve just invested time and resources into your online presence, but one of the main ways to really see if that effort was worth it is by tracking how your content is performing. This data will also help you change your SEO techniques. Here are important website metrics to watch out for as you begin tracking your dental SEO journey:
- Backlinks
- Bounce Rate
- Click-Through Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Keyword Rankings/SERP Positions
These are the SEO tools that can help you track these dental practice KPIs and measure the success of your overall dental SEO strategies:
Cost of Dental SEO
While SEO is considered a “free” marketing strategy compared to paid search results and other ads, there’s still a cost of SEO for dentists and a cost for local SEO strategies, too. If you’re keeping all your local SEO efforts in-house by using automated tools, you can expect dental SEO pricing to be $80 to $1,000 per year or $50 to $600 per month. However, there are plenty of benefits to hiring an SEO agency or freelance SEO specialist rather than doing it yourself. If you decide to hire out, here’s a quick rundown of what freelancers and dental SEO companies will cost you on average:
Freelance SEO Expert:
- General SEO: $20 to $150 per hour, $100 to $750 per month, or $500 to $3,000 per project
- Local SEO: $100 to $250 per project or $50 to $150 per hour
Dental SEO Company:
- General SEO: $75 to $250 per hour, $500 to $2,000 per month, or $2,000 to $5,000 per project
- Local SEO: $300 to $5,000 per project or $300 to $2,000 per month
Want to take your dental SEO strategies to the next level? Hurrdat Marketing offers affordable SEO services and local SEO services that can help your dental practice bring in more patients. Contact us today!
