A dental practice is a high value business. However, even if you are bringing in a lot of revenue, your outgoing costs will still be very high. Therefore, it’s a good plan for you to use all of the strategies available to you to increase your profitability. You probably already have a robust marketing and advertising plan in place, but have you really worked to maximize your SEO strategies?

The goal of local SEO is to boost your business and attract new leads and visitors from a specific geographical area. Therefore, a local SEO campaign with focus on keywords, search terms, and content that is likely to reach and be relevant to people in your area.

This includes adding your business to online business profiles and local directories, and targeting advertising to people within your defined local area. This is more specialized than a general SEO strategy that might be used for an online business, and therefore it is a good idea to consult with an SEO company that specialized in local SEO. This way, you will be confident your marketing spending will be reaching the people you want to reach.

Local SEO will help you in a number of ways, including (but not limited to) the following:

1. Boosting Traffic to Your Website

When someone in your area is searching, “best dentist near me,” you want your website to be the first link they see. It is critical that your business appears on the first page of search results, and the higher you are ranked, the better. And once you have attracted a visitor, you want them to like what they see, and book an appointment. A strong SEO campaign will focus on the following things:

• • Improving your website so that it ranks better in searches, and is easy to use and attractive to users

• • Managing your SEO advertising budget and metrics to help target your ads to relevant users

• • Optimize the keywords and search terms that lead users to your website

2. Strengthening Your Brand

One of the reasons your search performance matters, is people assume that higher-ranking websites are more reliable. When your business is ranked higher in web searches, that makes you more trustworthy to the user. And people want to go to a trustworthy dentist. Once you are ranking highly for user searches, you want potential clients to be able to easily find information about your business, positive reviews, and easy booking options. While your actual services will be the ultimate test of your brand, a strong online brand will bring more people through your doors.

3. Improving the User Experience

A good SEO campaign starts with thorough research about your customers, target audience, and your competition. This is because you want to understand what your target clients are looking for, and then show them how you can meet their needs. You also want to make sure you are staying up to date with your competitors, and matching your SEO strategy so they don’t bump you in search rankings.

4. Increasing Patient Visits and Revenue

The ultimate goal of an effective SEO strategy is to attract clients to your business. As you saw above, effective local SEO should improve your search rankings, help improve your brand profile, and make your website attractive and user friendly. If this is done well, you will see an increase in new patients and appointment bookings, and thus an increase in revenue.

How does local SEO for dentists work?

Your local SEO team will help you build up your business by focusing key strategies. An important part of this process is for you and your SEO team to discuss your dentistry practice in detail and set up clear goals for your SEO campaign. The better they understand you, the better their work for you will be. While there are many different ways that SEO can work, the following strategies are “tried and true”:

1. 1. Keyword research

Your SEO team will help you understand the keywords, phrases, languages, and slang your target clients use to find dentist services online. When you know how your target clients are trying to find you, you can build your SEO strategy to lead them to you.  You can add key search terms to your site’s content, headers, and image tags.

2. 2. Link Building

An important way that search engines decide how trustworthy your website is, is by how many other websites link back to yours. It is very important to have robust and varied mentions, citations, backlinks, and references from other sites that the search engine “trusts”. Because some search terms are so popular it’s almost impossible to actually optimize for them (such as “dentist”), having lots of high-value links can set your website ahead of your competition.

3. 3. Content strategy

Search engines give higher rankings to websites that have regular, quality content updates. If your website never changes, your rankings will drop. That’s why most SEO companies encourage clients to publish blogs and guest articles, and be active on social media. This is also a way to utilize local keywords and connect more organically to businesses and people in your area.

Dentists have a lot to gain from investing in a local SEO strategy. The most important thing is for a dentist to be able to reach their local audience, and to come across as trustworthy and reputable. A good SEO campaign can help you boost your brand and grow your business.