How Dentists Can Benefit from Local SEO

Your goal as a dentist is to keep new customers while maximizing your ability to attract new patients.

Nothing else is more critical to the success of your practice than the number of patients walking through your doors daily.

That’s why a highly focused local dental SEO plan is a necessity.

If you get more visibility for each local search term than your town’s other dentistry practices, you can dominate against those competitors.

On the other hand, you can’t afford to turn a blind eye to local SEO techniques while competing dental practices work hard at it.

Let’s look at how your practice can benefit from local dental SEO.

What Is Dental SEO?

Generally speaking, we need to define local SEO first.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Local search engine optimization is optimizing your website and other online business assets to get found by local customers searching at Google and other search engines.

Working on your local SEO means you can position your dental practice in such a way as to become visible when your potential patients need you most.

When do patients need you the most? When they’re actively searching terms such as:

• Local dentist
• Dentist near me
• Dentist in [insert your city]

If people cannot find your website or business listings when doing those searches, then that means those future patients are finding a competitor dentist to call.

5 Benefits of Local Dentist SEO

Here are five benefits to working on your local SEO plan.

1. Attract More Website Traffic

The most obvious reason to invest in local SEO is to increase monthly traffic to your dental practice’s website.

Understand that it’s not just higher traffic numbers that you’re looking for. Every quality dental SEO plan includes optimizing your website for increased lead conversions. You need to look at every possible entry point for generating leads and ask yourself where to improve.

• Does your homepage include an above-the-fold call-to-action aimed at converting new leads?
• Do you have an exit-intent pop-up form that converts well?
• Have you added timed pop-ups to the website?
• Does every blog post include a content upgrade aimed at attracting new leads?

These local SEO tactics and periodically improving them will set you apart from competitors dentists who don’t know anything about these vital online marketing strategies.

It will help you squeeze more value from your marketing dollars because you own a website optimized to take advantage of every visitor.

2. Local SEO Provides an Increase in Local Visibility

A well-developed local SEO strategy allows your practice to benefit from higher local visibility.

Using website optimization, your Google My Business account, directory listings, and review sites allow you to get found multiple times across all the various local searches performed by future patients.

Optimize Google My Business

We have already gone over the website optimization above. You also need to optimize your Google My Business listing.

Ensure your NAP (name, address, and phone number) is listed correctly.

Use images on your Google My Business listing because many dentists fail to do so. Google uses these images as a part of its ranking factors. You can increase visibility on page one of many local dentistry search terms after uploading helpful images about your practice.

Include important keywords in your listing’s description. Ensure that you have listed your hours of operation correctly.

Optimize Citations and Directories

Increase visibility further by listing your well-optimised website on dentistry-related citation sites and other business directories.

SEO citations for dentists are an essential part of local search engine optimization. Here are some popular online directories and platforms where you can create citations for your dental practice:

• Google My Business
• Yelp
• Bing Places for Business
• Yahoo Local
• Yellow Pages
• Healthgrades
• Vitals
• Zocdoc
• Angie’s List
• Local.com

Remember to provide accurate and consistent information across all directories to improve your online visibility and local search rankings.

If your NAP at all the available listing sites perfectly matches your Google My Business NAP, then you’ll improve overall search rankings. More future patients will find you as a result.

Manage Patient Ratings and Reviews

Honest and positive patient reviews increase visibility because those reviews pop up on various rating and review sites such as Yelp. Your Google authority rises with each new review. The result? An increase in rankings across all local searches.

Employing these websites, Google My Business, citation, and review SEO optimizations will combine to increase your practice’s local search visibility.

3. Gain Additional Visibility on Google Maps

Increasing your practice’s visibility on Google Maps is a significant benefit of quality local dental SEO practices.

Most dentists fail to appear in Google Maps because they don’t do the abovementioned Google My Business optimisations. You can take over this position by filling out your correct information and verifying your business with Google.

4. Gain Control Over Your Reputation

Managing patient reviews and ratings offers an additional local SEO benefit.

Staying active with the review process allows you to react quickly if a patient offers an unfavourable review. Some of your competitors fail to catch these negative ratings that hurt credibility and online visibility.

Google uses business reputation as a local search factor.

Take control of your online reputation by answering both positive and negative reviews. You’ll notice increased online exposure as your reputation score outranks competitors who don’t do the same reputation management work.

5. Generate Quality Backlinks

Google uses high-quality backlinks as a significant ranking factor when deciding whether to give your or a competitor’s practice extra visibility.

Citation and directory work start the backlink process. You’ll notice that an increase in online exposure begins to generate natural links from local business associations, bloggers, community newspapers, educational sites, and directories like dentadir.com.

Conclusion

Have you gained more appreciation of the benefits of using a targeted local dental SEO campaign? If so, then your next step is to assess where your local SEO weak points exist so you can make improvements.

One area that many dentists struggle to achieve success with is getting listed in enough quality directories.

Consider adding your practice to the dentist directory at Dentadir.com for free. Doing so can help Google take notice while also providing your practice with an additional source of patient referrals.

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