The best search engine optimization (SEO) pushes traffic to your website, improves your search results ranking, and increases brand recognition. With so many SEO strategies out there, it’s difficult to determine which ones are best practices to follow. Here are some of the best SEO tips that can help improve leads for your dental practice.
-
- First, know your customer – Any successful SEO campaign should first focus on your potential customers. Who are they? Where do they live? What common problems/questions do they currently have that your dental practice could be in position to solve?
-
- Choose your keywords carefully – The essence of your SEO strategy is about the keywords you choose for all the content that your potential customers are going to consume. You use these keywords across your entire marketing strategy for a coherent brand experience, so make sure they are the right ones!
-
- Build your site for mobile users first – In 2018, 58% of all site visits came from mobile devices. A site optimized for mobile will improve your rankings and ensure your website will remain accessible for the largest chunk of internet users.
-
- Speed matters – Page loading speed is a major factor in whether your potential customers will stick around. A slow website can sabotage the user experience and eventually prevent individuals from booking an appointment at your dental office.
-
- Your content is for humans, not bots – Don’t give priority to search engines over the real people reading your content. Instead, write material aimed at your target audience. When you put humans first, you will actually write useful content that search engines will reward, because in the end, search engines follow their users.
-
- Content should be unique and regularly published – Producing unique is even more crucial than you might believe, owing to something called the “fresh factor” in search engine algorithms. Unique content is one of the variables that influence this freshness rating and, as a result, the search engine rankings for that particular content.
-
- Links still matter – Linking to other blogs is crucial. Link building is still a key component of any successful search engine optimization strategy. Of course, you should only link to content pages that are authoritative. If you have a few authoritative connections rather than a dozen bad quality connections, you’ll create more trust and rank better for the keywords you are targeting.
-
- Use internal links – Linking between the different pages on your website will help search engines crawl them and will help make your site more authoritative overall.
-
- Backlinks still matter – When other websites link to your content, that is still the biggest sign that your content is well worth a high ranking. Content advertising is all about generating high quality, engaging content and creating a need for people to connect to you and share your content with others.
-
- But links need to be relevant – Links from pages related to your content’s topic carry more weight for search engines than irrelevant links.
-
- Optimize your images – Images are important in search engine optimization. Make sure they are optimized for the device they will be viewed on and ensure that their alt text contains the keywords you want to rank for.
-
- Don’t forget about meta descriptions – The meta description is the first part that people see when search engines display your page to search users on their results page. A well-crafted meta description can go a long way towards enticing the search engine user to click on your link.
-
- Create readable URLs – Make sure your URLs are easily readable by a human.
-
- Share your content – Social media and SEO strategy go hand-in-hand. Research points to the importance of social shares on search engine rankings.
- Be trustworthy – It is hard not to think that sites Google trusts should rank higher. Building domain trust will pay off in droves.
Monitor your progress
After you have implemented some of the SEO strategies, you need software to track what works and what doesn’t work. These web analytics solutions can help you monitor your achievements and help you make changes to maximize successes in the future.
Dr. Websites
Google utilizes about 200 different variables to rank website on their results pages. The sheer scale of this is still intimidating, particularly for local dental practice owners who just want to see more people walking through the door.
Search engine optimization is a rich and complex pursuit, and no one strategy will be enough to ensure success. Are you looking for some help on building a diverse and comprehensive SEO campaign for your dental practice? Contact us today!