Have you ever experienced getting all of your day’s appointments filled by patients who found you online? If your answer is never then there is a great chance that you have not given online marketing enough attention. Understandably so, you are busy with patients, improving your profession, and learning new techniques to best serve your patients which means focusing on marketing is too far on the list of priorities. However, hiring professionals that focus on local search engine optimization (SEO) in Richmond Hill can help expand your market reach without taking too much of your time.
What Is SEO for dentists?
There is a huge demand for dental practitioners to make their presence felt in the digital sphere. Online presence is now necessary for dental practices. It must start with developing a new website. After all, how could people identify your London denture clinic if you are not searchable online?
Traditional ways to promote dental services are still helpful in getting patients to book an appointment but the influence of digital dental marketing is one that you can’t turn a blind eye on. This is why you need to work with a reliable company offering SEO in Richmond Hill.
With the help of a professional group you can craft custom dental SEO techniques and strategies to help your website rank higher on local search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others generate SERPs after a query is made. Websites that rank higher in the SERP generate more clicks and attract more traffic. They are also most likely to be converted into patients.
SEO Techniques for Your Dental Practice
Photo by Merakist
The principle of SEO revolves on the fact that 75% of users would book an appointment with dental clinics that appear on the first page of SERPs. You need to hank higher in order to attract more website visitors and increase your chances of filling up your bookings. Here are some tips to help you grow your dental practice through SEO techniques.
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Do Thorough Keyword Research
At the heart of SEO is the keyword. No strategy can be formulated if no keyword research was done. In order to reach the right people, you have to know what they are looking for. Search engines will only return a set of websites to a query made.
To effectively reach your intended audience, be mindful of the keywords that will be used during your campaign. Including the words “dentist”, “dental clinic”, and your location makes it easier to rank.
Keyword research can be done through the help of different tools. These generate different keywords that are classified according to the search volume and click-through rate (CTR).
Once you generate the suggested keywords, study the data and pick the ones that will give you the best ranking. Aside from content that the visitors could actually read, also make sure to incorporate these into meta descriptions and other encrypted elements of your website that the search engine bots can crawl on. So a client who is looking for a clinic that offers sleep dentistry in Oakville can find you.
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Optimize for Local Search
As a practice that relies heavily on local clientele, you want searchers from your area of business to find your clinic. For your website to be on top of the searches, you need to optimize for local searches, too.
In order to optimize for local results, you need to create and optimize your Google My Business (GMB) profile. This is one of the keys that will open a host of opportunities to have all of your pertinent business information to be indexed by Google.
Make sure that your dental practice’s name, phone number, address, business category, description, photos, and website link when creating your GMB profile.
Aside from GMB, you can also help improve your local SEO by including these:
- Submitting to local listings like Yelp
- Encouraging previous and existing patients to leave a review about your practice on different online platforms
- Optimizing for voice search
- Incorporating relevant local news, activities, and events
- Getting high-quality backlinks from business partners, authority sites, and social media influencers
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Improve Page Load Time
One of the things that not all website owners realize is that page load time is a crucial factor when ranking. Internet users also have high expectations of websites and when these do not load in 3 seconds or less, they will abandon the page right away.
Google bots take into account the load time of websites as a ranking factor. When pages load slow, they will give lower rankings for the website. The farther in the ranking a website is, the lesser the traffic and conversion it yields.
To check your site’s performance, your hired SEO in Richmond Hill will use Google’s PageSpeed Insight. It gives you a chance to identify the issue that causes the slowing down of your site so you can address it.
Other things that can be done to improve page speed are: optimizing images, switching to reliable servers, and reducing redirects.
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Create High-Quality Content
Before clients are able to decide on which clinic to go to, they will do their own research first. One doesn’t just go to a dentist without knowing what services they can offer and how this practitioner can help address their concern. It is important to provide them with content that is useful, relevant, actionable, engaging, and timely.
Dental content can vary from proper oral hygiene, dental services, innovative procedures, and general news about dentistry. Diversify the presentation, from written materials like blogs to images and videos.
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Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
What is one thing that you notice about people these days? If your answer is that they are mostly hunched over their phones, then you are right. A huge chunk of the Canadian population owns at least one smartphone. This is a vital tool to help them connect and find businesses that can help address their needs. Optimizing your website for mobile by making sure that it is properly laid out encourages mobile users to visit.
Mobile-friendliness is also a crucial Google ranking factor. It is not just wise to make sure that your website renders well on mobile devices, you make it easier for the search engine giant to rank you better.
A reliable SEO in Richmond Hill will give you an overview of how your dental practice’s website will improve in each phase of the campaign. Through their help, you can build a prominent online footing to reach more prospective patients.
