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Discover the best content marketing strategies for dentists Learn how to demonstrate expertise, attract new patients, and grow your dental practice with content.

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Content marketing is the future.

Brands that fail to leverage this channel will lose out in the long term. It helps businesses to educate their audience, improve brand awareness, build a loyal following, generate and nurture leads and drive sales. 

For instance, Demand Metrics found that it generates three times as many leads by costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing. Also, 44 percent of respondents in a DemandGen survey say they consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with a vendor.

So, doing content marketing for your dental practices is a no-brainer.

And in this blog post, we shared the best content marketing strategies for dentists. Use this comprehensive guide to inform your strategies and set measurable KPIs to track your progress.

So, let’s begin.

Advanced Dental Content Marketing Strategies

Here are our favorite dental content marketing strategies to dominate organic search result pages.

1. Begin with content planning

Diving straight into content creation is a huge mistake.

Of course, you’d need to iron out your strategies to make the most of this channel. And that’s what content planning is all about. It involves:

• Setting content marketing goals
• Identifying your target audiences
• Researching customers’ pain points
• Deciding on content types 
• Building a team
• Creating a content calendar
• Specify your content marketing tools

Align your content plan to your overall marketing goals. 

And also set measurable KPIs to track your progress. Your content marketing success will depend on your content plans. So, it’s important to prioritize it. We recommend hiring a freelance content marketer with experience in dental marketing to help out with this.

Solid options are available on Fiverr, and for a good price too.

Alternatively, you could email us at sam@smartentrepreneurblog.com/us for a comprehensive dental content plan. We can also help you integrate your other marketing channels to supercharge your lead generation.

2. Research top industry keywords

Keyword research is an essential part of content planning.

And if you’ll be depending mostly on organic searches for content visibility, then it’s the most important part. The essence of keyword research is to uncover all the top queries or search terms your prospects use to find dental services or answers to their questions.

Identifying these search terms and ranking for them can boost your search visibility.

As you already know, the conversion rate for traffic from this source is impressive. We recommend Marketing Miner for keyword research. 

The software helps you find similar keywords from a seed search term to enrich your content. 

It also provides you with key metrics like search volume, historical trends, SERP features, and CPC, enabling you to decide on the right keywords. Another thing that made us fall in love with this tool is that it can analyze up to 100,000 keywords at a go.

Only a few alternatives come close, making it one of the best tools for data-driven marketers. 

Additionally, Marketing Miner offers you 1,000 monthly free credits, making it one of the tools to add to your content marketing tech stack.

In addition to this keyword research method, spy on your competitors to uncover the search terms they target. Just log in to Marketing Miner, enter a competitor’s domain, and specify your location. 

Scroll down to Keywords to see the search terms they already rank for and the search volume. 

Marketing Miner will also provide insights into the competitor’s estimated monthly search traffic and SERP features for each keyword. You can filter or export the result.

Quora is one of your indirect competitors.

Sadly, a lot of dental brands neglect it. And you shouldn’t. Discover all the questions people ask about dental services on the platform. Use the Google site: search operator, for example, site:quora.com cosmetic dentist to uncover them effortlessly. 

Identify all the questions that are relevant to you and create a comprehensive and helpful article for each of them. You can replace “cosmetic dentist” with your seed search term.

After researching your keywords, cluster them to improve your chances of ranking for multiple search terms. We recommend Keywords Insights for keyword clustering.

3. Map your customer journey

Mapping customer journeys is essential to designing an effective content marketing strategy.

Sadly, a lot of marketers ignore this. 

Consumers are not always in the same buying stage. And marketing to them the same way will only lead to a huge disappointment. Their journey begins with being aware of their needs. Next, they consider their options, purchase, and then, evaluate their purchase experience, which will determine if they’ll return.

In a nutshell, a typical purchase decision flows from:

Awareness >> Consideration >> Purchase >> Post-Purchase Experience.

These stages are known as the customer buying cycle.

We recommend creating content for each of these stages. It helps you cater to all your prospects, regardless of their buying stage. 

First, categorize your keywords into these groups. 

For example, find out the search terms patients use when they run into dental issues (awareness), considering a dentist (consideration), trying to purchase dental services (purchase), or after buying one (post-purchase).

Afterward, research content topics for the keywords. 

Here are some examples:

Awareness 

• What causes tooth decay
• How to stop toothache
• Can honey whiten my teeth?
• How do I stop gum bleeding?

Pro Tip: create valuable content that addresses prospects’ pain points. Also, let them know how your dental practice can help. The objective here is to move them to the consideration stage.  

Consideration

• Top 10 dentists in New York
• Dental crown vs implants
• Cost of dental implant
• Tips for Choosing the right family dentist

Pro Tip: provide unbiased information and chip in what makes you the best to prep them for the purchase stage.

Purchase

• Affordable cosmetic dentist 
• Best Dentist in New York
• Child-friendly Dentist in New Orleans
• Dentists near me

Pro Tips: these guys are ready to buy. Convince them with compelling social proof and get to pay.

Post Purchase

• How to care for a dental implant
• Can I use toothpaste after a dental implant?
• Best dental insurance that covers adult braces

Pro Tips: provide the information they are looking for and upsell them. The aim is to drive repeat purchases from existing customers and onboard non-customers. 

You can email us if you need help mapping your customer journey. We can also help you with implementing actionable content marketing strategies that can move them seamlessly through the stages.

4. Demonstrate industry expertise

Google has added another E to its E-A-T guideline.

So, experience, authority, and trust are no longer enough to meet Google’s content quality. Instead, you’ll need to demonstrate that you have industry expertise to improve your chances of ranking high on Google.

We experienced a ranking surge when we implemented this. And here is how:

Expertise

The first thing our authors did was to update their author profiles. However, before that, we installed the Advanced Custom Field plugin on our website. It added additional fields to our user profiles, which allows us to enrich our authors’ Person schema with more useful information.

Our authors also updated their bios to show they are subject matter experts and linked their social media accounts.

Finally, we set up automatic Person and BlogPost schema injection for every content we publish.

Experience

Our blog covers over five, including HVAC, dental marketing, insurance, real estate, and taxes.

We permanently assigned one author to a niche, unlike before they combine the niches. The good thing with this is that every content we publish under their name helps build their topical authority.

Additionally, our authors started using experience-related phrases in their content, like:

• We recommend
• From our experience
• When we tried this tool
• We believe
• From our observation

Authority

We only publish quality content that meets search and user intents.

Also, our authors cite only authoritative sources. Occasionally, we run press release campaigns to get placements on reputable news sites to gain positive brand mentions and quality backlinks.

We also disavow suspicious backlinks to keep our Moz spam score below four percent.

Trust

You’ll need to get Google to trust you to rank your content. And here some of the things we did to achieve that:

• Added an About Us page
• Updated the Contact Us page
• Implemented Organization schema
• Added Privacy Policy page
• Updated the copyright to the current year
• Implemented GDPR notice
• Updated the sitemap

Want to supercharge your social media presence? Learn how Sendible helps us boost brand reach, save time, and maximize results. Use it to grow your audience and unleash the power of social media.

5. Leverage content optimization tools

Your content needs to rank on the front page to maximize your content marketing efforts.

Pages that rank in the first position get ten times more clicks than those in the 10th position. Also, the top five results account for about 70 percent of the total clicks.

So, you’ll be leaving a lot on the table if your content ranks outside the first page.

And to avoid this, we recommend content optimization tools, like Surfer SEO. It analyzes your top competition for your target keyword to provide you with AI-powered on-page optimization suggestions to outrank them. It takes the guesswork out of your content creation, giving you the best shot at Google’s front page.

Learn the exact ways we use this software to dominate the search in this Surfer SEO review.

6. Build quality backlinks

Backlinks are one of the essential Google ranking signals.

Building as many of them as possible to your content is one of the most straightforward ways to achieve top-page Google rankings. Beating your competitors in this game can put you ahead of them.

Google sees backlinks as a vote of confidence or endorsements.

So, when people link to you the search engine gets the impression that the page is valuable and meets searchers’ intent. Hence, it intends to rank them higher.

Of course, it’s possible to rank a keyword without backlinks. But, you might not be able to hold that possible when a more prepared competitor comes into play. Also, backlinks are handy for ranking competitive, and high-search volume keywords.

Adsy offers one of the easiest ways to build quality backlinks.

The website connects you to thousands of high-authority domains that accept guest posts. You can learn how to leverage this software for link building in our Adsy review.

Here are other ways to build quality backlinks to your website:

• Run press release campaigns
• Publish original, linkable articles
• Spy on your competitors’ link profiles with Marketing Miner
• Use the Link Management platform to find quality links
• Publish infographics
• List on all relevant local directories
• Reach out for collaborations

Use our comprehensive link-building resource to pull all these off.

7. Boost search relevance with schema

Schema is one of our favorite ways to boost search rankings.

Of course, they are not core ranking signals, but provide more information for Google to understand your content better, allowing you to improve their search relevance.

BlogPost and Person structured data are two essential content marketing schemas. You can automate them with the Rank Math Pro WordPress plugin.

But we prefer to take things a bit further with advanced schemas, like FAQs and star ratings.

This structured data helps us improve SERP engagement and organic clicks.

You can see how the FAQ schema enhances our search result page, making it stand out.

Also, here’s how the star-rating schema transformed our SERP.

Notice how the rich result makes our page stand out on the SERP and draws attention to it.

So, we recommend implementing all this schema structured data to take your dental content marketing to the next level. We use the FAQ Schema for Pages And Post WordPress plugin to implement FAQ schema markup while publishing a blog post. It’s easier to use and makes the entire process effortless.

Alternatively, Rank Math Pro comes with this native capability. So, you might want to use it.

We use custom JSON schema code to achieve the star-rating SERP rich result. 

You can email sam@smartentrepreneurblog.com/us if you need our help generating this code for your dental content marketing.

Besides schema structured data, SEO entities and entity linking can help you achieve search relevance. We covered these in detail in our advanced dental SEO strategy resource.

8. Transform your search clicks into leads

As you already know, content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing.

But if you don’t make it easier for readers to convert into leads, this won’t happen. We often embed a Collect Chat conversational bot in top-ranking content to achieve this.

Here’s one we implemented for a client in Nigeria.

This chatbot helps us generate hundreds of highly qualified leads for the client each month. 

Use Zapier to integrate Collect Chat with your email list. You can also connect to Facebook ads to remarket them in real-time. But we prefer calling the leads on the phone to close them immediately. We only recommend using email or Facebook ads to nurture those who didn’t convert.

Check out our Collect Chat review to learn how to maximize the software.

Top 6 Dental Content Ideas to Stand Out

Use these content ideas to inform your strategy.

1. Press releases

Run periodic press release campaigns to gain backlinks and improve brand awareness. 

We recommend running this campaign for your dental office at least twice monthly. 

Use press release distribution services like 24-7 Press Releases to get placements on hundreds of news sites at a go. Besides backlinks, these kinds of placements get you numerous brand mentions, which are essential for outranking the competition and building a positive brand reputation. 

2. Helpful tips

A lot of people use Google to find answers to their problems.

So, create helpful content that will answer patients’ questions. Tips like: home remedies for dental issues, how to choose the best dentists, and DIY teeth whitening procedures are some content that works for dental patients. However, research your keywords to eliminate guesswork.

Helpful tips should make up a substantial part of your content. 

3. Customer success stories

Once in a while, feature your patients’ success stories.

Video testimonials, with clear proof, will work better. Distribute widely using your blog, social media, and email. A press release can also help you achieve wide distribution. Here’s an example for your inspiration.

One of the good things about sharing your customer success stories is that it helps you gain social validation and proof, boosting your conversion rate.

4. Customer questions

Your customers have burning questions.

Identify them and create valuable articles around them. You can find these questions on Quora, social media, and dental forums, including those on Reddit. 

5. Industry surveys

Create this content type to gain tons of free backlinks.

People will link back to you when you provide them with trusted data they can use in their research and work. The backlinks boost your domain authority, improving the chances of your content ranking high on Google. They can also help establish your brand as an industry authority.

6. Product reviews

Product reviews make our top three best-performing content types.

So, it’ll pay to key into it. 

The truth is patients often face choice paralysis, for example, choosing between dental crowns, implants, veneers, and bridges. But you can make things easier for them with an unbiased review of these procedures. Streamlining their decisions could help you guide them to conversion.

Also, cost review articles like Dental Crown vs Implant Costs work great and can help you generate numerous bottom-of-the-funnel leads.

Need to Get More From Your Existing Customers? Learn how we use Loyalzoo to improve our customer retention rates, get more referrals and build a loyal customer base.

How to Measure Your Dental Content Performance

These are our favorite metrics for tracking dental content performances:

Organic impressions

This metric tells you the number of people that have seen your content on the SERP. Low impression means you’d need to rework your SEO. First, audit the page to uncover the reasons for the low impression.

Use Google Search Console (GSC) to track this metric.

Keyword positions

Use this to keep an eye on your keywords ranking.

Pay more attention to keywords that rank outside the top ten positions. They add little search value to your dental website. So, re-optimize them to boost their rankings. Also, track the average keyword position for each content and the entire website.

GSC remains the best tool for this.

Organic clicks

How many organic clicks do you get?

You should be able to answer this question for each page and the entire website. Use historical data to track your content performance over time. Declining organic clicks could signal a fall in keyword ranking. Find out who is outranking you and what they do better.

However, if the average position remains relatively the same, then you might want to check the search trend to be sure it’s due to a change in the keyword search volume. In this case, research the alternative search terms and optimize for them.

Click through rate

Use this to know the number of people that visit after seeing your content on the SERP.

Google Search Console compares your organic clicks with the search impressions to arrive at your CTR. 

Aim between two and five percent, and track this metric on a per-page basis. If any falls below the two percent benchmark, then make your meta description more compelling and actionable. Also, update the page title to align better with searchers’ intent.

You might also want to implement star rating and FAQ schema to further boost the CTR.

Scroll depth

See how deeply people scroll your pages.

This metric provides you insights into how people consume your content. You should aim for at least 70 percent scroll depth. Anything less than 25 percent means you’ll need to rework the content. 

Your audience doesn’t find it valuable. Rewrite in short, punchy sentences, pay attention to formatting, and use several headings and engaging visuals to make the content readable.

Use Hotjar to set up scroll depth tracking.

Average leads generation

How many leads do you generate from your content marketing?

Divide the total leads by the number of published content to get your average leads. If the number is not encouraging but you get impressive organic traffic, then update the chatbot copies to become more conversational and compelling.

Integrate Collect Chat with Google Analytics and your email marketing platform to track your leads. Use Zapier to set up this workflow.

Dental Content Marketing: What Next?

Content marketing is just one of several channels you can leverage to grow your practice.

In addition to it, we recommend optimizing your dental website for search engines to boost your organic presence. Also, list on Google Business Profile and Yelp to attract local patients.

Furthermore, take advantage of Facebook ads to reach more prospects and achieve quick wins. You can check out our top 21 Facebook ad targeting ideas to make the most of this platform.

Also, use email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing to improve customer experience, strengthen brand awareness and increase sales.

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FAQs

What is dental content marketing?

Dental content marketing involves consistently creating articles, videos, and blog posts that provide value to your audience and answers their questions. It aims to position your brand as an industry expert and thought leader.

How can content marketing benefit my dental practice?

Here are some ways a solid content marketing strategy can help your dental office:

• Provides helpful answers to prospects’ questions
• Improves organic search visibility, traffic, and brand awareness
• Create loyal brand advocates
• Improves lead generation and conversion
• Effective for audience and customer retention

What are the top content marketing tools for dentists?

Several online tools can help streamline your dental content marketing, but here are our favorites:

• Marketing Miner—keyword research and competitive analysis
• Keywords Insights—keyword clustering and search intent analysis
• Adsy—finding guest post analysis
• 24/7 Pressrelease—wide PR distribution
• Rank Math—on-page content optimization
• Surfer SEO—outranking the competition
• Collect Chat—converting organic traffic into leads
• Zapier—content marketing automation
• Sendible—social media scheduling and auto posting 

How does dental content marketing work?

In a nutshell, content content marketing involves researching keywords to find the search terms prospects use, creating valuable content around those keywords, and optimizing the content to rank on Google to enable prospects to easily find it.