Looking to rank your dental business on Google, but you’re stuck on the way forward? This dental SEO strategy definite guide is for you. Discover the secrets behind your competitors’ top search engine rankings.

Most customer purchase journeys begin on the search engine.

Forrester found that 71% of consumers use a search engine to discover new products, while about 74% use it for consideration and purchase. So, optimizing your dentist office website for organic searches is one of the best ways to get more patient appointments

Additionally, studies found that SEO has a better click-through rate than PPC. Also, SEO leads have a 14.6% average conversion rate. When compared to the average website conversion rate, which lies between two and five percent, then this channel offers the best potential to grow your dental practice.

You probably know this, but wondering how to proceed.

Thankfully, in this article, we shared the best dental SEO strategies to rank on Google. 

So, let’s begin. 

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Top 8 SEO Strategies for Dental Practices

Ranking on the Google front page is not an easy feat. But these strategies can help. Action them to outrank your competitors and dominate the search results pages. 

1. Begin with keywords

Keyword research forms the foundation of SEO.

So, begin your dental SEO campaign by uncovering the search terms prospects use to find dental services within your location. Luckily, several SEO tools can spit these out in a few minutes.

However, Marketing Miner remains our recommended option.

The tool gives you free 1,000 monthly credits, to begin with. You can upgrade your account as your need increases. One of the things we love about this software is that it’s feature-rich. So, besides researching keywords, you can use it to audit your website. 

Check out our small business SEO audit checklist to make the most of this feature.

It can also help you to spy on competitors, analyze your backlinks, track your keywords ranking, and monitor brand mentions. 

In addition to using SEO tools, another way to find relevant dental keywords is checking on Quora to discover questions people ask about dental services.

These long-tailed, low-competition keywords are easier to rank. Use them in your content for quick wins. 

Additionally, check your competitor’s page titles to see the keywords they target. You can also ask prospects for the likely keywords they will use to search for any dental service.

2. Optimize for local searches

Most of your appointments will come from patients within your neighborhood.

You’ll leave a lot of money on the table if you fail to target these people. And that’s where local search optimization comes in. For a start, use location-specific keywords to rank in target cities. It’s as simple as adding the location to your keywords, for example, “best cosmetics dentist office In Niagara County.”

These kinds of search terms are easier to rank and they convert better.

Not a believer? Here are what the numbers say about local searches:

• Local searches contribute about 22.6% of website traffic.
• About 42% of millennials will likely visit a business after conducting a local search.
• Google said that 28% of nearby searches lead to a purchase.
• The traffic for location-based businesses increased to 28.8% from 19.2% between January 2020 and July 2022.

[Sources]

So, I guess you won’t want to miss these opportunities.

In addition to using location-based keywords, list on Google Business Profile to target more local patients.

Combining the two can supercharge your lead acquisition. The good thing with this option is that it allows prospects to call you directly from your listing. It also put you on the Googe Maps and helps you generate quality and trusted customer reviews you can use on your website as social proof.

Additionally, add your dental practice to Yelp and other local business directories to boost your search visibility. Enter your email in the box below to access over 200 of these directories.

Now, imagine what it means for your brand visibility if you list your website on 100 of these directories.

Boom!!! 

3. Leverage content marketing

Content is king

Those who ignore this will lose out. Research found that content marketing costs about 62% less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads. Also, small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than those that don’t.

Additionally, websites with blogs have 434% more search engine-indexed pages than those without.

So you must blog consistently to maximize your SEO. 

However, it’s not something you can start without planning. Content marketing requires a solid strategy to make the most of its potential. If not, you’d end up publishing content that doesn’t rank, wasting valuable resources.

So, for this, we recommend Surfer SEO.

The software can help you generate content briefs, build outlines, and research keywords. 

However, its best value lies in providing you with AI-powered content optimization suggestions to outrank your competitors. The tool analyzes the top competition for your target keywords to provide you with actionable insights to outrank them.

Surfer SEO is one of the reasons behind our top Google search rankings. 

More:

And more:

You can learn how we leverage this tool to boost our organic visibility in this Surfer SEO review.

However, before using this tool, create a content plan or calendar. 

It ensures you don’t run out of steam. Also, Google rewards blogs that publish consistently. Use the keywords you generate during keyword research to inform your blog topics. Additionally, action these tips to get more from  your SEO content marketing:

• Create content to fully address the keyword search intent
• Build topical authority with the pillar-cluster content model
• Cluster your keywords to optimize for multiple search terms
• Use internal links to distribute page authority
• Build backlinks to published content to improve the ranking.
• Distribute your content on social media to generate social signals
• Optimize your content with SEO entities.

4. Build entity-based backlinks

Backlinks are essential to rank on Google.

A study found that websites that rank in the first position on Google have about 3.8 times more links than the other top ten sites. So, getting as many of these links as possible can put you on top.

They can also earn you quality referral traffic. And from our experience, this traffic converts well. For instance, affiliate marketing, which depends largely on referral traffic, is a $12 billion industry. Additionally, 40% of U.S. merchants consider it as a top acquisition channel.

These stats show how powerful referral traffic is.

However, getting people to link to your content is a chore. But in this article, we shared some ways to get them without going insane. The strategies are unconventional, yet effective. So, you might want to check them out.

Supercharge the backlinks with SEO entities. 

SEO entities are an advanced SEO strategy known as semantic publishing. It pays less attention to keywords and more to things (entities). They provide more context to Google, helping the search engine understand your content better.

They are the secret weapons of the top SEO experts. The most straightforward way to build entity-based backlinks is to choose topics that contain at least one entity and ensure the entities are part of your backlink’s anchor text. As a rule of thumb, an entity is anything that has a Wikipedia page.

For example, the entities in this blog topic are:

• Dental
• SEO
• Strategy
• Google
• Rank
• Guide

Getting entity-based backlinks to this post is as simple as linking to this post from another page using the anchor text “dental SEO strategy,” which are my top entities. 

However, since you won’t have control over the writing team, we recommend using guest posts for this strategy. And Adsy can connect you to hundreds of high-authority websites that accept them.

Besides guest posts, PR campaigns are an excellent way to build solid backlinks.

It can also earn you many positive brand mentions and lots of referral traffic. We recommend using PR distribution services, like 24-7 PressRelease, for the best results. This service can get you placements on over 2,500 authority platforms and news sites. 

Massive!!! 

5. Don’t ignore dental schema markup

Google is all for search relevance.

The search engine tries to rank as high as possible the web pages that best match user intent. And you can make it easier for Google by injecting the right data into your pages. They provide additional information that helps the search engine understand your page content better.

Besides improving your odds of ranking higher on search, adding structured data lets Google display rich search results for the page, boosting the CTR and SERP engagement.

Here is how your search results will look with the star-rating schema.

And this is what you’ll get with the FAQs schema, one of our favorite schemas.

In addition to these two, we recommend that you implement the following SEO schemas to boost SEO leads:

LocalBusiness schema

This schema is one of the most essential for dental offices. It tells Google that you are a local business and can improve your rankings for local searches. With this schema, you can supply critical local business information to Google, such as:

• Opening hours
• Areas served
• Addresses
• Payment methods
• Official logo

Add this schema to all your pages.

KnowsAbout schema

This is one of the most underutilized JSON schema structured data. Add the schema to all your pages. Use it to tell Google your industry expertise.

Person schema

Inject this structured data into all your blog posts. Ensure to include the KnowsAbout property in the schema code to demonstrate industry expertise.

Please read this blog post to know more about this schema.

BlogPost schema

This is another important structured data to add to your blog posts. It helps Google to understand your articles better. We prefer using Rnak Math to inject this schema automatically into our published articles.

Other essential dental SEO schemas include:

• Video schema
• Breadcrumbs schema
• Sitelinks schema
• Organization schema
• AreaServed schema

To implement the above schemas, first, generate the JSON code with Schemantra. However, we recommend Classy Schema for video schema and Merkle schema markup generator for LocalBusiness and FAQs. Next, copy the code and use Google Tag Manager to inject them into the appropriate pages.

But you can automate these with Rank Math. The pro version allows you to create custom schemas. It supports over 840 schema types. Check our Rank Math review to learn more.

6. Build Google entity stack

Google entity stack is an effective, yet neglected, dental SEO strategy.

It’s about improving your domain authority by building backlinks from Google properties, such as:

• Google Docs
• Google Sheet
• Google Calendar
• Google Maps
• Google Forms
• Google Slides
• Google Business Site
• Google Drive

The SEO technique is as simple as creating a file or entries in these properties and interlinking them using the search terms you want to rank for as the anchor text. Interlinking them creates a network of entities that reinforce the relevance and authority of your website.

First, create a Google Drive folder and name it with your target search term.

Next, create an article about your dental practice on Google Docs and set it to public—anyone with the link can view. Ensure to link to your website and all your Google properties. Add the Google Doc to your drive.

After this, create a Google Sheet and input your company name, address, email, website, and social media links. Also, add all the links to your Google properties, and then save the file on Google Drive.

Repeat this for all the other properties.

 You can watch this video to learn more about Google entity stacking. 

7. Don’t ignore page experience

Google admits that page experience is part of its core ranking signals.

Sadly, most marketers focus squarely on Core Web Vital, a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and page visual stability. However, Google recommends that site owners must focus on other aspects of page experience to rank high on search.

According to them, these questions can help you optimize your page experience.

• Do pages have good Core Web Vitals?
• Are pages served in a secured fashion?
• Does content display when on mobile devices when viewed on them?
• Does the content lack an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Do pages lack intrusive interstitials?
• How easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages?
• Is the page designed so that visitors can easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page?

Google evaluates page experience on a page-specific basis. So you must answer these questions for each page. If your answers are yes, then you are on track to providing a good page experience.

8. Improve page engagements with videos

Most SEOs believe that adding a video to your page improves the search ranking.

And we believe that too based on our experience. 

According to Forrester, using video on a landing page can improve its Google front page ranking chances by fifty times. In a different study, researchers found that companies that use videos enjoy 41% more search traffic than non-users.

Our favorite way of using videos to boost ranking is to embed a YouTube video hosted on the page, especially a landing page, and then add a video schema to it. We prefer short explainer videos of less than 6 seconds. Studies show they drive the most engagement.

Besides improving search rankings, videos are great for boosting conversion rates.

Studies found that landing pages with videos report 86% more conversions than text-only pages. Also, companies that leverage video marketing grew 49% faster than those that don’t.

Dental SEO Strategies: Now, What Next?

Convert your organic traffic into leads.

We believe that these SEO strategies will improve traffic to your dental office website. But the truth is most of this traffic will not convert to leads. However, you can improve this by embedding a Collect Chat leads generation chatbot on your SEO landing pages. And you can learn how in this Collect Chat review.

Additionally, check out these dental practice marketing strategies to learn more ways to grow your practice.

However, ensure to run a dental SEO audit before starting your organic search campaign. You can use our SEO audit checklist for small businesses to pull this off.

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FAQs

What is dental SEO?

Dental SEO is a search engine optimization strategy tailored to improve your dental practice. Implementing them can improve your search rankings, getting you more traffic and sales leads.

Can I do dental SEO myself?

Yes, you can by following the strategies outlined in this resource. However, we recommend hiring dental SEO professionals to assist you with this. They are experts in this field and can further tailor these strategies to your needs.

What are the recommended dental SEO tools?

You’ll need several SEO tools to implement these strategies. Some of our top picks are:

• Rank Math: on-page optimization
• Collect Chat: convert search traffic to leads
• Adsy: backlinks building
• Sendible: social media management
• Lumen5: video creation
• Marketing Miner: keywords and backlinks research and rank tracking
• Surfer SEO: content optimization
• Schemantra: schema generation
• Google Search Console: key SEO metrics tracking
• Ahrefs: keyword research and backlinks analysis
• Keywords Insights: keyword clustering and search intent analysis

What are the best metrics to track for my SEO?

The essential SEO metrics to track are:

• Search traffic
• Organic impressions
• Click-through-rate
• Average keyword positions
• Impression by country
• Keyword positions, clicks, and impressions

Register your website on Google Search Console to access these metrics for free.

How do I spy on my organic search competitors?

You can spy on your competitors using SEO research tools like Marketing Miner, Semrush, Ahrefs, and SE Ranking. Use any of these tools to analyze their keyword data to uncover their target search terms. Also, audit their backlink profile to see where their links come from.