Why SEO Matters to Dental Practices

Dentistry is a competitive business and patients in most cities have endless options when they’re choosing a practitioner. Attracting new patients requires a competitive edge. Now, more than ever, it is essential for your practice to be visible online. Patients aren’t just asking their friends and families for recommendations – they’re taking word of mouth to a whole new level.

Before deciding on a dental care provider, new patients spend time researching their options by reading reviews and surfing competing websites to find the best dental service provider that meets their unique needs. This is particularly true for young families, Gen X’ers and Millennials who are in the market for dental services. If they can’t easily find your practice online, they’ll choose one of your competitors who is already front and center on the web.

Are there dental practices in your area that are thriving and growing quickly? Do you want to see that type of growth for your practice? These competitors are leveraging digital marketing and search engine marketing to fuel their growth. Whether you’re a specialist or a general practitioner, your website is second only to referrals as the main source of new patients.

Are website marketing issues holding your practice back?

How can you ensure that your practice is visible and easy to find? As a hard-working dentist, it can be difficult to find the time to address the website marketing issues that are holding your practice back from the growth you deserve. You might find that the websites of your competitors appear higher in search results, but you don’t know how to improve your own rankings. Or you might discover your website isn’t attracting significant numbers of new patients, even after hiring a web marketing company to help.

Website marketing takes time and knowledge

For most dentists, time and tactical knowledge are the factors limiting their marketing success. That’s why we started firstdentist.com’s tailor-made search engine marketing services. We take the most important and time-consuming technical tasks out of your hands and place them in the trusted hands of seasoned SEO professionals.

Our CEO, Ross Dunn has been providing local search marketing professionally since 1997. Ross hosts SEO 101, a bi-weekly podcast recently acclaimed as a top 10 SEO resource by Hubspot. SEO 101 is in its 7th year. Ross is the guy who professional SEOs tune into to stay current. His team has managed SEO for hundreds of local businesses since 1997, so you know we’ll help you rank well in the search results and keep you there over the long term.

Building a practice isn’t easy

We know you’ve worked countless hours to become a dentist and build your practice, and you should be proud of all you’ve accomplished. Next to referrals, your website is paramount for growing your practice and requires professional, specialized attention. If your website isn’t generating the desired stream of new patients, digital marketing experts like firstdentist.com can help.

firstdentist.com handles the specialized technical work such as code and schema markup, and the time consuming tasks such as link building and creating content that are necessary to get and keep your website ranking well. By working with an experienced, professional web marketing company you can rest assured that your website and digital marketing efforts are attracting new patients. This peace of mind will free you up to focus on patient care, building your team and spending more precious time with your family.

This is what we do

firstdentist.com will optimize your site on over 300 ranking points during setup. Some of the important tasks we cover include:

• Google+/Bing/Yahoo setup and verification
• Title tags
• Meta description tags and meta keyword tags
• Text in alt attributes
• Body text: what people see when they visit the site
• Rewrite website content so unique on the web
• Heading tags: any titles or headings on the page will be improved
• Content rewrite to ensure that it is all unique
• Navigation – improve access for the search engine spiders
• HTML & XML sitemaps
• Add robots.txt
• Add sitemap.xml
• SEO-friendly URLs
• Reduce image sizes
• Alt tags for all images
• Geo-targeting
• Add mobile viewports
• Add favicon
• Site and URL structure
• Map-based SEO to maximize regionally based searches
• Schema markup
• Open Graph markup
• Google Analytics goal repair/creation and/or integration
• Screaming Frog site scan to check for errors
• Checking the site for spam, or any other techniques that could result in penalties or a decline in rankings

Our monthly work on your website

We use industry and proprietary tools (Screaming Frog, SEMRush, Moz.com, etc.) to analyze how SEO updates are affecting your website’s rankings in the organic and local map-based results. We also monitor Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) and Google Analytics and fix all current issues.

Ongoing monthly SEO services include:

• Refining the optimization work on web pages as necessary to increase search engine rankings for the primary and secondary keyword targets
• Monitoring rankings on Google.com and the keyword reports within your Google Analytics account
• Monthly re-optimization of pages on site as necessary to increase quality search engine traffic
• Our specialized local SEO software monitors your local search rankings and informs us of incorrect or incomplete practice address information also known as ‘NAP’ (Name, Address, Phone) or ‘Citations’ data on Local Directories (ex. Yellow Pages, Yelp, Bell, Whitepages, Healthgrades, DR.Oogle… 60+ directories in total) and data aggregators. We use this insight to manually correct each pertinent issue. Our software is also used to monitor online reviews
• Google Analytics to report on website traffic and organic search trends
• Search Console provides overall account monitoring and reporting

Monthly Content Creation

Google rewards fresh, unique content that is added on a regular basis. New content builds search engine authority. firstdentist.com creates a 500-700 word article on your website each month as part of our SEO strategy. We will ask you to review and edit the content before posting it on your website, so you’ll know it’s high-quality.

What you can expect from a firstdentist.com SEO Package

You can enjoy the comforting feeling that an industry leading SEO company is continuously monitoring your website to ensure it is at the top – or on its way to the top – of the search engines. You’ll have a dedicated account manager who will check in with you regularly and arrange quarterly meetings to assess your progress. firstdentist.com will position your practice in the best light possible to help you attract ideal new patients.

SEO services from firstdentist.com

All services are provided in-house by firstdentist.com and clients receive monthly reports with detailed feedback on how to improve digital marketing results to attract more new patients. Our goal is to quickly help our clients outrank their competitors so they can attract the best new patients in their city.

Call us today to book a complimentary marketing session that looks at your practice’s current online presence and provides a digital roadmap for attracting new patients to your practice.