Understanding Organic Search and What It Means for Your Dental Practice
Optimizing your dental practice’s online content for organic search, also known as search engine optimization (SEO), will enhance its visibility by boosting its ranking in the results. Additionally, effective SEO can be a significant factor in long-term growth for any dental practice dedicated to maintaining a strong online presence. However, for those who are not well-versed in the science of organic rankings, SEO can be intimidating. While SEO can get complicated, the basic concepts are pretty straightforward. Allow me to break it down for you and demonstrate how SEO can help your practice.
What is SEO?
In the simplest terms, SEO is a targeted dental marketing strategy to boost your practice’s search engine rankings, specifically Google. Mostly, SEO focuses on organic (unpaid) search results because that is one way people find your website and other online content. When you employ even basic SEO practices, it effectively harmonizes your digital content, making it easier to find and access. In turn, you should see more people viewing your online content (traffic). Naturally, more traffic means more engagement, more people contacting your practice, and potentially more revenue.
What Goes Into SEO?
The goal of SEO is to rank your practice higher in organic searches, that is, searches initiated by consumers (potential new patients). To make that happen, you can optimize digital content using various strategies, including keywords and content strategy, which are the most fundamental components of effective SEO.
Keywords
A keyword is a word or short phrase that describes a specific piece of content, like a web page. Each industry has its own keywords. In dentistry, your goal will determine which keywords you should work towards getting ranked for. If you want to rank high for multiple keywords, that implies more work on your part. For instance, any version of “dentist in [city]” is a very popular keyword in the dental industry. It takes a lot of effort to rank with that keyword, especially if you’re in a competitive market. It also behooves you to work toward more service-specific keywords, like “dental implants in [city].” Again, the more competition there is for those services, the more effort you will need to make to boost your organic search ranking.
Content Strategy
Without going into the technical details, content strategy is planning and managing your digital content. One way to do that is by improving your website and posting fresh, relevant content in addition to what already exists on your website. To enhance SEO, your website should have dedicated service pages for the main services you offer, especially the ones you wish to do more of. Regularly posting additional online content — blog posts, videos, social media content, etc. — around those services will create more content for Google and other search engines to find and help boost your ranking faster.
Investment and ROI
SEO is an ongoing investment. The amount of time and money you spend will depend on your goals and the competition in your area, how aggressive you are in your efforts, how old your domain and website are, where you rank now, and other factors. It’s also worth noting that ROI is more than measuring online traffic. It’s about converting as much of that traffic as possible into quality patients, which takes additional efforts beyond SEO strategy.
For a dental practice, effective SEO requires time, effort, and planning. With consistency and patience, SEO will improve your practice’s online visibility and increase website traffic. In the beginning, you may see modest results. But SEO is, above all, a long-term strategy. When done correctly as part of a well-rounded digital marketing strategy, you will see sustained revenue growth.
