How to optimise your dental practice's online ranking

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Top five tips on increasing traffic to your dentistry website.

1. Extensive keyword research
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about knowing the keywords you're targeting. It starts with keyword research and understanding. Essentially, good SEO is about matching up the content of your website with the search terms people are putting into Google to find you. The closer the match, the more relevant your website, and the higher up your website will be in the results. There's no point focusing on a search terms or keywords that no one searches for. This can be commonplace with dental websites: too much content is jargon based and not great for SEO. Google has a number of great tools to measure both competition and search volume. Search for ‘Google Keyword Tool' and find out what people are searching for and how much competition there is for that term. Then, agree on the keywords you'll be targeting, including your location. For
location-based services, it's important that this becomes part of your keywords when writing content for your website.

2. Content
Probably the most important part of any SEO activity. Making sure you have enough great content on your website not only increases SEO, but also leads to more conversions – that's more qualified patients, to you and me. Content can come in all shapes and sizes – the two main ones are:
• Blogs: Up-to-date, relevant information on your industry, your practice, advice, tips and other information
• General content: Services, treatments,
testimonials, case studies, team, practice, the price list and of course, you. Plenty of keyword opportunity here.

3. Social bookmarking
Just like bookmarking in Internet Explorer or Firefox, social bookmarking allows
website visitors to share their bookmarks with others. Google, and other search engines, pay attention to these when ranking your website. The more social bookmarks you have, the higher your website will rank. It is very important to be actively involved in social bookmarking-activities. Join all the major social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Facebook. Bookmark your own articles and press releases, make friends and share your bookmarks, too. Social bookmarking websites are very well optimised and are indexed by search engines every day. If your website's content is bookmarked, then you can expect your website to get indexed by Google within 24 hours as well.

4. Links
Links help search engines find pages. As a search engine crawler travels around the web, it follows links and indexes the resulting web page. The more links to a web page, the more likely and quickly the web page will be indexed.
A page's value is determined by the number of links pointing to the page. The search engines place a greater value on a page if lots of pages link to it. For example, let's say you have a web page that gives excellent oral health advice. If there are other websites that link to that page, the search engines will assume that the web page must be important (based on the number of relevant links).
Links essentially help search engines to determine what the page is. This is where the link's text is important. If the link text contains keywords, then, the search engine has some indication of what the page is about. For example, assume we have a web page explaining the different ways to whiten teeth. The keywords for that page are ‘dental', ‘tooth whitening', ‘cosmetic dentist', ‘oral health' and ‘laser whitening'. If other websites want to link to your web page, they should use link text that contains those keywords.
By having the keyword ‘tooth whitening' appear in the text that acts as a link, it indicates to search engines that the page must have something to with ‘tooth whitening'. So, you can begin optimising your website's content immediately by using keyword strong links within your own website. Additionally, when you get the opportunity to put links on an external website, make sure the link text contains your keywords.

5. Love your web designer
Probably the odd-one-out in this article, but equally important. A good relationship with your website designer can be the best investment you'll make in SEO! This person should be the knowledgeable one. They know how it works and it will always remain in their interests for you to stay profitable and highly ranked.

I do SEO consultancy at Base Creative and I can always tell which of our clients really want great SEO. They are not just enthusiastic about their patients, but also about their website's potential and optimisation. This means that you can expect more than just great results, but an ongoing
relationship where your SEO guy is constantly looking out for new opportunities, new ways to promote your website, and ideas that spill into the offline world too. So, if your web designer isn't quite sure about ‘all this SEO stuff', maybe spark up a relationship with a new one.

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Well done, I like this article - it's a good and easy to read introduction on natural SEO.

Remember to also be consistent in your optimisation. The keywords you want to rank for should appear in your content from head to toe but not usually exceeding 7-8% keyword density, sometimes 2-3% is better. But make sure the keywords are appearing at the top, middle and bottom of the page. Your internal links to that page should use the same keywords in the text link. External in-bound links from 3rd party sites should again use the same keywords in the text link to that specific optimised page (not just your home page). All this improves the relevancy of your page for that specific keyphrase.

These days it's very important to rank on the Local Map listing which is now usually appearing ABOVE the natural results for location-based keyphrases on Google.

If you don't already know, Google Local Business Listing has just re-launched as Google Places.
Read the blog article at
http://www.dental-focus.com/marketing/announcements/dental-marketing-on-google-places/

Posted by Krishan Joshi 24/5/10 at 08:04

Completely agree. Getting your business up on Google's Local Business directory helps define your location, too. Location based searches will become more a part of natural listings (if they aren't already a major part now).

I can also recommend this article about not hiding content behind your search features. Especially important if you have to complete forms in order to get access to content (hint: Google won't complete your forms!):

http://www.basecreative.eu/news/richard-haygreen/2010/04/20/google-hates-search

Posted by iaingscott 24/5/10 at 15:10

Fair points one and all.

I would further add that if you want to be heard through the noise you should also consider:

1) Shouting louder than the rest - do this through directory listings and link-building activity: get on the likes Yell and other free health listings that exist. A listing is anything that brings your URL up in a search. Flikr, Facebook, linked-in all of these can be easy ways to get your web address out there. There are thousands to choose from but picking the right ones is the trick. This is an essential for maintaining position. Keywords are shared but prevalence comes in degrees and you want to be at the higher end of the scale for sustained presence. The more times your links are clicked the higher you rank for search engines.

2) Turn down the noise: Impossible to do unfortunately and highlights the fact that Dental practices are moving onto the web in full flow so if you aren't there too you won't stand a chance of being heard so you need to get yourself out there. Rome wasn't built in a day so when you decide to go online make sure you have secured the capability to make a real and continued go of it. This doesn't have to be expensive but it does need to be done by experienced, dedicated professionals and there are many of them out there which means you don't have to buy Harrods you can but Marks and get real value for your money.

3) Get your patients to shout for you: as mentioned by Krishan and Iain getting onto Google Places is important but delivering the patient care and service that drives someone to talk about you on Google is imperative to show up in the top places. The more recommendations you get the higher you will rank in the listings that match the search term entered. Get these testimonials on to your site and get them into the social domains.

4) Say something different: One of the greatest tools in the optimisation toolkit that is often overlooked is keeping your content fresh. Know the keywords you want to be found on, make sure they match the terms people actually use to find your practice and then add new relevant content using those key terms. Optimisation is not and please do not think it is, a destination it is a journey. Optimisation is an on-going process of learning what works and developing your content to perpetually get better ranking.

5) Being heard (optimisation) is important, but saying the right thing is imperative to getting patients to come to you.

Building your proposition is key and should be the cornerstone of all your marketing activity whether it is on or offline. For more information on proposition development please see http://bosschimp.com/proposition-development/

You could be found a thousand times a day but if you don’t give the patient the compelling reasons to come to you, your optimisation work is all lost. You need to say it, make your patients buy in to it and then make it easy for them to act on it. Please see the link for more information on improving conversions - http://realbusiness.co.uk/guy_levine/goodbye_seo_hello_cro

Posted by ArchMo 26/5/10 at 17:59

These days it's very important to rank on the Local Map listing which is now usually appearing above the usual results for location-based key phrases on Google.

Thanks
Maria Jim
Motorcycle Jackets Manufacturers

Posted by mariajim 21/6/10 at 10:15

Agree with all your points. And i think every dental website should have good and useful content to share with their user. Even adding self to Google's local business directory will help to get plenty new customers. Instead of loving the web designer , a web designer with prior experience in dental websites designing should be considered.

Posted by dentalwebsites 24/5/11 at 12:00