When you think of marketing and advertising, you wouldn’t initially believe that medical practitioners need them. However, if you have a private clinic, you can most certainly benefit from marketing tactics to improve your patient acquisition. One of the ways you can do that is by implementing local SEO tactics.
Local SEO for dentists is one of the best ways to acquire new patients or even attract old ones. If you’re not using these strategies yet, now is the time to do them, but what exactly is local SEO, and why is it so vital for you to succeed in online marketing?
Why Is Local SEO Important?
If you’re planning SEO marketing for dentists, knowledge about local SEO is even more critical. Local SEO for dentists allows you better to redirect potential clients to the location of your clinic. The heart of your local SEO strategy is local keywords. These are usually keywords that have geographic areas with them.
We know that consumers’ behavior is that when someone looks up local businesses on search engines, most of them will visit the closest store. This information is the reasoning that should drive businesses with physical locations to invest in local SEO, including medical practitioners who have a clinic.
There are many strategies and local SEO tactics that you can use, but here are several to get you on the right path.
Start Blogging
If you want your website to rank higher or to have more traffic, you need to produce content that people can use. It would be best if you started blogging about relevant issues related to your dental practice. You don’t need to post blog content every day to make this work for you. However, there needs to be some form of regularity to your posts.
When you start blogging, you don’t only help drive traffic to your website. It’s also a way for you to show your authority and level of expertise. You can use the content on your site to help get the patients’ attention, but it’s also a way for you to establish a relationship with them.
Build Links
One of the most critical factors that go into making you rank higher on search engines, or at least on Google, would be your links. Link building is a crucial part of your SEO strategy. When you build links, it lets Google know that your website is an authority or provides quality content at the very least.
With that said, you have to build both internal links and external links to make the most out of your link building. Internal links are links on your website that lead to other places around your website. On the other hand, external links are other websites that have links that lead back to your website.
Internal Links
Since local keywords or local SEO are usually geographically specific, this means that your local SEO for dentists should keep these in mind. One way to do that is by creating location pages on your site. If you don’t know what a location page is, it’s a landing page that targets the location-specific terms more appropriate for you.
You can use this location-specific landing page and link to it within your website whenever you’re mentioning where your clinic is. Having a proper internal linking structure on your website will help boost your rankings in local SEO.
External Links
External links are essential in terms of making your website rank higher in Google search rankings. If other websites keep linking back to your site, especially websites that already have a high authority on search engines, this will make Google recognize your site. Therefore, you should do all you can to make other websites link back to you.
One way you can do that is by guest posting. Guest posting is you creating a blog article that will be on another site that isn’t yours.
Aside from guest posting, simply creating unique and useful content is an organic way to have people link back to your website.
Use Local Keywords
SEO marketing for dentists means that you, ultimately, want to drive patients to the physical clinic. Therefore, you would wish to use local keywords to emphasize the clinic’s area to help get the patients there. Local keywords are usually long-tail keywords that include a location. For example, your local keyword could be “Las Vegas dental clinic.”
If you rank high for local keywords such as these, you’ll get more traffic from people in your area looking for dentists. You can also use locations near your clinic instead of using ones that are right on the dot. Either way, it’s going to give your website more traffic from higher-converting users.
Update Meta Tags
When you’re updating and fixing your website’s SEO, you also have to remember to update your website’s meta tags. Meta tags aren’t the part of your website that users or visitors will see. Instead, these are the snippets of text in your webpage’s HTML code that lets search engines know what content is on your website.
You should apply your keywords in the meta tags as much as possible so that search engines would know what is on your page. Plus, it also contributes to making your website more credible in the eyes of search engines.
List Business Information
When users or website visitors who are interested in your services visit your site, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to contact you. That’s why you should make your business information as easy to access as possible. You don’t want to lose a patient because they couldn’t find pertinent business information about you.
The best place to list your dental practice would be on Google My Business. If you list your business there, it will provide people whose search queries match your services a list of information about your business. It will also add directions to your clinic using Google Maps if you put your address on it.
Use Dental Citations
Since you’re working on SEO marketing for dentists, you should look for dental citations in online directories. Aside from Google My Business, there are tons of online directories where you can post information about your business. There are also online directories dedicated to dental clinics, which might be better for you.
You can hire someone else to input your business information in these special online directories. You don’t want to be in all of them, though. Some of these online listings will be free while some need payment. Before you use the paid listings, fill out the free listings first, and see whether you would benefit more from the paid listings after.
Encourage Reviews
After you finish providing excellent services to your patients, make sure to ask them to leave you a review. It can be overwhelming if you ask them to review you in different places. Please stick to one place and make it easy for them to review you there.
You can also get a written testimony from them that you can put up on your website instead. These reviews will help reassure potentially new clients of the quality of service that you provide.
Use Social Platforms
Your website isn’t the only place you should focus on when creating an online presence. You should also make use of social networking sites. These are some of the most powerful online platforms that will help you grow your patient acquisition rate.
In social media, you still need a content strategy. Although you don’t need to post longer content, there’s still a lot you need to plan. Keep it short but impactful.
You can even use social platforms to interact with potential patients better.
All of these local SEO tactics will help you in improving your online presence. Not only will they get more traffic to your website, but it’s also going to give more attention to your clinic. Try these out and remember to plan first before implementing them. That way, you’re giving yourself the best chance of success.
