How Internal Links and Backlinks Help or Hurt Your Dental SEO?

SEO is not about ‘getting traffic’ – it’s about getting the right traffic.’

Dental SEO has evolved from being a sidekick for other marketing tactics to the leading star in dental marketing. It is the most cost-effective, consistent, and rewarding digital marketing tactic for businesses looking to grow. 

Despite the enormous growth potential of SEO for dental practices, it is easier said than done because the competition to rank is pretty intense. Even though a small proportion of dentists pay attention to SEO, the number of practices that invest in SEO is still sizable as there are so many dental practices in every town. 

Besides, search engine algorithms are becoming increasingly picky about the websites they rank on the first search result page and giving more weight to the internal linking structure and backlinks quality than before.

Link building strategy is an integral part of successful dental SEO management. Quality link building accentuates your SEO strategy and convinces the search engines that your website is a trustworthy source of relevant content. But creating such quality links is a difficult art to master, which is why you need an experienced dental SEO agency by your side. 

This article will explore what internal links and backlinks are and how they can help or hurt your SEO.

 

What Are Internal Links and Backlinks?

Search engine algorithms crawl and index your dental website content through your site’s internal links and hyperlinks from other websites to yours. The right website linking structure and backlinking strategy provide you with an opportunity to harness and use it for content marketing for SEO and enhancing your website user experience. 

It might seem strange to think that other websites could be driving traffic to a dental website until you understand the mechanism behind it. So let’s dive right in and see how they work.

 

What are Internal Links?

Internal links are hyperlinks in your web page content, linking that page to another webpage on your website. There are various internal links, such as menu links, Page links, and contextual links.

The home page is the primary page the search engine begins crawling during a search. Contextual links that connect various topics and concepts may be placed on all pages to ensure that your content fits together perfectly. Since internal links are present within your website, managing them is entirely under your control.

 

Your homepage is also the ‘home’ for internal links.

 

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks are links to your website from an external website that you do not own or manage. Backlinks are meant for other websites to tell the search engine that it is also content relevant to your website’s search query. A high number of backlinks acts like an endorsement for your website’s content and tells the search engine to rank your website higher in the search engine results. 

There are several types of backlinks, like:

• Natural Editorial Links: These types of backlinks are difficult and rare to obtain. Your website can get a natural editorial backlink from an external website when they think your website is an authority on the specific domain of interest. It often requires you to create a reputation or brand image by engaging experts and influencers to endorse your content. Once the few influencers support and spread your content, it naturally reaches a vast number of bloggers and content creators who naturally backlink to your website.
• Manual Outreach Link Building: This is the most common approach to developing a backlink network. In this approach, the company providing you dental SEO services approaches relevant website owners and bloggers who have established credentials to backlink to your website. It involves reaching out to them, discussing the process, and striking an agreement on the path forward.

 

Now that we know what internal links and backlinks, their role, and how they function are, let us get into the details of how they can help or hurt your dental SEO strategy.

 

 

How Can Internal Links and Backlinks Hurt or Help Dental SEO?

Both internal links and backlinks can have a significant impact on your dental SEO ranking. They can set your rankings soaring or hurt you badly and get penalized by Google. Let’s see how this works:

 

How Can Internal Links Help Your Website SEO?

• Internal links also enhance your user experience by making it more appealing and structured to the visitor.
• The right internal links on your dental website can make the search engine understand how your site’s web pages are relevant and which page has higher authority.
• It helps to build content silos and improves the page rankings of your web pages.
• They will highlight the relationship between the various website pages.
• Proper contextual links are essential to show the topical relation between them.

 

How Can Internal Links Hurt Your Dental SEO Strategy?

• Too many internal links, especially with the same anchor text, lead to diminishing your search engine optimization.
• Internal links in abundance cause spamming and break the user’s reading flow.
• Similarly, too few internal links on your website do not allow the search engines to notice your website.
• Internal links with the “no follow” attribute are useless in SEO as they do not allow the search engine to crawl around them.
• Non-availability of a link or a broken link can increase the user bounce rate.

 

Now let’s find out how backlinks can help or hurt your dental SEO strategy.

 

How Can Backlinks Help Your Dental SEO Strategy?

• You can increase your search engine rankings by asking your patients to review your dental practice on review websites like Yelp or DR. Oogle or social media platforms. When you get a new review or testimonial, it links back to your website. Search engines view a positive review as a sign of user trust in your business, which can get your site to rank higher. 

• Backlinks help your website to get discovered by search engines. 
• Backlinks are like a ‘vote of confidence’ from other websites, implying to search engines that they vouch for your content. This vote of confidence has a direct positive impact on your rankings.
• The more relevant backlinks your website has, the better ranking on search engines will be.
• They are responsible for driving referral traffic to your website from external sites.
• People coming to your website through a link to read a piece of content are more likely to explore other areas of your dental website.

 

How Can Backlinks Hurt Your Dental SEO Strategy?

• Illogical backlink connection can harm your website rankings. For example, if you have a backlink from a bakery website that illogically mentions your dental practice, this could be an irrelevant and low-quality link.
• If similar pages link to your website from the same anchor text on multiple sites, search engines may consider this as mirrored pages and a type of a link-building scam.
• If your backlink strategy is to participate in a private blog network is a risky SEO practice and expensive and difficult to maintain.
• Any backlinks on your website that link to resurrected expired domains no longer active but still have high authority could prove disastrous to your website. This is because Google now automatically resets the page rank if the linking domain expires.
• Similarly, the use of paid links goes against Google’s Webmaster guidelines. If caught, it could destroy your website’s search engine ranking within seconds.
• Toxic links can even lead to penalties.

 

What is the Role of Internal Links in Dental SEO?

At this stage, you might be wondering how placing internal links in your content could improve your traffic since they are only linking your web pages. The answer to that question lies in the manner a search engine crawls through the internet content. Links essentially help the search engine recognize more pages and contents relevant to the current search query. It is an easy hack to make more of your website content available to the search engine to crawl.

Additionally, internal links also improve your website content’s connectivity and coherence, making it more appealing and structured to the visitor. Having strategically placed internal links gives the impression that you have well-structured and pre-planned content for your dental website, which ties in nicely. It communicates an image of structured thinking.

 

Why Do You Need High-Quality Backlinks?

Backlinks are endorsements for the content on your website. Search engine algorithms also consider the website’s reputation providing the backlink, like the relevance of that website, rankings, and traffic details. 

A backlink on a high ranking and high traffic website has much more punch to it than from a poorly designed and less frequented website with low rankings. It is also essential that the backlinks are set up on industry-relevant websites so that your website attracts the right kind of traffic. Therefore, the Dental SEO company must make a conscious effort to build a highly relevant and high-quality backlink network. 

 

What Are Do-Follow and No-Follow Backlinks?

A DoFollow link is an HTML tag that labels a link on a website’s content as a link that search engines should consider and crawl. DoFollow links help search engines find your website, and the more the number of DoFollow links your website gets from other high-quality websites, the higher it will rank on the search results. 

NoFollow, on the other hand, is an HTML tag that notifies the search engines not to crawl a particular link on the website content. NoFollow links do not help you rank higher in search results as they do not count towards the scoring.

 

How to Know if Your SEO Company Adds Weak or Strong Backlinks?

SEO for dentists might be a difficult thing to understand in-depth completely. However, you should know enough to deal with dental SEO companies and their team. A good Dental SEO company must have a backlink strategy to build a network of relevant and high authority backlinks to boost your SEO rankings on search engine result pages and improve traffic quality.

But now the question is, how do you know if your SEO agency is adding strong backlinks or not? Here are a few tips to start:

• A good backlink will always come from a page relevant to what you are talking about on your page. For instance, if your web page talks about Invisalign, then a good backlink will come from a page discussing Orthodontic treatments.
• Good backlinks originate from trusted sites, not spammy ones.
• A strong backlink should be relevant to the rest of the content and position naturally in the content flow. Otherwise, there is a good chance that the link is spammy.

These are the most important signs that tell you that the dental marketing company that you have employed is doing it right (or not).

But if you see that your backlinks don’t qualify with these metrics, you may confront the SEO company with questions about the links and ask them to alter their strategy. You may also ask them when you will be able to see the SEO campaign’s tangible results. If you don’t get any clear answers to these questions, you know what you need to change. 

 

Conclusion

Acquiring backlinks is a complicated process and requires you to create engaging content that other websites would like to endorse. It also requires you to have an outreach program to the other relevant websites to chalk out a deal for the backlink endorsement. 

Here’s where a partnership with a competent Dental SEO company can be a differentiator. With their knowledge of SEO, the whole link building process, and their expertise in content marketing for SEO, dental SEO companies can ensure that your website gets good quality backlinks and that your internal linking structure is efficient.

Dental SEO marketing is viewed as rocket science by those not familiar with it. But for a dental SEO company that does it day in, day out, it is nothing more than a simple math problem.