Why Is It Essential to Optimize Your Website for Dental SEO?

Hundreds of thousands of brands across a spectrum of industries have enjoyed a massive ROI on SEO, and things are no different for dental brands – dental SEO can boost your revenue by a whopping 230%!

In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) drives traffic to a dental website from search engines by optimizing the website and implementing off-page activities based on an SEO strategy. 

The traffic generated from SEO is organic, or in other words, free traffic. It doesn’t just increase traffic volume but also enhances traffic quality, meaning you get more easily convertible leads. And more easy to convert leads translates to an increase in foot traffic and more new patient appointments.

Dental website SEO involves making changes to your website’s design, structure, and content to make it more attractive for search engines and users. The challenge is that you are not the only one doing it; all of your competitors would also have invested in dental SEO. 

To stand out from the competition, you need a user-friendly and conversion-friendly website because the Google algorithm considers websites’ user experience as one of the main ranking factors. User-friendly sites reward with a higher position on the search engine result pages.

But what exactly is a user-friendly site? What does a good dental website design look like? Why is on-page optimization so important, and how does a Dental SEO company do that? You’ll find answers to all these questions in this article. Read on!

 

4 Things Best Dental Websites Have in Common:

Your website should attract and retain patients and help to create a brand image of your dental practice. Here are the four main factors the most effective dental website have:

 

1. User Interface (UI)

Your website may be the first impression a potential patient may have of your practice. A visually attractive dental website design ensures that it isn’t the last. 

Guidelines: 

• Easy to navigate menu for desktop and mobile
• Your website must look polished and professional. 
• The text should be easy to read. 
• Meaningful graphics should be added wherever required but not overdone.
• The layout must be uncluttered and straightforward.
• The layout should design for mobile and desktop, and tablet.

 

2. Quality Content

Your visitors come to your website to find information about your practice and learn about the treatments and procedures. So, providing the right information and quality content increases patient trust in your practice and is vital for SEO for dentists.

Guidelines:

• Your business information, including phone number, address, appointment booking capabilities, should be consistent and easy to access on your website.
• The content must break down and divide into small sections. No one likes to read long paragraphs of text.
• The content needs to be clear and compelling. At best, you have 10 seconds to impress the visitor. Don’t waste that.
• Website content needs to be updated regularly. Stale content drives visitors away faster than you think; fresh content is a must for effective content marketing for SEO.
• Write the content in the third person. Avoid using I, we, us, etc. They are not on your site to hear about you; they are there to hear from you.
• Double-check every fact or stat you use.
• Ensure that the copy is error-free unless you want to be remembered for typos and grammatical mistakes.

 

Learn more about the importance of content marketing for dental SEO

 

3. User Experience (UX)

Arguably one of the essential components of search engine ranking and a great dental website design is the site’s user experience. Here are some critical elements of good UX design:

• Dental websites must be mobile-friendly.
• Every component of the site, including hyperlinks, site search, etc., should work correctly and quickly. Broken components frustrate the visitors.
• The page should not take more than 5 seconds to load.
• Minimal scrolling is a must. 
• The home page should have the correct link structure that takes users to relevant pages.
• The layout has to be consistent. Repeating some aspects across the site is advisable.
• Easy navigation is critical. Don’t make your users hunt for information.
• The website must have cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

 

Learn more about how dental website design can generate new patient appointments

 

4. Optimized for SEO (On-Page Optimization)

Why must websites be optimized for SEO, and why is it essential for dental SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing web pages to boost your website’s search rankings and generate more organic traffic. As the name suggests, on-page optimization focuses on your website’s elements, not those external to it. Besides publishing quality, relevant content, on-page SEO also involves optimizing image size, headlines, various HTML tags (header tag, meta tag, title tag).

Related Article: Learn About Dental SEO Rankings

On-page optimization lies at the core of dental SEO management. Over the years, Google and other search engines have evolved to understand what a user is searching for when he types a query and how to deliver results that match their requirement. As a result, they now give more importance to a website’s design, structure, content, and relevance to the search query to determine ranks on their SERPs. On-page dental SEO helps search engines understand these very factors.

You can’t ignore on-page SEO because you have more control over your website’s elements (on-page SEO) than on external sources (off-page SEO) when you go about optimizing them. And if you put effort into a process, it will give you a more significant boost in rankings and revenue than otherwise.

What On-Page Factors You Should Optimize for Successful Dental SEO?

There are dozens of on-page factors you could and should optimize. Let us now look at some of the most important ones that a top Dental SEO company would always optimize.

 

• Page Speed

Page speed could either measure as page load time (time taken to display the entire content on a particular page) or ‘time to first byte’ (how long it takes for the webserver to send the first byte to your browser). Google has said that they consider page speed as an indicator to rank pages. 

Also, page speed plays a huge role in delivering a great user experience. Slow loading pages have a higher bounce rate (about 38% for pages that take more than 5 seconds to load compared to 9% for pages that load inside 2 seconds).

You may test your current website speed here.

 

• Site Map

A sitemap is a file that contains a listing of every important page on your site. It helps search engines find and index all of your website content. If you have a website that contains many pages, if you have recently added new pages, or if you do not have external links coming into a few of your pages, a sitemap will help Google to find these pages quickly.

 

• Text Content

Optimizing text content on your site is arguably the most crucial part of dental website SEO. You should create website content for both users and search engines, although users are the priority. The content must contain some keywords and semantically related words, but even more importantly, it should be informative and relevant to your audience. It needs to give value to the reader. The headlines must be punchy and spark interest among the readers to read further.

Learn more about How to choose the right keywords for dental SEO.

 

• Title Tag

The title tag is an HTML tag found in the head section of a web page. It tells the search engine about the page subject. The title tag should not be more than 70 characters and must contain a primary keyword specific to the page as well as your practice name.

 

• Meta Description

A meta description is a meta tag that gives a little more information about the web page to search engines. The meta description also tells the users what to expect by visiting the page. Even though meta descriptions do not directly impact rankings, a smart Dental marketing company will optimize it by including keywords and enough quality content to encourage searchers to visit the page. Ultimately, it increases traffic and improves your conversion rate.

 

• Header Tags

Header tags are simply HTML elements (numbered H1 to H6) that differentiate headings and subheadings from other text types. They give search engines a better understanding of your content and make it more enjoyable and easy for visitors to read the content. Infusing keywords in the header tags help your SEO too.

 

• Internal Links

Internal link building simplifies site navigation for the audience. It creates cohesion between different pages and enables you to pitch your services to potential patients more effectively. For instance, let’s say you are writing a blog post about ‘Invisalign braces.’ You can add links in the post to the Invisalign page on your website. Internal links are the fuel on which dental SEO management operates. Internal links dos and don’ts must be known be the dentist too.

 

• Image Name and Alt Tags

Adding images makes your web page more appealing, but optimizing them will make them an invaluable SEO asset. Using a descriptive image name and alt tag containing a keyword will allow search engines to better index your images and put them in front of users when they conduct an image search.

Conclusion

Over the years, many agencies have shifted their focus from on-page optimization to off-page techniques like social bookmarking and link building. But the ones that know their craft understand that off-page optimization won’t do any good without on-page SEO. Skilled SEO professionals prioritize on-page optimization always. And as search engines and their algorithms keep getting more and more sophisticated, leaning towards the side they are leaning towards (on-page optimization) would hold you and your website in good stead.

If you have hired a professional agency’s dental SEO services, ask them, and verify if they have optimized the following on-page factors:

• Website content
• Title tag and header tags
• Meta description
• Sitemap
• Internal links structure
• Page speed
• Image name and alt tags

 

You can also evaluate your current SEO company performance here.