Picture Dental SEO as a digital roadmap, guiding potential patients to your dental practice through the maze of online content. This is achieved by optimising your online presence, making it more discoverable in unpaid search engine results, thus leading to increased exposure.
Imagine this scenario:
You’re the top result for “dentist in Kuala Lumpur” on Google’s local search results.
And this:
You’re also topping the charts for “teeth whitening service” on Google’s organic search results.
This kind of exposure can channel potential patients to your website or encourage them to reach out to your practice directly.
From general dentists to oral surgeons, and orthodontics, dental SEO can benefit all practitioners, regardless of their size or location.
SEO is crucial for dentists because a substantial number of patients seek dental services and information via search engines. For instance, every month, there are over 34,800 Google searches for “dentist near me” in Malaysia alone.
If your dental practice is invisible when people search for relevant keywords, you risk losing potential business to your competitors. Therefore, ranking prominently is essential. On average, the top unpaid result garners 27.6% of searcher’s clicks, while only 2.4% click on the tenth result.
Whether it’s SEO for a dental clinic or another business, the fundamental SEO strategies are the same. However, dental practices should give priority to certain techniques, especially when it comes to local SEO.
Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free tool that allows you to manage your business listing on Google. Providing accurate and comprehensive information about your dental practice can help you rank higher in local results.
GBP is a bread and butter tools for clinics mainly due to the nature of how people in Malaysia especially search for nearby clinics. GBP will make your clinic to appear in the Google Search, and most importantly, in Google Maps.
Optimizing GBP for your target keywords can be a distinctive competitive advantage against all other clinics in your area. So, we’d advice you to prioritize on optimizing the profile with valuable keywords to ensure your clinic is in front of those people who are looking for the terms.
Listing your dental practice in reputable online directories gives patients more ways to find your services through search.
Not only this method helps you find new audience, it also gives the backlink scores to your website so that your website SEO (domain ratings) ranks higher in Google.
Some of the examples directories that you can register in Malaysia are:
High ratings on Google can elevate your dental practice’s ranking in local results. Patient reviews not only contribute to your online reputation but can also lead to an increase in inquiries.
At Lamanify, we always encourage our clients or anyone who consult with us to focus on growing the user reviews on the Google Business Profile.
Reviews are the pinnacles of success for clinic business and it is the first thing that people look for when they search any clinic nearby.
Focus on ensuring the patients leaving positive feedbacks to your profile by encouraging them to write positive experiences when they visit your clinic.
Google prefers to rank sites that demonstrate a strong E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), especially for topics like dentistry, which directly impacts users’ health.
You can prove it to Google that you are the subject matter expert on your area of expertise, ie. general dentistry, paediatrics dentistry or any other specialties that you want to promote.
By showing those expertise, you can improve your dental SEO strategy way ahead of your competitors.
You can combine your expertise and experience as part of the content strategy to build up the authority and trust in that particular topic.
Keyword research is a process of finding relevant terms that people use when searching for products and services in their area.
Use Google Ads keyword planner tool to find the best keywords that are relatable to your dental niche.
The key idea here is to find those high-volume keywords and optimize your website for those keywords. This way, Google can see that your website is highly relevant with the keywords and able to rank you up higher in Google Search results.
But..
Try not to put it too broad. Instead, use a long-tail keywords such as “dentist shah alam” as compared to just “dentist”. This way, you can ensure that your website doesnt rank for irrelevant terms and hyper-targetted to the right audience whom are searching for your clinic.
On-page SEO involves optimizing a webpage so that it ranks higher for relevant keywords and encourages more visitors to take the desired action.
Optimizing your dental website might take some technical expertise. However, if you make it right, all your dental SEO efforts will scale up faster and better.
Your website is the key driver for SEO.
The backend of the website should be structured very well to ensure Google-bot able to crawl your website properly.
Some of the key important elements that should be optimized:
If you can’t do this on your end, contact your developer to help you out. If you’re using WordPress, you can contact us at Lamanify so we can assist you on this auditing your on-page SEO for free.
Using structured data on your site makes it eligible for rich snippets—enriched search results on Google. These can attract more clicks than standard results.
However, to implement Structured Data requires advanced SEO technical skills.
If you managed to execute it, you will see a better click through rate of your website since you will take more ‘real estate’ of the Google Search when the rich snippets pops out within the search result page.
Technical SEO involves optimizing technical aspects of your site, aiming to rank higher in search engines and provide a better user experience.
The keyword here is ‘user experience’.
Anything that could improve user experience will give you better dental SEO scorings to the eye of Google.
This is because, Google now rewards a well thought website (not just limited to design) to improve the SEO score.
For example, a fast-loading website is better performing in terms of SEO compared to a laggish website. A mobile responsive website has more edge in SEO performance compared to non-responsive website.
Conduct your audit to your dental website to ensure it is at its optimum stage before doing further SEO efforts.
Backlinks are links to your site from other domains. Google treats certain types as votes of confidence, so they can contribute to higher SEO rankings. Plus, they can drive referral traffic to your site.
So, having your website registered on various portals, directories or any publications will result in improving your domain rating (or the trustworthiness) of your dental website.
By keeping up with good backlinks, Google will treat your website as a trusted website with a lot of other referring websites that give the ‘vote’ to your website.
Before you even start any dental SEO setups, you should know what you are going to track.
So that you can know if your dental SEO efforts are actually working, and you’re able to determine what other things that you might missed.
The first step is to setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
These two FREE tools allow you to measure:
These are the 10 essential strategy that you should do for your website to improve the dental SEO for your business.
Remember, the techniques mentioned above are not exhaustive, but they are a solid starting point for improving your Dental SEO.
Should you have any question on this topic, do not hesitate to contact us at Lamanify and we’re here to help in any of your SEO questions.
