Are you hoping your SEO effort brings in new leads for your dental clinic? The good news is that dental SEO is not any different from other Internet marketing strategies.
For one, it entails doing search engine optimisation (SEO), learning about local potential clients’ demands and needs, and effectively contacting them.
Using digital marketing tools to connect and interact with patients will improve retention and draw in more new patients to your dental clinic. After all, patients’ confidence in your dental office may decline if they are left in the dark, uncertain of whether your clinic is open or whether they can expect good dental care on their next visit. Dissatisfied patients will eventually turn to other dentists that are actively promoting their dental care online.
Alternatively, you can show your patients you care by sending proactive and beneficial digital communications. If you regularly communicate with your patients via your website or social media pages, you can inform them of pertinent business information that will help them decide whether to trust your dental clinic or not.
We will share how SEO can help your dental business grow and what you can miss out if you do not tap this in-demand marketing strategy.
Why Is SEO Important for Dental Clinics?
According to Internet Live Stats, Google handles more than 3.5 billion daily searches. There’s a good chance that this number includes individuals looking for a dentist in your neighbourhood. You won’t be able to connect with present and potential patients if you only use conventional marketing strategies (e.g. direct mail and radio advertisements).
This reason (along with the rest below) is why SEO is important for your dental business.
Helps Increase Brand Awareness
Any marketing campaign’s primary goal, whether digital or not, is to increase brand awareness. Both traditional and online marketing are effective at raising brand awareness, but because of society’s growing reliance on technology, digital marketing typically outperforms its rivals at the present.
HubSpot reveals the following mind-blowing statistics:
- Google Maps is used by 86% of users to find a business’s location.
- By 2022, voice search is predicted to generate $40 billion in income.
- Before getting out of bed, more than 46% of individuals check their smartphones.
- Over 2.38 billion people use Facebook worldwide.
- Instagram is used daily by more than 500 million users, and there are more than 1 billion active accounts.
Inbound Marketing Is Better than Outbound Marketing
There are two types of dental marketing strategies: inbound and outbound marketing. With the use of your practice’s own content, you may effectively entice potential patients to return to your clinic (inbound marketing). On the other hand, outbound marketing calls for you to go out and find potential patients while vying with other dental offices for their business.
Outbound marketing strategies are overrated, according to 32% of marketers. If the majority of your strategy is outbound, take this as a warning.
Helps Reduce Marketing Cost
A thriving dental office requires constant attention to the bottom line. You should be aware that outbound leads cost 49% more than inbound leads. This makes sense once you give it some thought.
For instance, you’ll spend money on design, printing, and delivery if you launch a direct mail campaign. Email marketing, on the other hand, has far lower overhead costs, making it more affordable.
Provides Higher ROI
Online marketing’s return on investment (ROI) tends to be on the greater side due to the overall decrease in advertising costs.
In comparison to placing an advertisement in the newspaper or sending out direct mail, starting an SEO campaign and attracting new patients to your dental practice typically costs far less. Your profit margin may rise considerably if you simply pay a few cents per lead instead of hundreds of dollars.
Implements Granular Marketing
Traditional marketing is expensive partly because it promotes your advertisement to thousands, perhaps millions, of people. Although it may appear to be a winning tactic, it is frequently not.
The audience for television, radio, direct mail and telemarketing advertisements is passive. Many people you are marketing to may not even be considering dental services. With traditional marketing, your audience is frequently bigger, but fewer people are actually paying attention.
You may target your adverts far more precisely with digital marketing. This implies that you may reach your target market of people already considering using your services more simply with advertisements.
For instance, Facebook-sponsored advertisements let you choose the demographics of the people you want to see your ad in their news feeds, including their location, gender, income, and interests. For websites, you can utilise local SEO to target specific locations where you offer your services. With this, your marketing efforts could become more focused and successful.
Easy and Accurate Analytics
Since there is no reliable method to know how many people see traditional dental advertising (like say, an ad in your local newspaper), it can be challenging to gauge its performance. This makes evaluating the success of these techniques difficult. In contrast, it is simple to track and gauge whether SEO is successful. You may learn which pages visitors to your site visited, where they came from, and what device they used to access it by looking at data like website traffic.
8 Effective Dental SEO Strategies
The marketing landscape has significantly transformed, particularly dental SEO and promotion strategies. While there is a place for traditional means, no clinic can expect to flourish without an effective online marketing strategy.
You, like the majority of dentists, are probably too busy giving dental care to have the time to try out innovative marketing strategies. All dental practices, though, need to be aware of the benefits of implementing effective dental SEO strategies in this day and age.
Consider employing these tried and proven strategies for your dental marketing, in addition to using traditional platforms:
Build Your Brand Identity
Your dental clinic’s branding sets you apart from the competition and creates a distinctive experience that people recognise as soon as they get to know you. The unique experience that your facility delivers should be reflected in every way that patients interact with your clinic or brand.
A brand strategy for dental digital marketing is a long-term plan for creating a strong brand presence to achieve specific goals. Any successful dental clinic should have a carefully thought and well-established brand identity to differentiate itself from the competition.
Establish Social Media Presence
Even if social media is currently a crucial part of modern dental office marketing, many analysts anticipate it to continue expanding. Younger generations are increasingly looking for dentists independently, contributing to some of this. A dental office’s social media presence must be active and effective to attract new patients.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that social media has revolutionised dental SEO. To make the most of this, you must publish great photos with intriguing captions.
Create a Google Business Profile
Making a Google Business Profile (GBP) page is a simple dental SEO strategy.
In essence, Google incorporates information from your Google Business Profile, which is a reliable source, into various search experiences. This information includes things like your dental clinic’s address, hours of operation, and photos.
As you might anticipate, a comprehensive and informative Google Business Profile may assist in making your office visible in many Google search results, including those of individuals actively looking for a dentist.
Optimise Your Website
If your website isn’t in top shape, it won’t matter if you have a stunning physical dental office in the neighbourhood. Today’s patients will evaluate your clinic based on the look and functionality of your website, since it is typically their first point of contact with you.
Website optimisation is known to enhance your website’s performance across several dimensions, such as internet traffic, conversion rates, and usability. Making sure a user’s digital journey is seamless is the main goal of website optimisation.
However, persistence and effort will be needed to keep your information up to date and your website functioning properly. You must regularly update and manage your website.
Secure Positive Testimonials and Reviews
Word-of-mouth advertising works hand in hand with online reviews. When you ask your patients how they learned about you, the majority of them may reply, “I found you online,” “You had outstanding Google ratings,” or “You were referred to me by someone.” Most people read reviews before going somewhere new. It makes sense that people want the finest dentist possible, and excellent reviews can instantly associate your practice with excellent care and service.
Create Dental-Related Contents
Have you stopped updating your blog? It’s a shame because it’s one of your best tools for dental marketing. A common problem with dental clinic blogs is that they are often out-of-date, disorganised, and irrelevant. Additionally, providing valuable material and broadening your online presence is a missed opportunity. The blog content on your website could help you provide value for your patients, rank on search engines, and build your brand’s reputation in the dental industry.
Think of publishing blog posts under the following categories:
- Dental Issues
- Dental Techniques
- Oral Health
Invest in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is a crucial component of digital marketing for dental clinics and engaging with patients looking for dental care. After all, most people prefer to look up their dentists online, especially those in their local areas. Additionally, as we already indicated, many dentists are expanding their patient numbers due to local search results.
Fortunately, through GBP and website optimisation efforts, you may well be on your way to developing an excellent dentistry SEO strategy. However, engaging with a reputable SEO agency can significantly improve your campaign efforts if you want to get the most out of this strategy.
Work with a Reliable SEO Agency for Dentists
Increased patient satisfaction will result in favourable patient reviews, which is the biggest advantage of investing in digital marketing and SEO. More positive patient testimonials will result in more clients, indeed. Although dental SEO takes time and effort to shape up, it will attract a continuous flow of new patients once commenced and that will increase the revenue in your clinic in the long run. Reach out to TopRankings for a consultation if you decide to put your patients first and delegate your support to a group of marketing and SEO specialists.
Our team of professionals specialises in SEO for dentists. We create a strategy and carry out a customised SEO plan that will undoubtedly help grow your dental business. Call us at 1300 881 911 for enquiries.
