How to Turn Your Dental Practice Website Into a Lead Generation Machine

Your Guide to Dental SEO That Drives Sales

Unpredictable markets put more pressure on businesses to drive leads through their doors. But that’s harder to get more patients with fewer and fewer marketing resources.

This Actionable Guide to Dental SEO will show you how to generate more leads to your dental practice with your existing digital assets. By following the steps laid out below, you’ll increase traffic to your site and leads to your business. So, if you’re ready to fill up your appointment book, keep reading!

When’s The Best Time to Create Content?

Now. This is the time to expand on dental content for your business.

That’s because it can take Google up to 6 months to crawl your posts and rank them. In other words, the content you write today, may not start driving in the leads you need until 6 months from now. But if you start now while your competition’s holding back, you’ll get the edge you need to get ahead. 

Finding Your Target Keywords on a Budget

Without the right keywords, your posts won’t rank and your content marketing efforts will have been in vain. To ensure you get the most out of each post, you need to find out what people are searching for. And to do that, you need to know the keywords they’re using.

If you’re looking to develop a content marketing strategy on a budget, here’s how:

1. Start by searching for articles on Google around topics you think your dental patients would look up. Read the articles that pop up. Note any repeating phrases and keywords. 
2. Note the “People Also Ask” section. This can be a great area to find relevant topics.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results. You’ll notice google suggests other relevant topics. Write these keywords down and continue to search.
4. Check out Wikipedia articles around your topic. Specifically, look at the table of contents. This can be a great way to find areas of interest you can write on. 
5. Review news articles as well to see if there are any trending posts on your topic area.

Once you have some ideas of keywords and topics, you can try researching them on either aHrefs or SEMRush. SEMrush offers a free trial, and aHrefs offers a 7 day trial for $7. This can help you verify the topics you want to write on have the traffic necessary to justify writing on them. 

Optimize Your Website for Conversions

Before you start writing new content, you need to optimize your site for conversions and SEO. This is one key component that many Digital Marketing Agencies in Chicago miss out on. Using your targeted keywords, optimize your website pages with relevant copy that showcases your dental practice. You’ll want to outline your specific services and ensure that your prospects can quickly and easily reach you. You should also check that:

• Pages load fast
• All the links on the page work
• The copy on each page is thorough and thoughtful
• You achieve the appropriate keyword density
• You have the right forms set up for capturing dental leads

There are several services online that you can use to check the health of your site by running a quick audit (SEMRush and Ahrefs, for instance). You can also quickly evaluate your page speed using Page Speed Insights. Make sure you use these to optimize your pages.

Note: If your site functions poorly, your expertly written content won’t rank. Google values the user experience, so make sure you offer prospects an easy, insightful time on your site. Running a site audit and fixing any mistakes will go a long way.

Optimize Your Current Blog for Conversions

Do not simply start writing blogs. That’s not enough. If you want to drive traffic to your dental practice, you need to evaluate what you have on your site first. Thin content can negatively impact your ranking. And dead posts, duplicate posts, and outdated posts work better as lead weights than lead generation magnets. That’s why you should always optimize your current content before you start writing new content.  This way, you’ll be certain that every piece of content and copy on your website is working to drive leads to your dental practice.

Always start your journey by reviewing your current website content and fixing previous posts. Can you go into more detail in the posts? Do you have proper headings? Does your content read easily with large chunks of text broken up and images that make the post enjoyable? Does your post provide more information on the topic than competing posts? Fixing up your dental blog posts and website copy is the fastest way to improve your brand visibility. And it sets the stage for your long-term content marketing strategy. 

What Dentistry-Related Content Should You Cover?

It would be a mistake to start writing blogs on topics you think would be interesting or on topics you’re interested in covering. Just because a topic is front of mind or interesting to you, doesn’t mean it will drive traffic or conversions. That’s why you need a content strategy. Otherwise, you’ll waste time and money writing content that no one is searching for. 

The content strategy for your dental site should be consist of 4 tiers:

• General Knowledge: Common questions that come up in your practice, tips on dental hygiene, dental pains and fears, FAQs, etc. Essentially, these are informational based posts that drive curious people to your site. Not all traffic may convert, but does help with ranking and positioning over competitors. It increases your chance for backlinks as well, which are crucial for increasing your site’s visibility. 
• Transactional Posts: These posts offer the greatest value for your dental practice. They’re your money blogs. You want to target review-based content, comparison pieces, and the costs of specific dental services. You’ll also want to write about your specific services like LANAP, Dental Veneers, Sedation Dentistry, Invisalign, Teeth Whitening, etc. This helps you illustrate your expertise and build trust with your prospective patients.
• Trending Topics: High-interest topics that reflect cultural trends. It’s an easy way to see a boost in traffic that can help you rank. The downside is that your traffic won’t generate many high-quality leads. But, it can help you gain more backlinks.

Begin with a foundation of content around your essential (high-value) services if you want to succeed. Next, you need to develop a content calendar that covers a variety of pieces over time. After you start posting regularly, you need to monitor traffic to your site and see which types of posts get more visits and interaction. Focus on these pieces of content. This will help extend your reach organically above your competitors. 

How to Write High-Quality Dental Content for Your Blog

Writing effectively for dental SEO and your audience is no easy task. You should do what you can to make it easy for your audience to find the information they’re looking for in your posts. Use these strategies to optimize your posts for readability.

• Use short sentences and transitions.
• Be clear and to the point.
• Write small paragraphs (no more than 4 lines of text in a Google Doc.)
• Avoid complex words and terminology. 
• Cite data to support your claims.
• Edit thoroughly (Use Spell Check, Grammarly, Hemingway App, and Peer Review)
• Add images that reflect your brand and personality. 

In addition to readability, you need to make sure you target the right keywords in the right places. Keep in mind, these are only guidelines. And you should never stuff keywords. Instead, it should sound natural.

These are some rough guidelines for keyword optimization:

• Target ONE Keyword per post/page
• Place your target keyword in your main heading (H1). 
• Use your keyword in as many subheadings (H2s and H3s)
• Use your keyword roughly 5x per 1000 words.
• Add roughly 4 internal links per 500 words
• Add at least 1external link per post per 500 words
• Your posts should be at least 500 words long.

Word of warning: Outsourcing content to sites like Upwork that offer affordable content creation can be hit or miss. Be prepared to handle more difficulties with writers who create lackluster content, struggle with directions, or simply disappear. 

The Value of Local SEO for Dentistry

Local SEO helps prospective patients in your area find your business. For example, if someone searches “dental implants near me”, you want Google to send them to your site for the answers. Not only will they learn more about the procedure, but they’ll also build trust with your dental practice.

It would be a mistake to think you can just write “local dentist near me” in all of your posts and pages. Instead, there are several BETTER strategies you can implement to target local SEO for your site. Embedding a map into your site, writing out directions, referring to your city or location in your posts. You can also make sure your dental practice has listings in online directories. Understanding local SEO is crucial for getting more visibility and leads to your dental practice.

And skipping local SEO would be a huge mistake for your content marketing strategy. These are your highest value dental prospects. They’re interested in your services at your location. All you need to do is stand above your competitors and win them over with high-quality content. 

Google My Business for Dentists

You want to leverage GMB to help position you higher in search results. By having an accurate, up-to-date listing and sharing content via the GMB platform, you can give your business a further push to outrank the competition. 

Why Quality Matters with Dental SEO

Our time matters. We’ve only got so much time in a day. And, no one wants to spend it trying to read fluff. If you rush content or simply throw words up and hope it’ll work, you risk wasting your time. You also risk angering potential patients with a lackluster website and content. Not to mention, you could potentially damage trust.

Worse, you risk damaging your practice. Your website is a glimpse into your dental office practice. It should be bright, inviting, and warming. The tone and voice of the words you write should reflect on how you and your team speak with one another. Make it honest. Make it candid. And don’t be afraid to show some personality. 

Your prospective patients will judge you based on your website content and copy. If it doesn’t provide a pleasant reading experience and the information they need, they’re likely to show up at your competitors instead. 

The Downside to Dental SEO on a Budget

Your content needs to find you more leads. No excuses. If your content isn’t helping direct people to your website who will eventually show up in your dentist chair, it’s not doing its job. Sadly, it doesn’t take much. Hunches and shots only waste your time and resources. Without knowing how to find and interpret the data, you can only get so far. You may occasionally write a good post that drives some traffic, but outside of the occasional murmur, your results will be limited. However, with the right dental SEO strategies in place, you can generate enough leads to weather any storm.

How to Go Further with Dental SEO

Dental SEO is about more than writing random posts on dentistry. You need a content marketing strategy for lead generation. You also need an optimized website and content that drives traffic. That’s how you stand above your competition. But without a data-backed approach, you’ll be flying blind.

Plus, you need to consider how you’ll get backlinks to that new content, so it can rank. Will you submit guest posts? Will you target broken backlinks? Or, will you focus on one of the many other ways you can get links?

If you want to get more leads out of your content marketing strategy, then you need to work with an agency that has a background helping dentists fill appointments. That’s our specialty at Zen Anchor. We work with dental practices to get them visibility by expanding their digital presence through proven, data-backed SEO strategies. 

You don’t need to wait in the dark anymore. Team up with Zen Anchor and discover how to turn your dental practice website into a passive lead generating machine!