Opening a dental practice involves a lot of preparation and determination. Sometimes it is easy to forget how much attention you need to pay to dental SEO. A lot of people believe that if their website is good enough then their future patients will be able to find them immediately online, as if by magic. In reality, it takes a lot more effort to achieve high rankings within search engine results, and unless your website is entirely optimised for this you may find it challenging to get the number of new patients each month that you desire. A page one result spot on Google can boost your website traffic by up to 2500 views per month, which in turn will get your practice between five and ten new leads each month. Over ninety percent of people that use the Google search engine do not ever look past page one, so not having a presence on this page will dramatically damage your practice’s future.
Getting onto page one
Achieving a page one position is great, but you should always strive to achieve the very top result ranking if you want to maximise your practice’s potential. There are a number of marketing techniques that you can use to help boost your website’s rankings, but sometimes this can be extremely time-consuming, so by hiring a professional to do these tasks for you can be a good idea. Having a professional blog as well as utilising social media platforms will allow you to grow your online presence and reach a larger amount of people. Nearly four billion people in the world use social media, making it a vital tool if you wish to communicate with your future patients on a broad scale. If you have a blog, posting to it frequently every week will increase your chances of achieving a top Google result ranking, as your website is constantly providing up to date, fresh information. You are able to share your blog posts to your social media, and your future patients can in turn, share this to their social media, helping to grow your practice even more.
Where are you?
If you have a great website and you have appeared on page one of Google’s results but you just can’t seem to climb up to that number one spot, you can take other steps to try and boost your visibility online. A lot of people search up their future practice using Google Maps, so they can find a practice that is local to them. Enabling features such as click-to-find allows future patients to see how far away from you they are as well as giving them directions to your practice from wherever they happen to be. You can add in information such as opening hours too, so people can see when you are available. This is extremely helpful when it comes to emergency dental appointments, as people are in a rush in an emergency and will often opt to go for the practice that provides the quickest, most convenient way to contact them.
