Written by Selina Jenkins
Most patients today are finding, comparing, and booking appointments in dental clinics online. According to research by Google, 90% of U.S. internet users use search primarily to find local businesses. It is, therefore, important that you have a strong online presence. One way of doing this is optimizing your dental website for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO). So, how does your business directly benefit from dental SEO marketing?
- Increased Visibility
SEO is all about improving your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Most people searching for a dental clinic do not go past the first SERP. According to a Study by SlingShot SEO titled “Google & Bing Study”, the first SERP in Google receives 70% of all click-through traffic.
- Increased Traffic
The increased visibility leads to increased traffic into your site. Furthermore, a good SEO strategy will encourage people to spend more time on a website, which increases the chances of conversion. According to TMP/comScore, 82% of local searches end up in offline contact such as a visit, a purchase, or a phone call.
- Competitive Advantage
Most visitors believe, albeit erroneously, those businesses that rank high are better. SEO helps your effectively compete with your bigger competitors because it is not the size of the business that determines ranking.
- Greater Conversion Rates
One of the most important SEO tactics is the generation of quality keyword-optimized content. Quality content will bring you out as an expert in your field and this will lead to increased conversion rates. Other useful information such as customer reviews will also encourage conversion. According to TMP/comScore, 61% of local searches end up in a purchase.
- Cost Effective Marketing
SEO is a cost effective marketing technique – much cheaper than other online marketing options like PPC. Although an SEO expert greatly helps, some of the tasks such as link building and content creation can be done in-house without much expertise. It will increase sales without increasing marketing costs proportionately, but you have to be patient to realize the full benefits.
- Leveraging Social Sharing
If you are engaged in social media, SEO will play a critical role since content shared by users on social channels are directly related to such SEO parameters as Meta descriptions and Title tags. This is why posts and stories shared by your social media community are visible. SEO will help you control what people read, think and do on social media channels.
- Brand Building
Another way how dental SEO marketing can help your business is in branding. Building a strong brand in the competitive dental field is complex, chaotic, and costly. SEO helps your branding campaign since increased traffic means more people will see your site and are likely to come back and also tell their friends. SEO also helps in brand building since quality content will build trust and credibility.
- Targeted Traffic
SEO tactics like link building and local SEO help bring targeted traffic to your site. With SEO, you will be able to target the right demographic through the content displayed, attract the right geographical area through location-based long-tail keywords, address your audience’s problems and concerns, and build trust. This increases conversion rates.
You should combine SEO with other online marketing methods like PPC and Email marketing for the best results. Insist on White Hat SEO tactics to avoid Google penalties, including de-indexing of your site.
