As with any business, a dental practice needs to be marketed to get as many patients as it can. For years, dental practices have relied on traditional advertising methods such as ad spots on TV, radio and newspapers, or billboards and brochures.

The advent of the Internet, however, has provided dental practices a new option for getting the word out about their business. As a matter of fact, many dentists have already taken to creating their own website for their dental practice. That website, however, still needs to be marketed itself, and this is where search engine optimisation or SEO for dental practices comes in.

To run an SEO for dental practices campaign, a dental practice is going to need the assistance of an online marketing company that specializes in SEO. However, dental practices should be careful and discriminating about which online marketing services to engage.

Organic backlinks vs. artificial backlinks

There are SEO practitioners that charge exorbitant fees to conduct SEO for dental practices, but most of what they do is focused on providing backlinks artificially, which means they deliberately make attempts to post on as many websites—mainly blogs—as they can and provide a backlink to the site that they’re optimising, all without having to seek approval or permission from the webmaster. At the end of the day, SEO for dental practices that rely on artificial backlinks does not really work and may even put your site in a dangerous position.

When we perform SEO for dental practices here at Sharper Edge International, we take pains to get the links differently. Instead of artificial link building, we strive to provide our clients an organic link building service. Instead of us forcing backlinks to a client’s website on other websites, the owners of those websites themselves will be the ones who will post those links on their sites. In short, those backlinks will be developed naturally, which is always a much safer bet than artificial backlinks.

So how exactly does a dental practice website get other webmasters to voluntarily place backlinks to it? By putting up quality content, among other things.

The importance of quality content

When the content of a dental practice website is both informative and interesting, it’s only but natural for other webmasters to take notice of it and, more often than not, share it on their own sites by putting a link to that particular quality content. Also, with Google ranking individual web pages, posting more quality content will increase your chances of ranking in the search engine results pages are better.

Some website owners, however, mistake quality content for quantity of content, and add as much content as they can for the sake of adding content. Owners of dental practice websites must keep in mind that Google measures the time visitors spend on any one page of their websites. The logic for this is that if visitors spend more time on a page, then it must have quality content, and that will help that page rank better than its competitors.

Hyper-targeted keywords

Keyword analysis is also a major component of the service we provide to clients. When we come up with keywords for a client’s website, we make sure they are high-converting and hyper-targeted keywords. For instance, instead of just settling for, say, “dental surgery” as a keyword for a dental practice website, we use the more specific “dental surgery Sydney”. That’s because the latter leaves no room for doubt about what the searcher is looking for and where they can get that service. When we load a dental practice website with more hyper-targeted keywords that perfectly describe the kind of services it offers and where, the dental practice is bound to get more targeted inquiries that eventually convert into paying customers.

If you’re thinking about getting SEO for dental practices done on your website, give our services a try. We’ll help you make your online presence bigger and much more felt, resulting in more patients and greater level of success for your dental practice.