When it comes to how to attract new patients to your Dental practice, the days of turning to only offline advertisements are over. Today, 97% of consumers search online for local businesses including dentists. While other methods exist, a focus on Google, the search engine and online marketing powerhouse that dominates much of the digital world, does more to increase the flow of new patients and gets more of them through your clinic doors.
How to Get More Dental Patients – Start With a Powerful Website
With the vast majority of people in your geographic location using the internet, and especially mobile access, to search for dental offices, you need to create a strong online platform. A quality website does more than display basic information about the office and dentists that provide services there. Learn how to increase patient flow in dental clinic businesses with the inclusion of these must-have website features.
Stylish, Modern, and Responsive Pages
Dental offices focus on cleanliness and the latest technology and systems. Your website should reflect those ideas. Keep up-to-date with style options, and always ensure pages load quickly. Responsivity matters as this ensures proper display on smaller smartphone and tablet screens.
Simple, User-Friendly Navigation
Potential patients do not come to a dental website to read long blocks of text. Make it easy to find what they need to know with an obvious, understandable menu.
Details! About the Dentists, Hours of Operation, and Services
A dental website turns visitors into patients with the proper information. Reveal facts about the dentist, when you offer appointments, and what dental services are provided so visitors can make informed choices.
Use Organic SEO Methods to Fuel Ongoing Traffic
No matter what design you choose, include proper search engine optimization techniques to increase traffic flow to the dental website. Organic SEO is the ultimate answer to the question of how to get more patients for dental office success. While the full range of techniques could fill a book, these are the most basic and effective:
- Research high-volume, low-competition keyword phrases
- Use these keywords in page title and meta description
- Focus on keywords in headlines, sub-headlines, alt tags and content
- Optimize site for speed and clean code
- Create an effective internal linking strategy
- Increase backlinks to the site from high domain authority and preferable, highly-relevant, industry-related external sites
Related: Off-Page SEO vs On-Page SEO: What’s the Difference?
Increase Patients With Local SEO for Your Dental Office
As powerful as organic dental SEO efforts are to improve site traffic and convert interested visitors to leads, a geographically-specific business like a dentist’s office requires local SEO as well. People search for their next dentist from their phones today while they are picking kids up from school, on their lunch break at work, or anytime they have a few minutes to themselves. Local SEO positions your site to pop up in Google Maps, Bing Maps and Apple Maps when they use the all-important “near me” keyword modifier and other targeted keywords they’re using to find a new dentist.
In many ways, local SEO does not differ from organic optimization practices. The main focus is still on using keyword phrases to push your site into prominence on the search engines. The methods differ, however, and there are additional steps you have to take. A local SEO expert will help.
Find Location-Based Keywords
Just as you would research to figure out if “teeth whitening dentist” or “dental tooth whitening” would work better for your website’s search engine positioning, you should also find the most powerful location terms. These could include the province, city, town, neighbourhood, or even the postal code. If you’re in the United States, you swap out state and zip code for province and postal code, respectively.
Claim Your Google My Business Page
As Google owns their My Business pages, they rank higher than competing directories on that search engine and usually the Maps results are above the organic results. Fill out everything, verify your business identity, and select the best category: dentists. Take note of the particular name, address, and phone number (NAP) you use here, and make sure it is 100% accurate.
Get More NAP-Consistent Citations Linked Back to Your Dental Website
Use exactly the same NAP everywhere your dental office pops up online. Citations come from data aggregator, high-quality, relevant directories for dentists, medical & health care providers, regional businesses in addition to the country & industry-agnostic sites that everyone should be on like Facebook, YouTube, Yelp, Yellow Pages and more.
Focus on Boosting Reviews to Attract New Patients to Your Dental Practice
While Google My Business offers an excellent platform for reviews, other major directories like Yelp and HealthGrades also improve traffic. Nudge current patients to leave honest feedback or a review on these sites. They will not only improve local SEO, but more people search online reviews before choosing a local business than anything else.
Invest in Google Ads Get More Dental Patients
It costs money to have a professional dental website designed and to hire SEO experts for both organic and local SEO services. However, they frequently do not involve ongoing expenses. When you want to know how to increase patient volume in a dental office, however, it makes sense to invest in more specifically targeted advertisements.
The Google Ads program has the potential to speed up the process of gaining local traffic to a dentist’s office or clinic considerably. While it may not increase SEO, it still uses targeted keyword phrases to drive site visitors. This pay-per-click (PPC) advertising method pushes searchers to click on the link to your site more than they would for random results somewhere down the search engine page.
Discover and Use Stronger Keywords
Local or service-specific keyword research still uses high-traffic, low-volume phrases, but now you can analyze results data from PPC campaigns to isolate the most effective over time. This reduces the money you waste on non-performing keywords.
Get to Know Your Targeted Traffic
Collecting data is a huge part of the Google Ads system. This helps you drive more traffic to your dental website not only through improved PPC ads but also when using your traditional SEO methods. Google offers both “Audience Insights” and a comprehensive keyword efficacy report.
Do You Want to Get More Dental Patients for Your Office?
If you’re reading this, of course you want to attract more Dental Patients to your practice. Just as maintaining or achieving a healthy, attractive smile takes more than one treatment or service, effective online marketing of a dental clinic websites takes more than one method. A clever, well-researched, and ongoing effort that combines an up-to-date website, content creation, both organic and local SEO, and the power of Google Ads will deliver the results you want and need for ongoing success. Like several other dental practices, hire an SEO Consultant that can do all of the above, and begin achieving triple-digit returns and boosting production.
The post How to Get More Dental Patients For Your Office appeared first on Trevor Tynes, SEO Consultant.
