After helping Armadale Dental in Markham, Crossways Dental in Barrie, Archer Dental in Toronto, and Dr Ralhan’s two locations in Oakville and Burlington, I know a thing or two about SEO for dentists, and how to increase search-presence for dental clinic websites. In truth, I’m pretty good at it. Keep reading, and I will outline some of the things I’ve learned.
I tell my Humber students that good SEO practitioners trick Google into indexing their client’s web pages higher in SERPs by doing exactly what the search giant wants.
Most of the digital marketing agencies helping medical practitioners in Toronto today do not know how to do SEO for dentists. It shocks me when I see high-quality original content wasted in dentist’s social channels, and when I read well-written and informative articles in online lifestyle magazines with links to terrible dental clinic websites which are thin style-over-substance vessels of no repute. They have shallow pages, and what little copy they do present is rife with tiny errors. Very often, if you spot a curious line of text, you can easily cut & paste that byte into Google and find the originating website from which it was taken. I shake my head; they have it all backwards. Indeed, most dental clinic websites are template driven and exist entirely without original content (that’s because it’s hard to write original content for dentists, and it can be expensive, because there are legal implications). The best practice is to build incredibly useful pages that are beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, and yet filled with good information that keeps people reading and clicking and doing things, and taking actions. If I had to give an example, I would cite the teeth whitening page I made on Archer Dental ca which was the root of a well integrated content marketing campaign that brought bloggers into the Archer Dental Rosedale clinic for a whitening service.
Here’s the connecting teeth whitening post by Laura Bilotta, AM640 Radio Host and the boss of Single in the City. We also did Wedding Girl, and Cynthia Menard the 2017 Miss World Canada, and I wrote an article for View the Vibe detailing five different professional teeth whitening systems currently available in Toronto. Afterwards we created micro blogs and got social around incoming links direct to the page. We optimized the on-page experience and the anchor text of the links for ‘teeth whitening + Toronto’ and, after three guests, we succeeded, one whole year later. The freshly renovated page climbed up the index from position 28 to its current resting place on pg1 where we connect with the latent demand of approximately 700 search queries for ‘teeth whitening Toronto’ per month. For the first year as we were doing the campaign, we stayed atop pg2 in the search results and only briefly appeared on pg1 now and then (we had The SEO Ride – read my previous post). But today, one year later, the Archer Dental teeth whitening page is now consistently found in the middle of pg1. Yes, it took a whole year to happen. But that is the best practice for making better search results; we made a page that truly deserves to be found on pg1 of Google ca for its focus search term.
SEO for Dentists has two operating theaters. Organic search traffic to dentists can be divided into two categories, local and specialty services. Some visitors will try the dentist’s site seeking a local solution, while another group come looking for specific services. What about the people who visit the site by searching the dental clinic’s name? That is not a true organic search, but more like a lazy direct-visit. All the same, in my experience that does account for at least 30% of the organic search volume, as people are lazy (and or they may not know if its dot ca, or com, or net?). People Googling the name is a mark of brand strength in the marketplace and while it’s not an SEO factor, it could indirectly measure the strength of your social media or your print media campaigns.
Local Search – According to SEMRush com, the keyword query ‘Toronto + dentist’ is searched 4400 times per month, and I can say with some pride that Archer Dental ca is currently found in position #4 for that search (organic results). Now you might wonder if that is the largest locally modified dentist-related search term in Canada? It is not. Both ‘dentist + Edmonton’ and ‘dentist + Calgary’ are twenty percent larger at 5400 and 5600 searches per month, respectively. How is that possible, as both these cities are only half the size? The answer is because Toronto has more and better-known neighbourhoods which are place names which become more specific geography search terms when seeking dentists. For example, the Junction + dentist, Church St dentist, Little Italy dentist and even downtown Toronto + dentist are big search terms here. The secret to ranking higher for ‘place name + dentist’ is to make trust within that local community. Get people reading and using the content on your pages with the place name in the Page Title and the h1 header and or sub headers. Make highly usable local flavoured stories for your blog too. How? Write up something real and important that really happened and be the authority on the local subject. What exactly? One idea may be to set up a booth at a local community events fair just so you can blog about it afterwards and be the conduit for the local news that other folks will share and curate. If you sponsor a local hockey team, as many dental clinics do, then make the blog the news conduit and encourage regular readership by writing authentic reports of the games. BUT be sure to show your logo on the jerseys and get some dental keywords in the content too. (Target of opportunity = emergency dentist, LOL) The dental administrators themselves could share photos and blurbs from the dental blog media on the office Facebook and Pinterest pages. The more local and niche specific the info is, the more valuable and sharable it will be within the community you’re targeting.
For example, when Archer Dental launched their Little Italy clinic, we seized the opportunity to have a party during the Little Italy St Festival so we could blog about it. I made the photos of a wandering mariachi band the blog post’s featured image. Connecting that image and the cultural relevance of that occasion to the business formalizes the relationship by the simple act of hundreds of people staying 2.3 mins to read the story and look at the pictures and visit the location page through the internal link. Usability is the biggest ranking factor and the strongest signal to Google that this business is a relevant search result for ‘little Italy dentist’. It worked and is still working today. Despite there being over two dozen dental offices on College st alone, and over a hundred dentists in that area, and despite Archer Dental being less than a year old in that location, the Archer Dental website ranks high on pg1 for ‘Little Italy dentist’ queries today.
Dental Service Search Terms
After locally modified searches, the second source category encompassing almost all other organic search traffic is dental service terms. Specialty services are popular, but also generic anatomy and symptom-driven queries. Teeth whitening, cavity filling, root canal surgery costs are among the biggest service terms, but all of these have long tail isotopes, and some are quite significant. For example, teeth whitening + pain (sensitivity, bleeding, sore) etc. Ranking higher for these long tail terms is a function of making long pages – make highly usable, ‘high functioning’ webpages that are all about the service itself and detail all nuances. Position these popular queries as sub headers especially when you have the perfect original picture or text blurb or quote or some hard-to-source data specific to the condition etc.
Make better dental website pages. Do not copy & paste from other websites and whenever possible do not use stock photos but rather try to snap high quality original pictures (especially for the blog stories) to demonstrate visually that your dentist is the expert service provider. The dentist should not be afraid to show their faces on their websites as trust is key and putting a face to the name is critical to forming a bond between the would-be patient and practitioner.
Take the information and make it actionable and worth bookmarking; for example, instead of listing symptoms include remedies and tips. Include all the Add This and Social Share buttons and share the pages yourself on your Facebook page. *not all at once, but over time so other people react positively and LIKE it.
What SEO tricks can dentists NOT do?
This curious picture is set forth deliberately small so you the reader will want to click it and make it expand. Do it – this tactic increases usability on the page.
Dentists in Ontario cannot issue coupons, run contests or advertise discount services or write the words ‘best dentist’ on their websites as doing this would contravene advertising and marketing guidelines set forth by the RCDSO. Yet ‘best dentist Toronto’ is a coveted search term. So how does one target the ‘best dentist’ and ‘top dentist’ search terms without writing these words anywhere on your dental clinic website? There are still ways… that cannot be spoken of here.
Terms of Service: While dentists can ask their patients for authentic reviews on RateMDs, OpenCare, Yelp, and on Google itself, in each and every case there are specific Terms of Service legal forms which, if you read the fine print, expressly forbid any gaming of their user submitted location reviews. So, dentists cannot ask for good reviews or suggest kind words or offer any rewards for positive testimonials. This becomes important when you see some social marketing service providers offer to leave positive reviews for practitioners … Well danger, danger, if they have not been sniffed out yet by the rate & recommend website managers then they will be discovered tomorrow and when they go down in scandal their dust cloud will cover their previous clients in a very sticky shame that will be hard to erase and forever limit trust.
Local Search results, even more than organic search results, thrive on Trust.
How Dentists Make Trust? (for SEO)
Original images go a long ways toward making Trust, and photo aggregators can send traffic to the site over long periods of time.
Making trust is a three-step process. It’s all about making great pages offering usable solutions that are shared and cited. One, two, three.
1. Make highly usable pages. Add graphics and pictures-that-expand-when-clicked. Add prices and describe procedures, make actionable lists and answer FAQs.
2. Make it possible to share the content and share it yourself. I started and Flickr and I even offer new stories on CanadianContent dot net and Rabble when they are political. There is a push by the NDP to make dental coverage part of our universal healthcare and that is a story worth posting on Reddit.
3. Get incoming links direct to the freshly fixed up pages from all types of media and especially from local reviews directories that are busy and important places online. Streamline the NAPs – make sure each and every name, address, phone number listing matches perfectly with what you have on site and in Google Places, or now it’s called Google my Business or now its just Google com / business (GMB).
Build Local Citations: The dentist who obsesses over their reviews will constantly search their business names and this has the bi-product of streamlining their citations. While they cannot change the user submitted testimonials, they can respond. But more importantly, they should have keen eyes and make sure that every single ‘citation site’ Yelp, Facebook, RateMDs etc has the same name, address and phone numbers listed – exact match. That conformity builds trust among the cache bots and will result in the location being pinned in more and wider local searches.
To make pretty pages filled with original content that is highly usable is the hardest and most expensive thing on the list. If you do a Google search now for a specific dental service or niche search term you will see the pg1 results on Google are all well-written and attractive, well executed pages on the subject. If you stay longer than two minutes and click around examining other pages and click-to-call or interact with the chat bot than your visit too will be adding to the positive usability score, and will, very-minutely affect the rankings of the site. As would a ‘bounce’ by-the-way; if you searched a term, visited a site offering a solution but then left promptly, that would, on a granular level be a negative indicator that the site fails to satisfy searchers for that topic. With this being the ultimate metric now used by the Google Organic Search Algorithm, there is no workaround; websites listed on pg1 of Google for a search on any given topic by and large generally deserve to be found there.
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