SEO for Dental Clinics: Best Practices and Its Importance

In this era, digital marketing is a method to reach all business sectors, including health. Currently, many health agencies have websites as one of their digital marketing strategies.

For those of you who have health facilities, such as a dental clinic, using SEO services can be part of your digital marketing effort. The following article will explain some of the best practices and the importance of SEO for dental clinics. Immediately, see the full explanation below.

The Importance of SEO for Dental Clinics

SEO is a flexible and promising marketing strategy for any business, including dental clinics. According to data from HubSpot, around 5.6 billion people use Google to perform certain searches every day.

Basically, SEO is a strategy that can help your website appear on the first page of the SERP. If you are able to develop a good SEO strategy for dental clinics, this has the potential to bring in new patients to your clinic.

Having a website is indeed a good step for your dental clinic. However, if the website does not appear on the SERP start page, then the user will switch to competitors who appear on the search engine start page.

SEO helps you beat your competitors with long-term business benefits.

Best Practices to Improve SEO for Dental Clinics

After knowing the importance of SEO for dental clinics, now is the time to find out what the best practices are that can be used to improve business strategies on your website. Here is the full explanation.

1. Make Title Tags Concise and Accurate

One of the best practices for improving SEO for dental clinics is to make the title tags concise and accurate. The title tag is an element that can identify a website page.

In most cases, the title tag is displayed as the main clickable link on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Optimizing the title tag is very important because the title tag is the most visible element of a website page.

Make the title tag concise and accurate, and be able to explain why the user should click on the page. Apart from that, you can also include the main keyword in the title tag and add the name of your dental clinic. Here are the following examples:

Natural Ingredients for Toothache Relief - My Dental Clinic

2. Give ALT Tags for Each Image

It is important for you to provide relevant alt tags and describe each image on your website page. Broadly speaking, alt tags have two main uses for search engine optimization.

First, search engines do not have the ability to detect or read an image. Therefore, the use of alt tags is necessary to provide an overview of the context of the image on search engines. Don't forget to include one of the targeted keywords in the alt tag of each image.

Secondly, alt tags help people with disabilities access your website properly. In general, a blind person uses a screen reader to access search engines.

Providing alt tags to each image can help screen readers describe the image verbally to visually impaired people. 

3. Monitor Your Website with Google Search Console

Monitoring website activity using Google Search Console is also one of the best ways to practice SEO for dental clinics.

By connecting your website to Google Search Console, you can analyze which queries are generating the most traffic to your website.

From the data obtained, you can then identify new keywords to use in future content. Apart from Google Search Console, you can also use Google Analytics to analyze every activity on the website.

4. Keyword Research & Create Educational Content About Dental Health

Keyword research is one of the most crucial elements of an SEO strategy. The keywords that have been researched will later be placed in the content on your website. This is done to make it easier for users to find your website through search engines.

Long-tail keywords can also help you win SERPs because they are in high demand but have little competition. To do keyword research, you can take advantage of several free tools, such as Ahrefs's Keyword Generator and Google's Keyword Planner.

Apart from keyword research, create educational content about dental health. Make search engines understand that the niche of your website is dental health, with educational and quality content. This is important to do because you are developing an SEO strategy for dental clinics as part of a digital marketing effort.

5. Install SEO Plugins

Good news for those of you who build websites using WordPress. One way to increase your website's ranking in the SERPs is to maximize the use of SEO plugins.

WordPress has many SEO plugins, among which are Yoast SEO and SEO Press. By using a WordPress plugin, you can produce quality content that complies with SEO rules.

6. Maximizing the Use of Meta Descriptions

The meta description is the short paragraph that appears below the page title on the search results page, or SERP. Broadly speaking, the meta description does not directly affect the ranking of your website.

However, this will affect your website's click-through rate, also known as CTR.

Maximize the use of meta descriptions by making them neither too short nor too long. At least the meta description requires around 155 characters so that it is not shortened on the SERP and can be read in full by the user.

Describe many things about your dental clinic, and don't forget to use a call to action, or CTA, when creating a meta description sentence.

7. Build A Mobile-Friendly Website

Building a website that is friendly for mobile device users is also one of the best practices to improve your SEO strategy for dental clinics. According to data from Google, around 60% of users access search engines using mobile devices.

This then becomes one of the reasons why Google likes a website that prioritizes the convenience of mobile device users. In fact, sites that manage to rank early in the SERPs are mobile-friendly sites.

Building a mobile-friendly website is quite easy, especially if you use a content management system like WordPress.

Thus, the guideline about best practices and the importance of SEO for dental clinics. Use SEO services to help you develop a more detailed and measurable SEO strategy for your own dental clinic. By establishing an SEO strategy for a dental clinic website, you will get long-term business benefits.