If you run a private dental practice, you’re not just a doctor whose goal is to help people and provide high-quality dental services. You’re also a business owner who has to deal with many challenges that come with building a successful practice on a daily basis. Of course, one of these challenges is attracting new customers. In the past, many dentists got new patients by word of mouth. But in today’s digital age, more and more people turn to the internet in search of medical providers, and dentists are not an exception. Thus, many dentists are now creating websites for their practices and looking for ways to find new patients online.
There are many ways a dentist or any other business owner can attract people to their website online. Some of the main methods include PPC ads, social media marketing and SEO. These methods are quite different in terms of their advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, PPC and social media ads give immediate results, as you will start getting website visitors the moment you start the ad campaign.
However, they are also very expensive and don’t provide any long-lasting results. You will only continue attracting new website visitors as long as you keep paying for ads. On the other hand, search engine optimisation or SEO methods usually take a few months to start showing results. At the same time, if you invest in SEO, your website will improve its positions in search results and keep them even if you stop optimisation efforts in the future. This will allow you to continue getting free traffic indefinitely. In the long run, investing in SEO is a much better option than paying huge sums of money for PPC or social media ads month after month. Plus, people will trust you much more if they find your website through organic search results instead of seeing an ad for your services.
But can dentists really attract new patients to their websites and practices using SEO? Yes! Let’s take a look at some numbers that prove this and review a couple of examples of dental websites that are getting huge amounts of traffic from search results thanks to SEO.
Search Demand for Dentists on Google
The above image shows Google search data on the term ‘dentist’. As you can see, people around the world search for the term dentist on average 1.3 million times per month. Around 603 thousand searches happen in the United States, 176 thousand in the United Kingdom, and 86 thousand in Canada. This means that there’s a huge amount of people looking for a dentist in your country every day. And by conducting search engine optimisation of your website, you can ensure that more people can find it from organic search results.
In addition, Google Trends shows a similar picture. The image above shows a steady increase in the popularity of the ‘dentist’ search term from 2004 until the present. This means that more and more people are searching for dental service providers online every year. Thus, if you hire an SEO company to promote your website in search results, you will be well-positioned to continue getting increasingly high ROIs for years to come, especially as PPC and social media ads become more competitive and expensive.
People Use Lots of Search Terms to Find Dentists
But ‘dentist’ is only one keyword. There are countless other search terms people use when looking for dental services. During the process of search engine optimisation, SEO experts analyse search demand and create pages that show up in Google search results and collect traffic. Here are just a few search queries people enter on Google when they need dental services:
- ‘Dentist near me’
- ‘Dentist in…’ + location. For example, ‘dentist east London’.
- ‘Dentist for…’ + group of people. For example, ‘dentist for children’.
- Descriptions of dental issues such as toothache and hundreds of others.
- Dental procedures such as dental fillings, cleaning, etc.
The images below show the average monthly search volume for different dentist-related keywords.
Other Dentists are Already Getting Results from SEO
Effective search engine optimisation can bring excellent results, helping the website show up higher in search results and potentially saving the website owner thousands of dollars on advertising every month. Below, we review some examples of dentist websites that are seeing a great return from their SEO efforts.
Our first example is www.mydentist.co.uk, an aggregator website that offers information about dentists working around the UK. This website has 212,000 average monthly visitors. These are people who visit this website after seeing it in Google search results.
At the same time, the site’s average monthly traffic value is around $221,000. This number shows how much money the website owner would have to spend per month to buy the same amount of traffic they get organically from contextual advertising systems such as PPC ads. This means that the website’s owners are able to save over $220,000 every month because their website has great positions in Google’s search results.
The screenshot below shows which pages bring the most traffic for this website.
As you can see, the pages shown in this list above collect a sizable amount of traffic. A good SEO expert can evaluate the pages currently present on your website and on competitor sites, optimise existing pages to help them attract more people, and create new pages that will collect as much organic search traffic as possible.
It may be natural to see great results with a large aggregator website, but what about a small private dental practice? Is SEO still a good investment? Our next example will show you that it is.
As we can see, even for a small website, the results are still promising. This London dental practice attracts an average of 800 organic website visitors per month and has a traffic value of around $1,800. London Dental Smiles is ranked highly on Google for the search term ‘London Dentist’ and many other keywords and is attracting significant traffic. This website gets $1,800 worth of free traffic from Google, meaning they can save this money they otherwise would have spent on PPC ads.
The critical factor to bear in mind is that PPC ads involve essentially buying traffic for money. So it follows that once you stop paying for ads, you stop getting traffic. However, with SEO, you will sustain your search positions and continue getting traffic even if you no longer use SEO services. By hiring an expert SEO agency and boosting your website’s rankings on Google, you can save yourself money and maintain your site’s traffic without having to fork out money on advertising channels such as PPC.
Now let’s consider which keywords this website shows up for:
Some of the keywords that bring the most traffic to these pages include ‘dentist London’ and procedures such as ‘apicetomy’ and ‘wisdom teeth removal’. This once again shows that there’s a huge range of keywords your website can use to collect free organic traffic on Google. All you need is the help of a qualified SEO agency to create, optimise and promote those pages.
Local SEO
Local SEO techniques are used to ensure that a website is shown to people who search for services in their local area. For instance, if you enter ‘dentist near me’ on Google, you will see websites run by dentists in your local area. Local SEO is very important for businesses offering services in-person. However, simply adding your website to Google My Business and putting its location on Google Maps won’t bring in as much traffic as you may want. Only comprehensive search engine optimisation of a website can help it show real results and rise in search engine rankings.
What Does an SEO Company Do?
While SEO is a great investment for dentists, achieving great results takes a lot of expertise, skill, and hard work. This is especially true for websites operating in the health and wellness fields. Google sets especially high standards for websites that sell products, provide services, or have content related to health and wellness to prevent low-quality websites from reaching the top positions in search results.
However, NUOPTIMA has been working with brands in the health and wellness industry for many years. Our experts have troves of experience doing SEO for medical and dental providers, clinics, companies selling supplements, etc. We know exactly what to do to get your website to show up on the first page of Google. Here are just a few of the things we can do to help improve your dental website’s Google rankings:
- Arrange the placement of links on reputable medical and dental websites.
- Create SEO-optimised content to help your website rank for more keywords on Google.
- Optimise existing pages to comply with Google’s rules and best practices.
- Create all the necessary pages to help your website collect as much organic traffic as possible.
Effective search engine optimisation can bring excellent results if done correctly by qualified professionals. At NUOPTIMA, we have a large SEO team packed with a lot of expertise that can help your website achieve great results. Book a free discovery call with our team today to explore how we can use SEO to achieve fantastic results for your website and business.
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