To properly market your practice, you need better SEO services. You probably have read all there is to know about SEO and even come across contradicting information. If you want your practice to be more competitive online in order to lure more customers in, there are a number of simple strategies you need to adapt in search engine optimization. The purpose of this post is to help you get started on the right foot when it comes to search engine optimization. Hence, we are sharing the best dental SEO techniques you can bank on for 2017 and beyond with actionable steps that will bring guaranteed results to your business.
Dental SEO Techniques for improved brand positioning on search engines as a dentist in 2017.
Audit your site
The most important step when trying to optimize your website is fixing all the bad SEO in both your website and your content. Most websites fail to rank well because they lack perfect SEO. This could have happened because you hired the wrong agency that did shoddy work in both crafting your website and creating your content. Now that you are serious about boosting your ranking, your first steps have to be identifying the problems and fixing them.
Below are some of the things you need to audit and fix:
- Bad content
You need to inspect your website for duplicate or unoriginal web content. Having the same content as another website will greatly impact your ranking. You risk getting your website banned. Delete the duplicate content. Second, you have to inspect your content for keyword stuffing. If there are too many keywords in your content and many grammatical errors, you need to fix that or even delete the content.
- Update the links and the 404 page
Broken links equate to bad SEO. You need to check all your links and make sure that your website does not have any broken links. You also need to make sure that the links point to where they are supposed to. The 404 page has to be updated to reduce the negative impacts of 404 errors. You have to improve the 404 page that loads up whenever a client on your dental website clicks on a link that is broken.
- Structural elements
The structural elements of your website, which include images, URLs, titles, CSS and tags among other things will impact your ranking. You can hire a professional to help examine the structural elements of your website.
Acquire great backlinks
Now that you have fixed most of the errors on your website, the second thing you need to do is to work hard to get good backlinks to your website. High quality backlinks will do wonders to your SEO. Link building is considered to be the most important part of dental SEO.
When it comes to link building, you have to be familiar with the practices that have been banned by Google. They include, but are not limited to the following:
- Selling or buying links
- Excessive exchange of links
- Links from low quality directory sites
- Forum comments that have optimized links in the signature
When you want high quality links, it is imperative that you use approved strategies. The key to great backlinks is creating good content that other webmasters will want to link to. You can use the following tips in link building:
- Set up and maintain a blog with high quality content.
- Back up your ideas by adding numbers and statistics in your content
- Do not fear covering controversial topics since controversy equates to conversation
- Publish the breaking news that people search for as well as create long term overviews that will still be relevant for months.
Time your social media posts
The social media has proven to be one of the most reliable platforms you can use to market your products and services at a cost effective way. What is even better is that the platform allows you to be more intimate with your audience. All in all, not everyone that turns to this option succeeds. This is simply because timing is everything.
As a dentist, you can use the social media to reach out to both patients and prospects. However, for the strategy to work, you have to learn when to post for maximum effectiveness.
The best time to post is on weekdays from 1pm to 4pm. Avoid posting over the weekends or before 8am or after 8pm. The perfect time to post is at 3pm every Wednesday.
On Twitter, you can post between 1pm and 3pm from Monday to Thursday. The worst time to post is after 8pm and after 3pm on Fridays. The sweet spot is from 9am to 3pm from Monday to Thursday.
- Google+
The best time to post on Google+ is every day from 9am to 10am. Do not post in early mornings and evenings. Wednesday at 9am is the sweet spot.
For LinkedIn, the best time to post is during the day from Tuesday to Thursday. Don’t post on Mondays and Fridays. You should also not post from 10pm to 6am.
It is important to note that you can post at any time. The trick is to know when your audiences are online. However, you should not ignore the data on when most people are online on different social networks.
Make your website faster
How long does it take for your website to load up? If it takes longer than 5 seconds, there is a very good chance that you are dealing with high bounce rates. To boost your rankings and increase traffic to your website, you have to speed it up. There are several tools available online that will help test the Page Speed of your website. Your website has to load superfast on both desktops and mobile devices.
Optimize for local search
One thing you cannot afford to ignore when it comes to SEO for dentists is failing to optimize for local searches. The trick here is to increase your practices in local visibility. Optimizing for local SEO is the best way to drive more traffic to your website.
These points will surely help you get started in the right way when trying to optimize your website. However, if you ever feel incapable of driving more traffic to your website, never hesitate to work with an expert.
Ben Anderson is a SEO expert offering dental SEO services to clients in California. He takes pride in helping dentists excel in their practice. When not busy, he loves spending time on his blog sharing tips on SEO.
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