One of the biggest challenges in starting a new dental practice is finding new patients and convincing them to pick you over the other guys.
If you’re tired of spending a ton of money on paid advertising and if the direct mail approach isn’t working like you thought it would, it might be time to try local SEO for dentists.
How can dentists use local SEO to get more patients?
Local SEO is about more than ranking on Google. It’s about making it easy for potential patients to find your dental practice and schedule an appointment.
Here are a few ways that local SEO can help you win more business:
It Gives You Visibility
Local SEO helps your dental practice appear in search results for the same terms that potential patients are using.
Open up Google and type in “dentist near me” or “dentist in [CITYNAME]” and see if your practice comes up. If it doesn’t, you are missing out.
Think of it like being located on the busiest intersection of your city. Anybody who needs a dentist in your local area will know you exist.
It Build Trust
Your Google Business Profile is a place where you can display photos of your dental practice and have customers leave reviews.
This is a great way to build trust with potential patients and let people know what to expect when they visit you.
Imagine a potential patient landing on your profile and seeing a nice clean facility and tons of five star reviews. The chances of them moving forward and scheduling an appointment are much higher than they would be if you didn’t have a Google Business Profile at all.
It Lets You Display Your Contact Info
When you have a Google Business Profile, patients don’t have to click to your website and find the contact page. Your address, hours, and phone number will be displayed right there on the search page.
Patients can even pull up directions and dial your phone number with a single click or tap.
How To Find Your Local SEO Rating
Before you decide to invest in local SEO for your dental practice, you probably want to see how your site already ranks on Google.
Semrush has a great feature that lets you track local rankings. If you don’t have a Semrush account and don’t want to set one up, you can reach out to an SEO specialist and they will perform an SEO audit for you at little to no cost. You can also use Google Search Console for free but it won’t give all the data you are looking for.
If you do have a Semrush account, just follow these steps:
- Open the local listings report
- Enter your website URL
- View your listings report for a detailed analysis of local listings
Don’t be surprised if there is room for improvement. Local SEO takes work and the fact that you are reading this means you are on the right track to gaining more visibility.
Image courtesy of Semrush
10 Steps To Improve Your Local SEO Rating
As I mentioned, there is a lot of work that goes into Local SEO. It’s going to take patience and dedication to get where you want to be, but you will get there. I usually estimate about 3 months before you see results, but that can vary based on how much work needs to be done and how much competition you are up against.
I’ve broken my process down into 10 basic steps. But be aware that these steps can change based on factors such as the number keywords you want to target and the number of locations your business has.
- Claim your Google Business Profile
- Update your citations
- Perform a technical SEO audit of your website
- Identify your target keywords
- Improve your on-page SEO
- Check your schema mark up
- Start blogging
- Manage your online reputation
- Track results
- Make improvements
For more details about these individual steps, you can check out my 10-point local SEO checklist.
Let Patients Come To You!
If you’re tired of working so hard to find new patients for you dental practice, local SEO for dentists can help establish a (mostly) passive source of leads. Instead of spending a ton of money on paid advertising, you make it easy for patients to find you.
If you’re ready to get started with local SEO, get in touch today!
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