Welcome to our Dental SEO series. In this series we’re going to demystify a lot of the confusion dentists have around SEO, show you why some dental websites rank better than others and what you can do to improve the ranking of your practice on Google in order to attract more patients.

The motivation behind these videos is that we’ve seen a lot of dentists take a crack at doing SEO either by themselves or by hiring someone they know. They throw a bunch of time and money at it, see little-to-no results, and then become frustrated and declare that “SEO doesn’t work!” and that’s really unfortunate because if you do SEO well it can be one of the strongest drivers of new patients for your practice.

Our goal with these videos is to help dentists better understand what SEO is, how it actually works today, how to do it correctly, and how to do the type of SEO that doesn’t just get you a bunch of website clicks, but actually brings patients into the practice.

So let’s get started. This series is going to be broken up into 4 sections.

In other words, what are people in your area actually looking for when it comes to dentistry? What should you focus your time and effort on? What will drive the best results in terms of new patients and quality of patients?

The most common reason dentists don’t see results with SEO is that there is never really a plan before they start, they end up wasting a lot of time and money trying to rank for a ton of different keywords that were never going to generate any return-on-investment.

How do you change your website design and content in order to be more relevant and rank better for the types of dental services that people in your area are looking for.

This is the topic many dentists know about but also the one that has the most misconceptions and we constantly see dentists use old and outdated strategies that not only don’t work, but they haven’t worked for many years.

To rank well on Google you need to go beyond just what content you have on your website, you need to look at how credible Google thinks you are compared to other dentists from the outside.

For example, you may offer dental implants or Invisalign and have content on your website about those services.. but so do dozens of other dentists in your area. Your website authority is going to determine whether Google trusts you more than the other guys and promotes you as the top choice for that service in your area.

It doesn’t do you much good if you get 1,000 clicks to your website but the phone never rings. You need butts in the chair for your practice to succeed. You can have the best SEO in the world that attracts thousands of potential patients to your website, but once they get to your website if those patients aren’t impressed with what they see, if they are left with a feeling of “this dentist doesn’t look like they are anything special” then guess what… most of those patients are not going to call you. They’re going to call your competitor down the street.