Maximizing Your SEO
The baseline of almost any new patient acquisition is having a good website and sometimes that means making sure Google is able to find it. To understand how to make your website more visible to Google, I’m going to get a bit into the Marketing/SEO weeds for this week’s blog!
In my practice, I’m running a little SEO experiment to see if a combination of a landing page and Google My Business will help boost our rank for generic keywords such as “Dentist + <City>”.
In my case, it’s “Dentist in San Diego”. This is an extremely difficult and expensive keyword to rank in such a large city. (I’m competing with literally 1,000+ other dental clinics.)
What I’ve traditionally done is format our SEO to rank for specific keywords for procedures that we WANT TO BE KNOWN FOR, not just our practice. For example, our site ranks high for specific keywords like “TMJ Dentist” or “How Much is a Crown in San Diego”. However, for keywords like “San Diego Dentist”, we’re #13 and we don’t even show up on mobile or maps. Maybe it’s because I’m too frugal to spend a lot of money on expensive keywords, who knows. I also don’t want to fill our “major heading” tags with “San Diego Dentist” and insert that keyword in text that won’t make sense.
Side note: If you haven’t already jumped on Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), then you’re absolutely missing out. Google of course will prioritize businesses that have a profile built in, and customers are more likely to click on your GBP profile than your own website.
How often do you search for a restaurant, find the google profile, click on it, and get directions or make a call? Now ask yourself…how often do you visit the restaurant web page? Probably not often.
Get on there, set up your profile, and upload photos, add a services menu, etc etc. Go wild.
Getting Up to Speed
Now, here’s the experiment–I heard that it’s not ideal to just link to your homepage, but instead link to a landing page that summarizes your offering and answers questions that people are commonly searching for. So what I did was create a landing page with the “major heading” tags as San Diego Dentist and “secondary sub-heading” tags as Dentist in San Diego. Two terms that I would never really use on my home page because it looks corny. I also set the page name to /dentist-san-diego to hopefully rank for that term. This landing page should be simple, utilize a list, and have your contact information and map easily accessible.
Here’s an example of ours: https://dentaldesignsd.com/dentist-san-diego
I used the accordion feature in Squarespace in hopes that Google will read it as a list. If it doesn’t pick it up, I’ll change it up to see if it improves things. People also search for how much things cost, so I suggest adding pricing (I will shortly), and also add an “Office Fees Page”. Our Office Fees page is the 3rd most visited site on our domain.
I’ll be tracking this closely, and my goal is to break into the top 5 with the keyword “Dentist in San Diego”. In all things, I’m watching the data and letting the data tell me what is going to work. So let’s see what happens!