Dental Clinic SEO: Off-site Search Engine Optimization For Dentists

Dental Clinic SEO is critical for getting new leads and patient inquiries from your website. In order to optimize your dental clinic website, you need to consider both on-page and off-page techniques. On-page is usually concerned with optimizing on your website itself. This includes SEO-friendly URLs, keywords phrases used in your dental content, images, header tags, internal links, and others. Most businesses place too much emphasis on the on-page SEO elements and in the process neglect the off-page elements. Off-page SEO refers to changes made to enhance your SERPs outside your website. Both on-page and off-page are equally instrumental in optimizing a website and enhancing its rank on SERPs. If you’ve never used off-page optimization, then here are some best off-page SEO techniques for your dental website.

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Social Networking Sites

Social media is not only useful in creating a large follower base and engaging with them but also from SEO perspective too. How? When you have social media pages for your dental clinic, it allows you to share your content to your followers. So when your followers click on your content, they will be directed to your dental website. As a result, your web traffic increases. Simultaneously, if your followers like or share your content, then it becomes visible to their friends or followers who may also visit your website. Therefore, creating your profiles on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others can be beneficial to increase traffic. Additionally, it also helps you get more backlinks.

Forum Postings

Participate in search forums by interacting on topics related to dentistry. If there’s any community that talks about dentistry or dental services, then make a connection with that community and join them. Also, there will be people asking some questions related to dental issues. You can reply to their answers and give your suggestions. Now you might wonder how it will help in SEO. The catch here is that when you answer their questions, you can provide a link to your website below your answer. The link has to be something related to what you are talking about. For example, a person asks a question regarding root canal treatment and its expenses. Now you can answer by explaining to him about processes of root canal treatment and provide a link to your root canal service page for more detailed information. This way you genuinely provide information without unnecessarily providing your website link. Use “Do-Follow” Forums so that you can include a link to your dental site within your signature. This way it allows search engines to crawl your site easily. Some popular forums you can use are Flickr Forum, Chronicle Forum, Dentistry Forum and others.

Search Engine Submission

One of the ways to let search engines know that you exist is by submitting your website to them. Once you’ve submitted your website to search engines, it speeds up the process of your dental website getting listed on search results quickly. The submission here means listing your dental website to some popular search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN, and others. Moreover, this listing is available for free.

Directory Submission

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Directory submission increases the likelihood of more people seeing your dental website. There are multiple general directories you can choose from but it is recommended that you submit your website to niche directories like Dentist Directory Canada. Once your directory has been selected, choose the category for your submission. The category can be based on the area of operations or the dental services you provide. With directory submission, you build quality backlinks to your website. The results may take some time to show but it’s worth investing your time in directory submission.

Social Bookmarking

The content on social bookmarking websites updates frequently. Therefore, search engines bots often visit these websites. Use social bookmarking to promote your dental website by properly handling tags so that your dental content can be broadcasted to a large network. The wider the reach, the more people will visit your website. Some popular bookmarking websites you can use are StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, and Delicious.

Article Submission

Share your dental articles on some famous article directory like Ezine, Go Articles, and others. Not only you get traffic to your website but also help you get some links from other people. However, you need to create quality content so that people read your article and provide backlinks to your website. If you are not able to create unique and high-quality content, then take help of a professional firm who will write dental articles on your behalf.

Link Baiting

Links are a critical part of SEO as there is a direct correlation between quality and quantity of links and the ranking of your dental website. You need to have both internal as well as external links. Now, when it comes to external links, your content has to be so good that other websites want to link to your website. For this purpose, you can create unique content or include reports and research in your content. Another way to get external links is by requesting other website owners to link to your website. Likewise, you can also link to their website provided they have valuable content and in return ask them to do the same.

Local Listing

For a small dental clinic, it makes sense to concentrate on the local area and then expand to other areas as your business grows. In addition, it is difficult to compete in the global market with large competitors in the initial stages. Hence, make your dental website local so that search engines can view your website and fetch the content. In this way, a person from your local area looking for content related to dentistry can easily find you. Moreover, since your clinic is located closer to his place of residence, he will be interested in opting for your services over others. Therefore, do local listing by submitting your website to Google Maps for business listings, Google Local, Superpages, Yellow Pages and other local listing websites.

Image and Video Sharing

If you have images that you have created for your website, then share them on some major photo sharing websites. Flickr, Google Photos, Photo Bucket are some popular photo sharing websites. Ensure you optimize your images with correct URL, title tag, description and alt tag before you submit your image. If people like your images, then they will comment on it or even follow a link to your site. Thus, it increases traffic to your website.

Just like images, if you have developed any videos, then upload and share them as well. Video sharing websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and Metacafe can be very useful for people to view and share your content. Provide a proper title, description, tags and reference links to your dental website when you upload them. If people find your videos valuable, then they will comment and share it with others thus, allowing you to get more backlinks and drive traffic to your website.

Now that you are aware of some best off-page SEO techniques, use them to enhance your SEO efforts. Apart from the above-mentioned off-page SEO techniques, you can also write business reviews, consider blogging or use social shopping network (if you sell dental products on ecommerce websites) as well. However, do not use all of these techniques at the same time. Work on the ones that you can do initially and then start with others. Similarly, it is not necessary to follow all these techniques and it depends on what is working for your website and what is not. If you need any help, then contact a specialized SEO firm to help you optimize your dental website and get more clients for you.

Other blogs on medical clinic marketing:

Medical Clinic Marketing: How to grow your email list for your medical clinic?

Landing pages for Dental Clinics