Off-page SEO techniques for dental clinic websites

In a nutshell, off-page SEO includes all the efforts that you make beyond your dental clinic website that boosts the website rank in the search results. If you think link building or getting numerous backlinks to your website is the only off-page SEO techniques for dental websites, then you are overlooking countless off-page SEO tactics that provide exorbitant web rankings. Some off-page SEO strategies are as follows:

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Claim and Optimize Listings and Directories

The foremost thing you must focus is acquiring your listing on popular directories and listings. There is a plethora of online directories and listings where you can list your dental clinic and be available for your searchers. People often fail to understand the importance of various free and paid listings available for their businesses to claim. Claiming and optimizing your dental business listing in directories and listings can increase traffic to your website, and attract more customers. These listings will feature the business profiles along with contact details of local dentists. This provides quicker access to the contact information. Even if you have an excellent website, if you don’t create profiles on local listings and directories, you will miss out on a major chunk of your potential customers. 

To optimize your local listings, add every crucial information after claiming the listing. Right from your dental clinic’s name to the contact information and the hours of service, feed in every information. Add your website in the specified field, and this will act as a backlink for your dental website. Select the right category on listings and directories so that both, online users, as well as search engines, can understand what your clinic specializes in. Add a compelling summary of your dental clinic with correct keywords so that the listing can appear higher in SERPs for relevant searches. According to the Local Consumer Review Survey done in 2017, 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Therefore, encourage your existing customers to rate and review your dental clinic as this will increase the credibility of your clinic amongst potential clients.

Use Link Building Opportunities

Links or backlinks are a primary ranking factor in Google. Here are some outstanding link building opportunities that have immense proven results.

Start Guest Posting

Guest posting or blogging is considered to be the most effective way to generate quality dofollow backlinks to websites. When you post your blogs on relevant dental websites and resources, it improves your SEO without getting any negative rankings on search results. Guest blogging not only helps in link building or getting traffic to your website but also positions you as a dental industry expert. So, collect a list of all dental websites that accept guest posts. Go to SimilarWeb, and enter the domain of that site where you want to write a guest post to understand the site’s popularity. You can even use blog social analyzer, and submit the RSS feed to know the number of social shares of the website posts. Pick the most popular websites and start writing blogs for them.

Participate in Q&A’s

SEO experts like Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, etc. have been using different question and answer channels and conversation communities to boost their visibility. It’s undoubtedly one of the best ways to improve traffic to your dental website. Join Q&A websites and communities such as Quora, Mind the Book, Amazon’s Askville, LinkedIn Answers, Answers.com, and many more, and search for dental topics on them. Give clear answers to relevant topics and link them with one of your blogs or web pages. Providing links in the answers will help direct more traffic to your website.

Social Media Posts

Another backlinking opportunity is the use of social media channels. Whenever you publish a blog on your dental website, you can share it on all the popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This is one of the easiest ways to instantly add a backlink to your dental blogs. Likewise, you can also share other information on your website such as the upcoming events and discounts on social media platforms.

Submit to Forums

Forums are somewhat similar to Q&A communities where you get yourself enrolled on behalf of your dental practice and engage with people. Join forums that are relevant to your dental business, such as Dentistry Forums, Checkdent, and Udent, and be a part of various dentistry-related discussions. You can also add a link of your blogs or relevant web pages to provide more information and direct traffic to your website at the same time. For instance, if the discussion is about benefits of Botox in dentistry, you can mention few benefits in your answer and add a backlink that takes them to the page or blog talking about features and benefits of botox treatment in detail.

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Share Content on Various Platforms

Apart from the backlinking opportunities, off-page SEO techniques for dental websites also include sharing the content on different platforms. You can share different types of content on various directories and forums to increase your business’s positive visibility on the internet and backlinking efforts. Here are some sites and platforms where you can submit your blogs, infographics, videos, images, and other types of content to enhance more visibility.

Blog Directory Submission

Whether you create blogs for your dental website or guest blog on other relevant channels, submit the articles and blogs on numerous blog submission directories that are available. This way, your blogs and guest posts will get greater exposure and increased clicks on the backlinks to your website. It takes time to get good results, but blog submission definitely helps in the long run. Although there are countless blog submission sites, most of them are not active or don’t have good domain authority. So it’s better not to submit your blog to every blog directory. You can submit your blogs to Networkedblogs, elecdir, and several other blog quality submission sites.

Share Your Videos

If you have videos related to your dental practice, it’s time to put them to their best use for better SEO rankings. If you don’t have any video content, think about creating some. Create and share customer feedback videos, dental procedure videos, DIY home solutions, or video interviews with renowned dentists. Give a proper title, tags, reference links, and description. Some sites where you can share your videos include Vimeo, YouTube, Ustream.tv, and Dailymotion.

Other blogs: 

Part 1: Online Marketing for Dentists Part 1 (SEO)

Part 2: Online Marketing for Dentists Part 2 (Blogging & Content Marketing)

Part 3: Online Marketing for Dentists Part 3 (Social Media)

Part 4: Online Marketing for Dentists Part 4 (Google My Business)

Share Infographics and Images

Infographics and images are becoming popular day-after-day. When you create unique, helpful, and interesting infographics and images, people generally tend to share them. But sometimes you need to share them in order to increase the exposure so that more and more people can share them. Submit your infographics and images on submission sites and give reference links to your dental web page or blog. Infographicsarchive, Infographiclove, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr are some channels for sharing your images and infographics.

Share Dental Documents

If you have documents or white papers related to your dental practice, such as in-depth information about every dental service you provide or precaution or care tips for some oral problems, then share them for increased exposure. Convert the documents in PDF or presentation format as these forms have better usability and shareability. Submit these ppt or pdf documents in the high authority documents sharing sites such as Issuu, Slideshare, and Scribd.

Make the Most of Social Media

Although Google and Bing search spiders may not crawl into social media profiles and communities as effectively as they crawl websites, highly engaged pages and accounts do have some impact on SEO. Therefore, if you want to improve your site’s overall off-page SEO, make sure to improve your social presence and engagement. And no, we aren’t only referring to updating regular posts and sharing your blogs and website information across different platforms. We are also talking about the link building opportunities you can make the most of. We already talked about backlinks from social media posts above in this article. But then if you have valuable information in your shared posts, more and more people will share it. This way, the number of backlinks to your website will increase. Not only this, several shares, likes, comments, and more engagement on your posts will add up to your SEO value.

Apart from sharing posts on social media, another easy way to add a backlink to your website is by adding your dental website URL in the personal information and the “About” tab of your dental clinic’s social media profiles. Imagine when someone visits your personal profile or dental clinic’s page on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll want to connect them to your dental website. This is where adding a link to your dental website helps.

Next thing you can do to build backlinks to your dental website is to include the link in posts you share on social media groups, communities, etc.

Start Creating YouTube Video

You might ask, how YouTube can be one of the off-page SEO techniques for dental websites? Well, YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine after Google. Moreover, links that you get from YouTube video description and comments help you improve your rankings on search engines. Video marketing on YouTube continues to gain popularity across the globe as people have an ever growing interest in video content. Not only this, videos have less competition, so they tend to rank higher on SERPs. So, if you aren’t making the most of YouTube and video marketing, you are surely missing out on a large amount of SEO value. It takes minimum 1 to 2 years to gain recognition. So, be patient and continue with video creation and share them as much as you can.

Start with creating a YouTube channel with your dental clinic name. As mentioned above, you must create videos related to your dental practice and share them for better off-page SEO of your dental clinic. If you are wondering what kind of videos you can create related to your dental practice, then several options are available for you. You can make a video of basic dental care tips and information such as “how to prevent tooth decay” or interviews with renowned dentists.

Creating videos, uploading them to YouTube, and sharing them on different platforms isn’t where your off-page YouTube efforts should stop. You need to upload the videos effectively with correct tags or keywords, description, category, language, location, and other information to make sure they rank higher whenever a user looks for a relevant query. Remember that YouTube can’t understand what your video is about just by the visuals. Therefore, it is your responsibility to provide inputs to YouTube so that it can understand what your videos are about. Use the relevant and popular keywords in the title and even in the description of the video. Talking about the video description, try to make it as long as possible and rich with keywords. Bigger descriptions can help YouTube to understand the essence of your video better. You can also add the transcript of your video in the description and accurately describe your dental videos. Don’t forget to add your website or blog link in the description for directing YouTube traffic to your website.

As you saw, off-page SEO techniques for dental websites are much more than backlinking. These are just some of the many off-page SEO strategies; there are a plethora of other tactics. Focus on the on-page SEO elements first because if your site has a powerful on-page SEO foundation, it allows you to present your website to newer audiences. Proper on-page and off-page optimization work will gain a better SEO value for your dental website. You can talk to our SEO expert to create a complete strategy with the perfect balance of on-page and off-page techniques for dental websites.