 Why is SEO Important to Marketing the Dental Practice?
80% of websites are found through search engines.
Your website is your image. After Dr. Hirschinger left the practice of dentistry due to injuries, he started DDS.com to help dentists with their websites, because he loves teeth and he found a love of technology. Your dental office is your physical space, and it is essential to your practice. Your dental website is your location in cyberspace, and is also essential to your practice. Just as your office must be up to date, so must your website be up to date. These days, even if the office is modern, an outdated website can make it seem outdated. SEO helps keep your website relevant.
The old saying in real estate of "location, location, location" is true in cyberspace as well as in the physical space. The goal of optimizing a website is to have one of your web pages appear on the first page of the search results when a user does a search for your services. The first page of search results is important because over 90% of the traffic from search engines comes from the first page. Just as a dental office located on a busy street corner benefits from the street traffic, so does a page from your dental website benefit from the "click" traffic from search engines.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Optimization is the practice of improving the functionality and effectiveness of a system or design, given a set of constraints. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of building or changing your dental website so that your website will be found on the search results page when someone performs a search for a keyword or keyword phrase found on your website. The largest search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Bing, who comprise over 95% of all online searches, and whose formulas, or algorithms, for ranking a page on the search results are closely guarded secrets. It's important to know that while individual pages are optimized for search engines, website architecture and navigation are also important, and one cannot overlook the importance of website esthetics for the benefit of users as well. Therefore, effective dental website SEO requires an understanding of both the technical and the esthetic aspects of website development and design.
How to Use SEO
Have you ever heard someone say that the key to good health is to remember that a healthy diet is not temporary, but a permanent way of life? Likewise, properly done, SEO is not merely a temporary task to improve your dental website once, but rather a continuous process to keep it relevant to what people want. The payoff is that SEO can give your website a sustainable competive advantage in the search results, because it has been built with better content and navigation, without the liabilities that many websites possess, such as excessive Flash and javascript. So, unlike its close relative, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), SEO is a long-term strategy for building a well constructed website with content relevant to what searchers desire.
The SEO Process
The general process of optimizing a dental website comprises both on-site and off-site factors. The first and most important on-site factor is relevant page content. The search engines desire that their website users find the most relevant search results possible. This means that they reward the web pages with the most relevant content higher in the search results, given they are able to first find and identify such content.
The second most important on-site factor for dental SEO is site architecture. Dental websites with excessive Flash or Javascript make it more difficult for search engines to see their content, and therefore more difficult to include in the search results.
The major off-site factor for the SEO of dental websites is hyperlinks. Websites are written in a language that is invisible on the actual web page, called HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. This language allows text or an image to "link" to another page anywhere on the Internet. With all else being equal, gathering links to a page on your dental website from other relevant websites will generally help your ability to rank higher in the search results. However, not all links are good. Sometimes your site can be punished for linking to what the search engines determine as bad websites, which can hurt your website's rankings.
The best links are "earned," rather than bought. A link from a quality website is best gained by websites that believe your practice website provides content that is valuable to them. Links from directory sites or purchased links are easily obtained, and therefore are valued less by the search engines. Gaining links from trusted websites is an important factor in elevating a dental website's rankings in the search results.
The Time Commitment
SEO for a dental website is not as mentally challenging as practicing dentistry, but it is time-consuming, because, as mentioned above, SEO is an ongoing process, rather than a one-time event. Proper SEO is similar to tuning an engine, changing the tires, and modifying body panels on a racecar while the car is in motion on the track. The reason is that the search engines are constantly modifying their ranking algorithms, and your competitors are also optimizing their sites. So SEO requires constant attention and vigilance, and is usually performed by an experienced search engine optimizer.
Learn more about DDS.com Dental SEO Services
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