Your dental practice website helps Google find your practice when a patient searches for a dentist online, and how your website is built and designed can make it one of your most valuable sales tools.
Today, our web team discusses how you can get your website to show up when patients search–and why this is important for converting patients.
The Importance of Showing Up on Google
Consider this: Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, 5.6 billion searches per day and two trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day.
Standing Out on Google Search
In the graphic below, notice how many results pop up when a patient searches for a “periodontist near me”—over 16,900,000. This means that Google literally crawls through over 16 million results in 7/10ths of a second.
With this in mind, you must build and optimize a website that makes it easy for Google to find you when a patient searches for a dentist online.
How Do I Get Google to Show My Site When a Patient Searches?
The golden rule of both website building and dental practice Search Engine Optimization is you must build and optimize a website that makes it easy for Google to find you when a patient searches for a dentist online, while still building your site for the human end-user too.
Most website users visit a site for no more than 11 seconds, so homepage content should be written for conversions. The rest of your site should be keyword-rich and equally focused on SEO.
When building your website, ask yourself these basic questions to help your website show up when a patient searches for a “dentist near me.”
Do I Serve High-Quality Content to Users?
Google prioritizes showing content to users that thoroughly and succinctly answers the questions they’re asking. Does your website have well-written content that serves users, rather than keyword-stuffed content you’ve written purely to have something on your site?
Is My Local Business Showing Up on Google?
Have you claimed and optimized your Google Business Profile? This valuable Knowledge Panel is a cornerstone of local dental patient search and is highly influential in Google’s decision to show you to patients.
Is My Content Fast and Easy to Access on All Devices?
Today’s patient is constantly on the move and rarely sits down at a desktop computer anymore. Does your website load quickly and without issue across smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices?
Is My Website Secure?
If your website isn’t securely built to protect patient privacy, Google will view you as unreliable.
Search Engine Optimization and Your Website
At Whiteboard Marketing, web building and Search Engine Optimization work hand-in-hand to create conversion-driven sites. In fact, SEO is one of our main goals when creating a website.
Both content and technical structure are fundamental for website success. When optimizing your website copy, keep the questions your patients are asking top of mind so you can accurately answer them.
SEO Standard Practices for Your Website
- Create unique, accurate page titles for each homepage and subpage
- Have a subpage for each service you offer
- Use unique descriptions for each page
- Accurately summarize the page content
- Optimize each webpage of content with keywords your patients regularly search
- Write content for your readers first, then Google
As far as the organization and structure of your website, make sure your marketing partner does the following:
- Creates strong titles and snippets in search results
- Uses description meta tags
- Adds structured data markup
- Organizes your site structure properly
- Understands how search engines use URLs
- Builds a navigation menu that is easy to follow for both Google and visitors
Creating and Submitting a Sitemap
The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap, which is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site.
Ask your marketing partner to handle submitting your sitemap to Google once your website is completed and ready for launch.
Build Your Site for Mobile Searches
In today’s modern marketing landscape, Google prioritizes ranking websites that are ”useable” on mobile over a desktop site. Since most users now search on Google with a mobile device, Google primarily crawls and indexes mobile versions of your website pages.
What Are Some Simple Ways to Boost my Website’s SEO?
Add these features to get started on optimizing your website.
Add an FAQs Page that Answers Common Patient Questions
When a patient searches for answers to this question, Google will see it–along with the answer–on your website and return this to patients as valuable content.
Write Authentic Bios for Your Team
Since using credible external links helps Google view your site as reputable, you can include important “linkable” information like colleges, universities, association affiliations and more in staff bios.
Add Before and After Images with Keyword-Rich Descriptions
What special services do you offer to your patients that they’re also searching on Google? Use your Before and After page to highlight these keywords.
Add a Reviews Page with Live Reviews
Google loves when websites regularly produce new, valuable content. Live reviews streaming on your site serve as fresh, unique content in the search engine’s eyes.
Add a Blog and Post Regularly to Your Blog Page
Dental practice blogging helps boost your SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to common patient questions.
Need to Hire a Website and SEO Expert?
At Whiteboard Marketing, our team of web experts builds each site with three goals of patient conversion, SEO and speed. We’ve successfully built hundreds of sleek, professional, conversion-driven dental practice websites across the nation. Schedule a consultation call with our team to learn more.