Did you know that something as simple as generating your content with AI could harm your SEO?
SEO and social media are the pillars of every marketing campaign. These are often the only way that customers can find your website and your services. Small, common dental SEO mistakes can lead to significant consequences in your everyday traffic statistics.
Fortunately, once you know how SEO works, you can learn how to game the system. So in this guide, we are going to help you avoid the sorts of mistakes that will get you penalized.
Keep reading for the seven most common dental SEO mistakes, and how you can avoid them.
1. The Biggest of Common Dental SEO Mistakes: Not Optimizing Yourself for Local Search Results
Dentistry isn’t like some online store or a political blog. You depend on organic search results from people in your area. Nobody is going to visit the dentist if it’s half a state away.
Further, you don’t want to be competing with a dentist office at the other side of the country. It would be very unfortunate if someone in Phoenix, Arizona was ranking above you when you operate out of Chicago, Illinois.
Too many businesses, dentists especially, do not optimize their SEO for their location. Include as many references to your physical location as you possibly can. Get reviews, especially from Google, to tie your business to that location.
If all goes well, you should be the first result when somebody searches for a dentist in your region.
2. Failing to Take Social Media into Account
As we said at the top of the article, it’s not just about your SEO and keywords and your dental practice blog. Social media plays a vital role in the success or failure of your business.
The majority of people get their news from their phones. In most cases, this news appears on their social media feeds. This means that their primary mode of interaction with the greater world outside is through social media.
Social media runs on algorithms that determine who gets content, and where. You want to be the first thing that a social media platform recommends to its users. As you build your marketing for dental practices, do not neglect social media.
3. Making Generic, Low-Quality Content
Google has to sift through a lot of search results every single day. There is simply no way for them to display all the search results every time somebody searches for them. To streamline things, Google evaluates every website on how high-quality the content is.
This means content that uses robust sources, has regular updates, and avoids cheap or duplicated content. AI-generated content may seem enticing, but saving money this way may not be worth it when Google punishes you for using it.
Spend the extra money and time to generate content that is worth reading. Your SEO score will raise as a result.
4. Not Including Diverse Media, Such As Videos
People have short attention spans, and that fact is being reflected in SEO as well. Your dental practice website stands the best chance if it offers different types of engaging media. Not everybody wants to read long-winded articles all day.
One of the best ways to do this is with videos. Just having an embedded video from your YouTube channel can make a huge difference.
5. Not Providing a Mobile Version of Your Dental Practice Website
As we said above, most people access the Internet on their phones. Phones have a very different aspect ratio compared to computers. The only way to solve this problem is with mobile website versions.
Make sure to create a mobile-friendly version of your website. This doesn’t just improve your SEO; it makes your website easier to use for clients.
6. Not Doing Any Keyword Research
It may seem like a no-brainer with dentistry. The main keyword people are going to be searching for is “dentist.” Why bother worrying about any other keyword combinations?
You might be surprised how people are actually searching for your services. The only way to know how they are searching is to use Google’s keyword planner and do your research. Consider contracting other services to handle your keyword research as well.
7. Having the Right Types of External Links and Backlinks
Links are a valuable part of your website’s SEO. Having high-quality links from reputable sources makes your website far more enticing in the search results. Additionally, avoiding linking to competitors will make you stand out on the results page.
However, you should avoid the practice of building backlinks. This sort of thing is preferable for blogs that host a lot of general content. If you do so on your own dental practice website, it causes Google to punish you instead.
Focus on having a healthy amount of links, particularly those that link to medical sites and government organizations. Make sure your links come from reputable organizations, and from within the past few years. Every once in a while, go into your articles and update the links to more modern sources.
Build Your Dental SEO Today
If you’ve never done marketing before, then there’s no shame in making these common dental SEO mistakes. Learning how to leverage SEO and social media to your advantage is a skill that takes many years of practice to do. Either do further research into this field or hire an outside marketing company to do it for you.
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