A Short Guide to SEO for Dentists with the Dental Marketing Agency

To train as a dentist you can spend up to ten years in school, and along with becoming a doctor it is one of the longest vocational courses that there is. Of course when you become qualified the salary is usually commensurate with the length of time that you spent training as dental procedures will often cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds, as the Dental Marketing Agency tells us.

For example, dental implant procedures especially when a number of teeth are replaced can cost over £10,000. We are seeking to claim that this fee is too high, as the work is complex, and getting procedures like this done cheaply will often lead to significant pain and discomfort. Nobody wants to go to a cheap dentist for this very reason.

But it does highlight just how valuable one customer can be to a dental surgery, and in this light we want to discuss the potential benefits of evaluating how your business shows up online, particularly on the major search engines like Google.

If we begin by taking the position that your business wants more clients, then it will be helpful to assess if there is an online demand for your service locally, by doing some Google searches.

For example if we look up "dentists in Birmingham" on Google we can see that there are somewhere in the region of 440 searches per month for that search phrase. It is commonly accepted that the top ranking website for any search can expect to receive between 30 to 40% of the searches for any particular search phrase. So in theory ranking for this phrase could potentially accrue to your website an extra 130 to 150 clicks on your website each month.

If 10% of those extra website visitors went on to become customers of your dental clinic then you could potentially add 13 to 15 new customers per month or 150 to 180 new customers a year. And it is worthwhile noting that this is only looking at the traffic potential for one search phrase when there could be dozens of search phrases related to the dental services that you offer at your clinic.

There won’t be many dental surgeries out there that do not have a website at this stage of the game, but the number of clinics employing an effective search engine optimisation or digital marketing strategy will be much fewer. And so that clearly means that there could be an opportunity for you.

In assessing this opportunity, the way to begin is by making a list of the services that you offer, both general and specialist including any emergency or out of hours services and then spending some time with the Google Keyword Planner Tool or some good keyword software to understand how many searches get carried each month related to the services that your business offers.

It will be important to be location specific as most dental clients will be unlikely to travel more than 50 miles to a dentist, and so if you’re based in Glasgow it will not be realistic to expect to win new business from the South of England.