SPONSORED: Why Content is King for Search Engines
Content, content, content. Are you sick of hearing that word yet? If you’ve been looking for ways to improve your dental website’s search engine optimization, you probably are. The fact remains that unique, high-quality content is king, and you’ll have to work on it to see noticeable search engine rank changes.
Content, content, content. Are you sick of hearing that word yet? If you’ve been looking for ways to improve your dental website’s search engine optimization, you probably are. The fact remains that unique, high-quality content is king, and you’ll have to work on it to see noticeable search engine rank changes.
When thinking about your dental website, it’s easy to get lost in the eyes of the design. The pretty colors, the easy navigation, and the compelling calls-to-action are so consuming that perceptions of your practice can often be made on those features alone. Unfortunately, being that shallow will get you in trouble. Don’t get me wrong-the design is extremely important to achieving the goals you set out for your dentist website. However, your dental practice website needs to have inner beauty as well. The inner beauty I speak of is content. Think of it as the personality and motivation of your website.
Content comes in 2 forms: Text and Multimedia
Text content is the written content within the website.
Text content gives your patients information to read and gives search engines the information to optimize your search rankings. Believe it or not, patients want to read what you have to say and what your practice is all about! Relying on stock content (written for you and most likely duplicated across many other websites) has a great chance of backfiring because there’s no personalization or personality in the words.
Written content also needs to expand past your welcome page. Websites that total 4 or 5 pages are a massive disservice to your practice. Your website is your space to advertise and show off the best dental practice in the area! Take advantage of it! I highly recommend having individual pages for each procedure, specialty, and dentist to maximize your content space and give patients plenty of opportunities to read about your practice. Patient education is a terrific source of new patient traffic and goes a long way to building trust with your dental practice.
Text Content and dentist search engine optimization (SEO)
Within your text content lies a perfect opportunity to plant important keywords that pertain to your practice to help you rank higher on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. While you want to write your content for patients (humans), you don’t want to disregard the search engines of the world (robots…for now). Keywords to include would be any procedures you specialize in and your location(s).
The more fresh and relevant content, the better your website is going to perform in the search rankings. While SEO for dentists incorporates many factors, high quality content that’s posted consistently is the No. 1 driver.
Multimedia content is any content that isn’t text.
Typically, this refers to animations, images, sounds, and videos. They say a photo is worth a thousand words. We believe it! You can only tell your patients how friendly your team is in so many words. However, show your office manager or your entire team in Halloween costumes, and you have yourself a piece of content that speaks volumes about your dental practice. The same goes for social media. The posts that generate the most engagement (likes, retweets, favorites, shares, etc.) are those of the team, the office, and the patients.
So put together a smile gallery of your past work. Take photos of your team and create biographies. Do a virtual tour of your facility or even create your own YouTube video! All of this is content that patients want to see and search engines want to crawl.
Go forth and populate your website with quality content!
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how much content you can produce if you can’t post it to your website. If you can’t post content to your website, it’s time to look into having a new website built for you that’s mobile-friendly, has a website editor, and offers SEO.
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Anthony Giovine is the director of marketing at VivioSites, a leading online dental marketing company that specializes in acquiring patients for dental practices through mobile-friendly websites and advanced search engine optimization. VivioSites’ customer-first philosophy stresses no contracts and unlimited, live support with experts that get to know each individual practice. To learn more about how VivioSites helps dentists across North America reach the first page on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, visit their website or email info@viviosites.com.
