An expert guide to dental SEO

When someone has a toothache, lost crown, or chipped tooth, you'll want your marketing agency's dental client to be the first thing that person sees when visiting Dr. Google.

There are a number of tactical ways to fight for those rankings, but there is no one-size-fits-all SEO strategy, and dental SEO is no exception. Dental practices are local businesses, which means local SEO strategies can be replicated across a number of different practices, each targeting its own region. That lets your agency expand its portfolio of dental clients using the same set of specialized techniques.

Your dental clients also invest a lot into digital marketing, and they expect to know what they're getting in return. So this guide covers both halves of the job: the dental SEO work itself, and the reporting that proves what it was worth. Almost half of small to medium-sized businesses overlook the measurement of ROI, which leaves an opening for agencies that can show the value of their services.

SEO for dentists is constantly evolving, and the days of keyword-filled content are long gone. Today, things like the location of your practice, nearby competitors, what your niche service is, and even your own reputation as a doctor play important factors in how (and where) you turn up in a Google search result. Your website needs to build trust with potential patients and position you as an authority in your field.

Cherie Dickey, SEO Team Lead, Smile Marketing

Key takeaways

• Dental practices are local businesses, so location-qualified long-tail keywords are the way in — nearly 92% of searches use long-tail terms, which is the difference between competing for "dentist" and winning "dentist in downtown Springfield".

• Reviews carry unusual weight in this niche: 90% of people use online reviews when searching for their medical needs, so review generation and review reporting belong in the SEO scope.

• Total contacts is a one-dimensional measure of a dental campaign — KPIs such as cost per lead, cost per acquisition, return on total marketing spend, and patient retention show what the work is actually worth.

• The standard ROI formula gives every new patient the same value, so separating one-time procedures from repeat services produces a far more accurate number.

• Dental practices offer near-identical services in different neighborhoods, so one keyword strategy, dashboard, and report template can be replicated across a whole portfolio of clients.

Explaining to clients how search engines rank dental websites

While the importance of SEO in general might be common knowledge, the importance of dental SEO is harder to communicate. The typical on-page practices, such as the use of keywords and an optimized website, are mandatory, but dentists work locally — a strategy built for an online business or a large-scale chain isn't going to suit them.

Content that drives traffic from local sources and highlights local voices in reviews provides a rich SEO backdrop, so search engine rankings reach the right people in the areas these businesses actually operate.

Remember, your clients are dentists, not marketing experts. Most have never been walked through how a local pack is assembled or why a review profile moves rankings, so the explanation is part of the deliverable.

How to optimize a dental website for SEO

The right dental SEO strategy is critical to getting any dental practice's website to a decent ranking. These are the steps an agency can take to optimize its client's online presence.

• Use relevant keywords

• Remember local SEO

• Use local directories

• Optimize the pages on the website

• Invest in relevant content

• Increase the number of reviews

Find the relevant keywords for a dental business

Dental SEO is more than the basic keywords of "dentist" and "toothache". Start by thinking beyond the common terms and considering what specific keywords reflect the unique offerings of a particular practice.

Buyer-intent keywords target a specific audience that's more likely to need a dentist's services and are an opportunity to highlight services a practitioner specializes in. So instead of just "dentist", use more specific keywords such as "family dental", "dental surgery", "veneers", or "sealants". If a practice specializes in root canals, that keyword and its semantic variations should be a major part of its SEO strategy.

Finding related terms on Google is also a helpful way to find keywords connected to the ones you're already planning on using. It refines your client's keywords from "teeth whitening" to "professional teeth whitening".

When adding keywords, remember local SEO

Search engines may be accessible anywhere in the world, but most dental practices are local businesses, and they need to plan locally. Local SEO is what turns your client's dental office into THE neighborhood dental office.

Nearly 92% of searches use keywords with long tails. Instead of searching for "dentist" or "sore gums", an average search is more likely to be "closest dentist near me", "emergency dentist weekends" or "what to do when your gums are sore".

Neighborhoods and other regional identifiers associate a website with the terms people in the area actually use. It's the difference between someone searching "dentist" and "dentist in downtown Springfield". Thousands of other practices are fighting for placement in that first option, but only a few are going to appear under the second.

Another easy step is to include a business's NAP (name, address, and phone number) on each page of its website. That information needs to be consistent not only on your client's website but on any business directories the practice is added to.

Google Business Profile and local directories

And speaking of those directories, according to HubSpot there are many to be considered, though a few basic choices include Facebook, Apple Maps, LinkedIn, and of course, a Google Business Profile. As well as catching the eyes of anyone using these directories, it also builds links to a website, improving its SEO performance.

Dental practices need special care when being added, as their addresses may include a specific office number in a larger building. The phone number should be the one for a public-facing contact, such as the line to a reception desk.

Also consider that some practices have multiple locations. For all the strategies included here, a business with multiple locations will require special attention, such as including all locations under directories, using keywords for specific services where they're available, and posting reviews that reflect the quality of service from the corresponding location.

Optimize the website design for effective dental SEO

As Google pays more and more attention to user experience in its ranking algorithm, a high bounce rate could end up hurting a site's ranking. Performing a health check on a website's SEO is a helpful way to measure its effectiveness, and the strength of that dental SEO is easily measured with an SEO audit tool. These provide a site-wide audit, letting you quickly assess what improvements should be made.

Some of the techniques that keep users engaged are obvious, such as a fast loading time and a clean design. But some are often overlooked, such as a mobile-friendly layout.

If someone is on their mobile phone looking for an emergency dentist, you don't want them to have trouble using your client's website.

Metadata matters too. Although metadata can be helpful when broad, a local business like a dentist benefits more from targeted tags and descriptions that highlight the community it's part of. Metadata including image alt tags is also an important part of making sure that your client's website is fully accessible. Being the authority on dental matters around the world would be nice, but a more attainable goal is to make a dental practice synonymous with the area it operates within.

A dental SEO agency should be running regular SEO audits to make sure all of the technical aspects of the site are clean, polished, and doesn't have any cavities.

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Invest in relevant content that people are searching for

A dental website should be much more than a place to schedule an appointment or find a list of services. Content such as a blog lets a practice engage with potential patients directly, providing detailed answers to common questions or advice on oral health at home.

Those pages expand a website's dental SEO reach to include people who aren't looking for a dentist right now but might book an appointment in future. When someone is looking for answers on why they are experiencing sensitivity or how long they should be brushing their teeth, you want them to find your client.

It also helps to think locally when creating content by connecting it to local events that might remind someone of their dental health — dental hygiene advice ahead of a local chocolate festival, for instance.

Another basic building block is an FAQ page, which addresses questions someone may have about flossing without devoting an entire page to the subject. The patient liaison team is a good source for these: the questions they field on the phone every day are the questions the FAQ page should answer. Over time, careful monitoring of performance metrics can reveal opportunities for more detailed content on a particular subject, such as a blog post.

Detailed pages for specific services are just as important, and they double as a way of expanding the impact of keywords for the treatments a practice offers. When someone searches for a dentist that offers crown repairs, they land on a page that goes into detail about the service and why your client is an expert on it.

Get more reviews that highlight a practice's strengths

Just like the offline world, word of mouth has a huge impact online. When searching for their medical needs, 90% of people use online reviews.

Although reviews on Google are essential, also consider review sites that specialize in doctors and dentists, such as HealthGrades.com and Vitals.com, both of which come recommended by WebMD.

We've detailed the importance of reviews for local businesses in the past, and some quick strategies to get those reviews with handy reminders such as including it on an appointment card or a clear call to action on the website.

Track those in a reviews report, so that once reviews start coming in, your agency can proactively take the more glowing ones and put them on the practice's website and social channels.

Our ratings & reviews report makes tracking your dental client's reputation easy. Try it free for 14 days!

Sitting in a chair while someone polishes your teeth for half an hour tends to build a personal relationship, so reviews that mention a dentist's soft skills — a good sense of humor, a caring demeanor — highlight strengths that are more believable coming from patients.

Setting yourself up to prove the SEO is working

Everything above is the work. What follows is how you show it landed, and that starts before the campaign does.

When businesses measure the ROI of their digital marketing, it's common to focus on whether the platforms and strategies in place are driving phone calls and form submissions. Most marketers view this as the job: you get people to call or submit a form, and it's up to the client to close them. You aren't in the business, so you can't make prospective patients choose one clinic over another — you can only give the client the opportunity to close the customer. And in a crowded space where you're regularly competing on price alone, many agencies don't have the resources to review leads for quality. You have the number of calls and forms synced to your report and sent to the client automatically.

Here's the problem: your client is tracking the actual patients that come in from you. Just because you don't know the real number doesn't mean that they don't. The more often you report inflated numbers, the less they trust you. And your good dental practices that spend big dollars know how to close.

Here's the second problem: it's incredibly one-dimensional and may not match your client's goals or be the best reflection of the success of your work. Total Contacts is only one component of a dental marketing campaign, especially when you're coordinating multiple platforms and advertising activities.

This is why it's important to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Before you can pick them, the goals need to be four things.

Clear and defined

Many clients do not have any digital marketing strategy beyond "get more patients", so you have to pull it out of them with questions like:

• What is your biggest current pain point? For example: not showing up on search engines because of a lack of local SEO, or an inconsistent social media strategy that leads to a diminished brand presence.

• Are there things your competitors are doing you wish you were too? What are the dental services they're most known for?

• Why now? Why are you considering a marketing program/switching from your current company?

• Are there certain types of patients or areas of the business (e.g., specific dental services) that you want to grow?

Relatable to your client's business and targets

Goals get much more useful when they're tied to what the owner personally wants.

• Do they want to sell in 5 years?

• Do they want to hire another dentist so they can work less?

• Do they want to add more locations?

Quantifiable (measurable) desired outcomes

Next, figure out how to quantify these goals, which always starts with benchmarking current performance:

• How many existing patients are you seeing now, and how many do you want to be seeing within the next 90 days? Next year?

• You're currently collecting 5 new Google reviews per month. We want to get to 10, which will improve your overall local SEO strategy.

• For the past month, you've ranked 5th on search engines. For the upcoming quarter, we want to move to at least #3 on Google search results.

• You have no content marketing program now. Within 60 days, we want to be creating two new pieces of online marketing content each month focused on the treatment type we want to grow.

Communicated throughout the business

In dentistry, and really most medical businesses, the patient liaison team is central to your success. The first meeting upon starting the relationship is with them, to establish:

• Marketing copy matches what they say on the phone/in-office

• Where leads need to go (emails, phone numbers)

• Established processes for tracking patient leads through the process

• Any FAQs they receive that you can proactively address

Setting client expectations in an unpredictable field

There is no use planning a campaign without defining your dental client's marketing budget and knowing their clinic's capacity. It's always advisable they have some room for movement, but understanding these limitations is paramount.

Suppose the hygienist is booked several weeks in advance. There is little benefit in pushing all advertising expenditure towards those services, even if dental cleans and other low-cost treatments bring in more conversions than higher-cost procedures. Dental work at the top end of the price list, such as root canals or emergency work, may not bring in as frequent bookings, but a number of new customers may help you exceed your advertising goals.

Review the current performance of your client's services and past marketing efforts to define a dedicated customer journey and draw up a budget vs. the profit required for results to be successful. Your ROI will be determined by whether the results meet your estimated predictions.

Put the money math in the proposal

Done well, your proposals can start with the "money math" side. It should include:

1. Benchmarked data – where they are now

2. Goals – where they want to go

3. How you're going to get them there with your proposal – this is where you justify your budget recommendations and demonstrate your projected ROI with actual math based on your research, including keyword volume, traffic, CPCs, click-through rates, conversion rates, the client's close rates, etc.

This revenue-first approach is easier to digest than a proposal summary or statement of work, and it makes the decision click for a new client.

Want more information on how to create proposals that convert prospects into clients? Bookmark the following:

• How to Create a Winning SEO Proposal

• How To Write a PPC Proposal That Converts

• How to Write Winning Social Media Proposals

Choosing the right KPIs for dental clients

KPIs are measurable goals used to help choose the best activities for a marketing plan. These five carry the most weight for a dental practice.

1. Sales growth

If the focus is increasing new patients, measuring total patients before and after the launch of a campaign is imperative for understanding the success of your activities, overall growth, and which areas require improvement.

2. Cost per lead

Reviewing the Cost Per Lead — the marketing efforts converted into prospects — helps your team estimate a budget for future campaigns and review the activities that turn prospects into customers. Focus on the quality of the lead rather than the total figure of potential interest, as not all prospects will convert.

3. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

CPA illustrates which marketing platforms have helped your client's practice reach its targets and successfully acquire patients, revealing the quality of the leads converted and demonstrating your ability to convert these prospects into patients.

4. Return on total marketing spend

Your client's Return on Marketing Spend (ROTMS) measures the performance of campaigns against the total costs of marketing activities. Similar to ROAS, which is the common metric used to review Ad spend, ROTMS results in a more comprehensive number that includes management fees and all costs associated with driving new potential patients to your clients.

This is an essential metric when reporting ROI, as it provides a full picture of total spending whilst factoring profit margins, operating expenses, and the performance of your client's business.

An example of the client-facing dashboard with an embedded video review of current performance.

5. Patient retention

It is often much more expensive to bring in new patients than to retain current ones. Measuring your client's patient retention rates tells you whether to focus future marketing efforts on new or returning patients, and it differentiates your agency from competitors when you bring in repeat customers.

This is how your clients are looking at it, and to be their long-term partner, you need to look at it the same way.

How to know when dental SEO is working

Explaining the importance of SEO to a client is best told as a story, and that story may have a number of unexpected turns after the first step. A roadmap built from the techniques above isn't a recipe for perfection, but it is a strong start, and each step needs a highly adaptable strategy behind it that uses real metrics and goals.

Dentistry is a tricky field to draw up specific goals against, because patients generally only seek out care when necessary or commit to routine check-ups and cleans. When tracking KPIs, consider in the early planning stages how patient behavior may affect your marketing efforts and the results of campaigns.

An example of AgencyAnalytics' goal-tracking widgets.

When measuring results against customer behavior, it is easier to break the categories into specific focus points, such as:

• Revenue generated per patient visits

• Average Customer Lifespan (new customers, current or returning customers)

Consider the other challenges you may face during the campaign and how you plan to address them, such as limitations with your client's CRM system, current social media performance, and resources to create promotional assets.

Reporting on ROI with the right metrics

Collecting and reporting data is essential for showing how successful a practice has been as a result of marketing activity, but it's important to know which platforms align most with your client's goals. These four channels carry most of the evidence.

1. Website traffic

Here is where you get all your Source data, so you know what exactly is driving all your leads. Google Analytics is one of the most used platforms to track website traffic, from website performance to insight into customer behavior and popular pages.

Monitor all your clients' Google Analytics data in live dashboards that are easy to understand. All from one single login. Try AgencyAnalytics free for 14 days!

2. Social media marketing analytics

The back end of social media shares several insights on follower growth, post performance, and audience demographics. You can also plug your social accounts into the AgencyAnalytics social media reporting tool to see all your metrics in a comprehensive social media dashboard, or track it from a customizable social media report template.

3. Email database

Email is a great platform for touching base with a client's current patients and encouraging prospects further down the journey. You can also monitor unsubscribes, click rates, and open rates, and clear the database of old addresses.

4. Phone call tracking and listening

Marion Relationship Marketing, an agency that specializes in serving dentists and dental clinics, has found that 85% of new leads come from phone calls. Those calls can still result in reschedules or cancellations, so rate them to see how many convert into physical customers. Platforms such as CallRail feature keyword identification tools that make this less time-consuming.

Keep all your clients' call-tracking metrics in one place with AgencyAnalytics. Try it free for 14 days!

Where the classic ROI formula breaks down in dentistry

There are many simple formulas used for calculating the ROI of a dental marketing strategy, but best practice focuses on the number of new patients gained from planned activities multiplied by the average lifetime value of a patient. Here is the overall ROI calculation broken down:

That forecast assigns the same average value to all new patients, which may not be the case for your client. Some patients only use the services on one occasion, such as a dental emergency. These customers offer lower value and cannot be compared equally to returning customers or higher-priced procedures, which makes categorizing the quality of patients all the more important for working out total ROI.

Unfortunately, typical marketing dashboards only review metrics based on cost instead of the potential profit generated. A returning customer may begin with a routine check-up and continue with repeat cleaning treatments, accounting for 2-4 visits a year. The cost of treatment matters too — a person visiting for complex dental surgeries may require extensive visits, cleans, and procedures over the course of the year.

With both of these factors to consider when digging into marketing metrics, track not only what a patient can initially bring to a business but also the profit that business can make from attracting valuable, returning customers.

Source

ROI is then determined by how successful your marketing has been in adding these quality patients to your client's database for future earnings.

Adding context to the numbers

Presenting numbers to your clients is one thing. What they think of them is another. Some clients have claimed the numbers were wrong because they don't match how they "feel" it's working, which is just their own intuition. Even where you cannot determine an exact measurement, the conversation is valuable, because most clients have never considered their Lifetime Customer Value before.

Many will see a bunch of numbers and glaze over, and if they want the numbers, they can sign up for Google Analytics themselves. Your value as a marketing professional comes from your ability to add context to the numbers for your clients.

One efficient way to do it: add a Loom video going over your reporting, to save the back-and-forth emails and keep your agency on the activities that produce results.

You're certainly not visiting all your dental offices every month, so it's a great way for them to see your face and hear your voice, reminding them they have a real person pulling the levers.

Using the right tools to monitor success

No SEO solution is an instant fix; it's a series of steps. To explain those steps, and amend them, you need the right tools.

A few simple metrics include conversions, website traffic, and keyword rankings, and they require tools that track your monthly SEO performance over a number of domains across time. That way more granular changes can be observed and made, such as adjusting keywords based on weekly or monthly ranking data, or monitoring backlinks so you can emphasize the ones creating a greater impact.

Having the right SEO reporting tools in place from the beginning offers greater insight into what works and what doesn't. Just as important is a set of rank tracking tools that can be applied to a number of different dental practices, so one successful dental campaign scales into many without starting from scratch each time.

Ranking tracking that clients can easily understand. I trust AgencyAnalytics more than any other rank tracker out there. It’s also easy to use and integrate with lots of other programs, such as Google Search Console and call tracking programs.

Justin Morgan / SEO Expert

The Dental Marketing Guy

What to include in a dental client's dashboard

Now you've set your KPIs and focused on the activities and platforms you'll use, it's time to decide how you'll track performance on their channels.

Custom marketing dashboards collect the data and showcase the results in one place. That's essential for campaigns coordinated across multiple platforms, each with its own reporting system, compiling everything into one accessible shared space.

No two clients are the same, which is why AgencyAnalytics offers personalized dashboards with a full suite of customizable widgets, a drag-and-drop report builder, and white labeling so you can build reports to match your client's needs.

Maintaining that success

Just like the daily work needed to maintain one's dental health, a good dental SEO strategy requires consistent maintenance: monitoring changes in performance, running an SEO site checker to find technical issues, and the occasional strategy shift to fix what isn't working.

Keep an eye on the competition too. A practice may rise to prominence in its area, but that doesn't mean other dentists won't use new techniques to make a name for themselves. Adapting to those new competitors is essential to the long-term health of any practice, and that adaptation begins with watching what they're doing.

With the AgencyAnalytics platform, track the competition so that once success is achieved, any upstarts challenging for dental SEO supremacy won't catch your agency by surprise.

Creating a dental SEO machine for your agency

Marketing agencies should streamline their dental SEO strategy to better serve their clients and chart a successful course for onboarding new clients who own dental practices.

Every client will have unique needs, but dental practices are local businesses offering very similar services. A keyword strategy that builds one practice's reputation as the go-to local dentist can be repeated in different neighborhoods, and long-tail keywords prevent overlap so each practice attracts patients in its specific area.

SEO dashboards and SEO report templates are easily replicated with AgencyAnalytics for new clients, saving time and letting an agency scale up the number of its dental clients. Much like your clients becoming a neighborhood dentist, you can distinguish your own agency as the go-to place for dental SEO expertise, among other niches.

Summary and takeaways

Any dental business understands the difference between a patient who flosses every day and one who only flosses the day before their hygiene appointment. Neither is beyond help, but the goal is to turn bad habits into good ones. Dental SEO works the same way: embrace the specific constraints of a local practice, apply a local SEO strategy, use targeted keywords, and create relevant content, and your agency can position its client as their area's destination for dental care.

Reporting KPIs alongside that work supports your clients' business objectives and tracks the campaign at the same time. Once you've confirmed the ROI of your planned activities formally, you can build a more accurate budget and review performance consistently to keep results on target. Those strategies, plus the tools to demonstrate what the campaigns delivered, give your agency a strong portfolio to use when onboarding prospective clients — especially in dentistry.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial with AgencyAnalytics to discover innovative solutions for reporting your digital marketing analytics, campaign performance, and ROI. Start using custom marketing dashboards for your dental clients today.