Over 75% of people look for their next service/product online. It is imperative for the dentist to have a complete web presence. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a form of marketing that will increase your website's visibility by search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo). SEO is process that will improve your dental practice website’s organic ranking (non-paid) and drives traffic. SEO will increase your online visibility when the patient is looking for you services. If you appear higher on the search engines, you are far more likely to be the dentist the patient decides to call or visit.
Here are just a few quick onsite SEO questions that the dentist should answers. If the answer is yes, their practice’s website rank higher and make it easier for your potential patients to find you online.
Website
Does your website have a robots.txt file? This tell the search engine how to crawl and index your website.
Have you checked to assure that search engines can crawl your site?
Are you effectively using keywords on your site that your target patient is looking for? Do you know how to identify the keywords the patients are searching?
Does all your pages have title tags?
Are your title tags short (<65 Characters), unique and compelling to help people come straight to your site?
Do you have short (<150 Characters) meta tags that are also unique, descriptive and compelling?
Do all of you pages contain only one H1 tag? This is your page’s heading.
Is the content on your website relevant, unique and personalized? The content should not exist anywhere else.
Do you have quality pictures of the provider and everyone else at the office? Please don’t use stock images.
Do the images have descriptive img alt attributes? Search engines cannot see pictures.
Have you signed up for Google Analytics? This can give you valuable information about the traffic (people) to your website.
Does your dental practice website have “call of action”?
Is the dental practice’s name, address and phone number clearly visible in all pages?
Are you using Bing and Webmaster tools?
Have you checked for broken links, page load error and other issues? You can use Screaming Frog to check if your website is crawlable, have any broken links and etc.
Have you checked to see if your dental practice website loads in less than 3 seconds? Ideally, you want all the pages to load in one second. You can use Google pagespeed to check the speed of your website.
Did you link your website to your dental practice’s Google + page?’
Have you verified that your dental practice site’s XML sitemap functioning and submitted to search engines?
Do the pages look great and work well with different browsers and devices (ei: iPhone, desktop, Chrome, Firefox, Safari)? Interactive website is very important. Check Screenfly to see how your website looks on different devices.
Does your page have functioning social media share icons so that patients can share your site with others?
If you have multiple dentists in your practice, have you created a page for each of them to showcase their experience and expertise?
Is all of your contact information accurate and consistent (name, address, phone) on your site and other citations? This plays a big role in local SEO.
Are you compliant with Google’s local business quality guidelines? Visit Google business to learn more.
If you have multiple locations/offices, is this clearly indicated on your site to avoid a patient confusion.
Are you effectively using social media to reach potential patients?
Have you created any blog that could help patients and bring people to your site?
Is the content of your website optimized for the keywords your patients looking for?
