Why Is SEO Important for Dentists?

Dentistry is an interesting profession, in that it is simultaneously ancient and high-tech, well-established and ever-evolving. With its roots in longstanding tradition and a dedication to cutting-edge technology and techniques, dentistry is a nearly unique field. You’ve devoted your life to mastering both the art and science of dentistry, and then using those skills to give your patients the highest standard of care.

However you have to balance your dedication to patient care with the business side of having a practice, and that includes marketing. While dental marketing is likely as old as the profession of dentistry itself, we live in a bold new world of information and connectivity. As a result, traditional approaches to dental marketing are incomplete without addressing a digital marketing component as well.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical function for any dental practice. SEO directly affects the ways in which potential patients encounter your practice, their initial impression of it, and how many of them find you at all. It’s important for any dental practice to understand why SEO is important for dentists, and how it shapes dental marketing.

At a base level, SEO affects how and where your website appears in search engine results. So for example, if someone were to search for “general dentist Charlotte NC”, websites with stronger SEO will be closer to the top of the list, while websites with less effective SEO would appear further down. As a result, if your site doesn’t have robust SEO, your practice might appear far enough down the list to be unseen by most search engine users. Most people typically stop reading after the first few results of a search engine query, and almost all stop reading after the first page.

This is an issue for most dental practices, as a majority of potential patients now find health care providers of all kinds via online searches. Search engines are still the most popular tool in doing so, requiring successful practice to devote time and energy to developing the best possible SEO for their digital presence. Priority search engine results not only put more eyes on your practice, but they project authority, expertise, and trustworthiness–all qualities potential patients look for in a new dental care provider. Effective performance on search engines is critical to effective digital marketing, and to effective dental marketing in general.

SEO, like other digital marketing, is both an art and a science. It requires a thorough understanding of the current state of digital marketing as well as an ability to anticipate future developments and foresee the cutting edge of digital culture. At DentaMarketing, we combine an adept approach to the developments of digital marketing with a personal approach to each of our clients. Our focus is delivering the results you and your practice need–results that reflect your skill and dedication to quality. DentaMarketing’s team of professionals uses their combined expertise to give you the best possible results in dental marketing, each and every time.