First, the map
For “dentist near me”, “emergency dentist” or a treatment and a town, the three practices on the map sit above the list of websites, placed mainly by how closely each profile matches the search, the distance to the office, and the practice’s reviews and the links pointing to its site.
So the first work in dental SEO is each office’s profile, with the right category, every treatment in its services and a link to the office’s page, which the Google Business Profile guide for dentists sets out field by field. With it goes a review request after every visit, which dental reputation management sets up, and the office page the profile links to, which local SEO for dentists covers.
Then, a page for each treatment
A patient weighing implants or Invisalign reads practice pages before calling anyone, so every treatment you want more patients for needs its own page, written from what your dentists say: the dental SEO keyword guide lists the searches for each, and dental content marketing covers what the page says and who checks it. Each office page also carries dental schema markup, a block in the page’s code that describes the office to Google.
Then, links from local sites
Google counts the websites that link to a practice toward how well known it is. The links worth having come from sites people in your town already read: the local paper that covered the practice, a community event your dentists took part in, a school where one of them gave a talk. Links bought in a package break Google’s spam policies and put the site at risk.
What to leave out
Monthly blog posts on brushing and flossing are read by people with no appointment to book. A directory package adds listings nobody reads, while the few directories patients use, such as Healthgrades, Zocdoc and your insurers’ dentist finders, only need to be right. Pages for towns where you have no office are doorways under Google’s spam policies.
How long dental SEO takes
The profile moves first: Google reviews most edits within ten minutes, and a few take up to 30 days. Once an office has done its verification steps, Google takes up to five business days to review them, and most postcard codes arrive within two weeks. Reviews add up with every visit. A new treatment page takes months, because Google has to find it, show it for its searches and see patients choose it.
Google’s own advice is to give a change a few weeks before judging it. Judge the profile by the calls and direction requests in its Performance report, and the pages by the searches they appear for in Search Console, which show up before the clicks do. Those are the numbers to ask a dental SEO company for, office by office.
Groups and specialists
A group follows the same order office by office, and DSO SEO covers doing it across many offices at once. An orthodontic practice counts consultations and started cases, and orthodontist SEO covers what changes for a specialist.
Bing
Bing SEO for dentists is two imports. Import each office’s Google Business Profile into Bing Places for Business, which puts the offices on Bing’s map with their names, hours and phone numbers, and import the site from Search Console into Bing Webmaster Tools, which verifies it and brings its sitemaps. Bing ranks the same pages, so there is nothing separate to write for it.