If you invest in a website, how will the right people find it? The Internet is enormous, with information available to people across the globe. Your audience, your target market, consists of a little piece of the globe, most likely. To ensure that your site is found by search engines, you need to begin with good keywords. Implementing those keywords in a well thought out, thorough SEO strategy will improve your site’s potential for being found by the right people.
Keywords are the words that your search engine specialists will use in the back-end structure of your website. They should also show up in your website copy (art doesn’t count) in strategic locations. The number of times words are used, combined with their location, links, and the rest of the content on a page, affect your site’s potential to be found in searches.
Choosing keywords is more than just guessing what you might search for if you were a patient, but that is a good place to begin. Your SEO company should consult with you on terms that you think are important. For instance, if you want more Invisalign cases, the word Invisalign should be a keyword, as should your name, practice name, location, and surrounding areas from which you pull patients.
When a person goes to Google and types in Invisalign dentist and your location, if those terms are keywords and you have a good SEO company, your site should show up in the results page – hopefully near the top. Keep in mind, many other dentists may be competing for the same terms, especially if you’re in a competitive area. Your overall SEO strategy and the longevity of your website on the same domain are factors in your “findability.”
Your site will need to be up for 3-6 months with a good SEO strategy before you begin to notice results in your reports. From those reports, your SEO specialist can refine your strategy to improve the potential for being found. A few things that will cripple your strategy: text in flash applications instead of live text (search engine spiders see the flash as a piece of artwork, not words), no text (all pictures), too many keywords on a page (this confuses the spiders), overhauling your website’s text, or a poor strategy from the start.
Some ethical issues come into play with keyword selection. If you don’t offer Lumineers, you should not use it as a keyword. Your state dental board, if they find out, could consider this tactic false advertising and misrepresentation. Furthermore, Lumineers might have a problem with it.
If you need search engine optimization for your dental website, check out TNTDental.com. Their full-service design, hosting, and support services cater specifically to dentists.