FAQ
frequently asked questions
Dental SEO is the practice of building an online presence and making the website of a dental practice rank high on Google. Its primary goal is visibility. When your website is the first thing people see when they search for dentists in their area, they are most likely to visit it, read about your dental services, get your contact information, and call to schedule a consultation.
There is, however, a challenge: dental SEO is becoming increasingly crowded. Many dentists have become aware of the benefits of search engine optimization and have taken advantage of it to market their dental services.
The average American adult spends nearly six hours a day connected to the Internet. That’s almost six hours of exposure to digital content that could influence their daily activities, including buying behaviors. Skipping on SEO would mean missing out on the potential for a lot of cost-effective marketing.
The best time to start with your dental practice SEO is as soon as possible. If you could start today, do it. The longer you wait, the bigger the head start you’re giving to your competitors.
How Much Should You Invest in Dental SEO?
For almost all dental practices, it’s a must to include dental SEO into your overall dental digital marketing strategy. It’s important to target the keywords that patients use on Google to find a local dentist and make sure that your content is in line with your SEO. All this hard work takes time and effort and doesn’t come cheap especially if you’re going to do it ethically without any black hat techniques. Before choosing a dental SEO company, you need to determine what sort of investment is needed to successfully achieve first page rankings on Google.
Dental SEO investment depends on many factors such as:
- How competitive is your local area?
- Your current ranking status in Google.
- How much good content do you have and how often do you update it?
- The quality of your content compared to your competition
- The number of backlinks that you currently have
- The number of high quality citations you have
- The age of your domain or website
Ranking on Google takes time and continuous effort to keep up with the algorithm changes, not to mention that your competitors are also optimizing their websites to compete for the same terms. That’s why we recommend a minimum commitment of 6-12 months to start seeing real placements on Google. You need to be financially prepared and patient with this journey in order to achieve the desired results.
The goal of a reputable dental SEO company is to show improvement in rankings, traffic and conversions on a monthly basis. At Zivvy, we pride ourselves with being able to show our dental clients constant improvement in rankings in their specific keywords using custom SEO plans designed based on your current market.
Search engine optimization is the practice of improving website rankings on SERPs using various methods such as content marketing and link building. This can dramatically boost your online profile and visibility. A successful dental SEO company can help your dental office be viewed as an authority in the dentistry industry and will be among the first to appear on the SERP (search engine results pages) whenever someone searches for dentistry related terms. These are some ways in which SEO can improve your dental practice:
- Improve your Online Presence — Dental SEO can help increase your website traffic by directing visitors to your website when someone is searching for dental-related terms or keywords.
- Optimizing your site — an important factor of any dental SEO campaign is making sure that your website has an attractive design and is also user friendly. This way your future clients will stay on your website longer and you’ll generate more conversions.
- Increase your Website’s Authority — if your website is seen as an authority voice in the dental field, it will show up higher in the search engine results. Dental SEO can help boost your website’s authority and boost your rankings.
- Increase the number of new patients — once all the above steps are taken, you will notice a tremendous increase in the number of new patients looking for your dental services because they found you online.
ROI or return on investment is calculated based on how much you spent on your dental office SEO campaign versus how successful the campaign was. It’s the difference between your dental SEO cost and new revenue generated.
You must calculate your company financials after carefully mapping out your marketing campaign in order to expect a decent return on your investment. You should get more revenue out of your dental office SEO campaign than what you spent on it in total.
However, you should have realistic expectations that are relative to the size of your business, a small or mid-sized business will not have the same increase in clientele as a large business. You should expect a significant ROI that matches the size of your business.
An SEO campaign is a marathon, not a sprint. It usually takes a few months before seeing any significant increase in website traffic. However, that shouldn’t stop you from continuing your dental office SEO campaign. A good dental SEO plan can take time to optimize your website and then to have the search engines notice the work that has been done to it. It can take weeks before you notice any changes and months before significant results become apparent.
- It can take some time for the search engines to crawl through your optimized website and recognize it as an authority in dentistry.
- Patience is important — You should be patient when running a dental SEO campaign even if you don’t notice immediate results. However, once your website gets some rankings on SERPs the results will be amazing.
- Results are marked by two major metrics: Higher SERP rankings and a Steady increase in new patients
- Your Website traffic will eventually reach stability — this is when you don’t see a continuing increase as the traffic will remain steady. This is when your campaign will be all about maintenance.
For your dental practice to reap the full benefits of SEO, you need a dental marketing company that can deliver the results you’re hoping to get:
- More new patients
- More returning patients
- More inquiries on your dental services
- More requests for a dental check-up
- A more robust online presence
- Improved online reputation
Landing you on the first page of the SERPs is the first primary goal; and once we achieve it, we move on to bigger and more rewarding targets.
We don’t focus on vanity metrics like keyword volume, page views, pages-per-visit, or backlink volume. We pay attention to more important things instead, like search term volumes, visitor profile, engagement, and quality backlinks, and of course, New Patients.
It’s better for your dental practice’s bottom line to get fewer site visits that all end with requests for a dental check-up instead of thousands of visits, but only a handful of inquiries and walk-ins. More than website traffic, you need high-quality visitors who’re most likely to become your next patient or recommend your practice to their friends and colleagues.
There’s more to your dental office SEO than meets the eye. With Zivvy as your service provider, however, you don’t have to worry. We keep you in the know and update you on the status of your campaign regularly.
Dental SEO campaigns usually run at least 6 months if you want any real chance of generating good results in terms of first page ranking, increased traffic and a flow of new patients.
Most dental marketing companies will usually have you commit to at least a 6-month agreement for dental SEO services. This is because good dental SEO companies can spend a lot of time doing research not only on your website, but on your competitor website, as well as doing lengthy keyword research studies. All this time is invested up front so that the campaign has the best chance for success. As they say, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
At Zivvy, we will usually require at least a 6 month contract….However, this isn’t written in stone. We always give you the option of discontinuing any SEO service plan with just a 30-day written notice. This ensures that if we have already started on producing the deliverables, at least we can finish with them and hand them off to you in a clean slate. It wouldn’t make sense for us to lock you into a service that you didn’t want to be in. We wouldn’t like it if a company did it to us (don’t even get me started on phone companies) so we don’t do it to you.
Most SEO projects cost between $1000-$4,000/month based on the features and locations of each campaign.
At Zivvy, we customize our dental SEO plans depending on what our clients need. To give you a ballpark idea, our plans typically start at $995 /month and our average monthly SEO package is about $1995 /month. Of course, If you have multiple offices, it could be higher because you would be targeting different locations
