More new patients
with

• better
• faster
• smarter

dental marketing and SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website for the keywords that are relevant to your dental practice. Done right, dental SEO can land you in those coveted top spots in the search engine results pages (SERPs). That means you’ll attract potential patients who are searching for a dentist like you. When a person is searching for a dentist in their location, they will type certain keywords that will lead them to a SERP. You want the people who are searching for a dentist in your location to find you—not your competitors. For example: A person may be looking for a general dentist in their area and may type this into Google: “top-rated dentist New York City.” Those keywords tell Google what the searcher is looking for, and Google will present dentists’ websites that most closely meet the person’s needs. Because Google uses keywords to find the right pages and websites, you need to use those same keywords on your website to tell Google that your site should be the first result when someone searches for a dentist in your location. Your content must be built with keywords and relevant information in mind. That way, when Google scans your content, your website ends up at the top of the SERP. A lot more goes into SEO than just optimizing for keywords, but that’s one of the main ways to show Google that your website is relevant to what a searcher is looking for.

The goal of dental SEO is to make it into the top three spots on the first page of results for relevant searches. You’re probably sick of seeing your competitors occupying those top spots. We’re here to tell you that you can knock them out of those spots and park your website there for good. Getting to that point is going to have a lot to do with the relevance and authority of your website. You want to be highly relevant and provide the best information in your area so you can get all of the leads the other guys are currently getting. Let’s look at how to gain authority for your website:

• The websites that make it into the top three in Google are typically the ones with the most trust and authority.
• There are tools that will actually give your website a trust score between 1 and 100.
• You can get a lot of trust and authority from backlinks from other websites.
• When you have a lot of good backlinks to your site, your site’s trust and authority improves. If you have bad backlinks, that can actually hurt your website.
• If your dental website has a strong link-building campaign, you’re going to be an easy contender for the top spots in the search results.

SEO is not an exact science, but ApricotDental can typically get a website to outrank its competition in five to eight months.

Of course! Give us a call at 877-491-6981 and we’ll be happy to send over references and proof of our clients’ successes. You shouldn’t just take our word—or any SEO company’s word—as evidence. First, you should check to see that an SEO company has ranked other websites in the top three in Google.

At ApricotDental, we’re proud to work with our clients to customize an SEO strategy that works for them, their market, and their budget. However, the right budget will make all the difference to your overall results. If your budget is too low for your market, you may not get the kind of results you’re looking for. If your budget is too high, you may not receive the return on investment you’re looking for. We can put together the right budget for you by analyzing the following:

• Your dental website’s current health and rankings
• Your website’s authority and relevance
• The competition in your market
• Link building currently in place

When you spend money on PPC marketing , you pay a very large amount for one click from an Internet user. Depending on the market you’re in and the competition for your keywords, you can pay $200 or more for one click. With organic rankings, on the other hand, you are receiving leads for a much lower cost. You will likely also convert more because organic rankings aren’t direct marketing. Someone is browsing for your services and finds you naturally, which makes the searcher feel more in control. They will feel more confident visiting your dental office if they were able to find you quickly and easily and you have a presence online. That tells your patients that you’re a well-known practice, and it makes them trust you . Many of our clients invest in organic campaigns and receive well over $100,000 worth of lead-generating traffic per month. To get the same amount of traffic via PPC, you would have to spend that much money, which is outside of most dentists’ monthly marketing budgets.

Your dental SEO keyword campaign is incredibly important to converting Internet users into patients. When a potential patient searches a competitive keyword in your area, you want them to find your office. Your competitors want exactly the same thing. We combine competitive keywords with fast-ranking phrases to get your website to shine in the SERPs. For instance, a competitive keyword phrase in your market might be “NYC root canal dentist.” A fast-ranking phrase might look something like this: “Where can I get an affordable root canal in NYC?” We do extensive keyword research to find the top phrases and keywords searchers use for your location and practice area. We create lists of commonly searched phrases and keywords, and we base that list on relevance, competition, click-through rate, conversion rate, and search volume. Usually, we start our keyword campaigns with about sixty top-searched dentist keywords, and then we increase your campaign to include additional keywords and phrases over time. Several of our clients have over 500 search terms, and we often get over 95 percent of their keywords and phrases to rank in the top ten search results.

The time it takes for your website’s pages to load does play a role in rankings because Google believes that a fast-loading landing page improves the user’s experience. However, a slower-loading page with great metrics will beat a page with weak metrics that loads a little faster. At ApricotDental, we code all of our websites manually, rather than using themes like some other dental SEO companies do. Our homepages load in 1.5 seconds or less, and our internal pages load in under 800 milliseconds.

Untold hours of research have gone into figuring out how to convert a person who is searching for a service into a customer or patient. Various factors will help convince a person that you are the dentist they want to see. Here are just a few of the key ways our dentist digital marketing team will convert Google users into patients:

• Pleasing, Clean Dental Website Design – Create a beautiful and visually pleasing website design that instantly puts users at ease and lets them know you care about your business. If you care about your website, that shows people that you care about your dental practice and your patients, too.
• Build Trust – Instantly show users that you’re the real deal with an above-the-fold design that incorporates your badges, certifications, testimonials, and awards.
• Incorporate a Clear Call to Action – Ensure that users can make the call to your dental office with the click or tap of a button. Display text that tells them how to reach you and what they gain by calling you, such as a free dental examination or discounted teeth whitening.

That’s only the beginning. Other factors that help us convert your website visitors include A/B testing, button colors, step forms, heat maps, eye-tracking, and attention to visual hierarchy. Nothing excites us more than converting website visitors into dental patients. We are always thinking up new ways to improve conversion rates for our dental clients. You could say we’re obsessed with it.

No. None of our clients’ sites have been penalized, although we have saved many sites that had been penalized before they came to us. We avoid Google penalties because we are focused on the two most important ingredients of SEO for dentists: relevance and authority. The most important thing your SEO company can do to get your dental practice to rank is provide engaging, high-quality content, build relevant and authoritative backlinks, and follow clean on-page SEO practices. When you do that, you won’t run the risk of being penalized.

For us, getting organic Google rankings for you is out priority—we’re here for it. Every member of our team is focused on providing you with what you need exactly when you need it. We believe in being ultra-focused on every aspect of a client’s campaign, and we want you to be the best-ranking dentist website in your market as badly as you do. We only sign one client per city per dental practice area. This exclusivity allows us to put all of our effort into making you the top-ranking dentist in town. Our goal when signing a client is to keep that client forever.

Having your dental practice included in directories is helpful for SEO purposes. Being included in directories lends location authority to your website, which makes it a lot easier for searchers to find you in a local search for “dentist near me.” That’s why we’ll get you into the highest-quality dentist directories.

This is a great question, but it’s difficult to answer. We tailor our process to meet the needs of each client, which means that you will receive a lot of personalized attention along the way. Here are the basics:

• First, we get to know you and what your goals are. For instance, will you be wanting an entirely new website or an overhaul of an existing website?
• Next, we need to analyze your website—find out where your online presence currently stands and what types of leads you’re getting now. Then, we’ll compare your website to your top competitors’ sites.
• We will also need to analyze your market and start on your keyword campaign.

There are many more steps that go into building a customized SEO strategy for dentists. Even before you sign a contract with us, we will analyze your website and your competition,and identify ways we can help you win online in your dental market.

We have the best designers and developers, and we’re so proud of the beautiful websites we’ve created for our clients. If you’d like to see some examples, we’ll be happy to send some over for your review. We’re sure you’ll love them as much as we do. Our designers and developers are always learning about the newest techniques, and they’re working hard to make our clients’ websites and pages load faster, convert better, and become more user-friendly than ever before. For more information on how we take a design from concept to launch, call 877-491-6981 or fill out the contact form below.

Backlinks are the links that connect to your site from other sites. Backlinks are more important than ever to SEO for dental offices. Here’s a simple way of looking at backlinks: Each link pointing at your website is like a vote for your website. It tells Google that your website is important enough to rank well. But your backlinks can’t just come from anywhere. In fact, backlinks from low-quality websites will hurt your digital marketing efforts. That’s why we build backlinks for our clients on authoritative and trustworthy sites. As your backlinks increase over time, so will your top three and number one rankings.

We are proud to employ staff writers dedicated to providing high-quality content and blog posts for our clients’ websites. Our experienced dental content writers know how to write content that ranks, engages, and converts. Our writers and editors are some of the best in the business, so you can rest assured that you’ll receive error-free landing pages with engaging content that will convert readers into patients.

ApricotDental is a company of full-time employees who are dedicated to our clients’ needs. We only outsource two tasks:

• We have a virtual assistant who handles some repetitive tasks like copying and pasting.
• We hire freelance photographers in our clients’ locations to take photos for their websites.

The ApricotDental team completes all other work, including strategic planning, reporting, content writing, design, development, publishing, SEO, link building, social media, ad retargeting, PPC campaigns, lead tracking, directory profile building, and general analysis.

Our dentist website SEO overhaul process goes much further than just changing some meta tags and headings. Nick Kringas, our on-page dentist SEO specialist, has a website overhaul checklist of over thirty key items to adjust on your dental site. Our technical SEO specialist also goes through your entire website to reoptimize pages so they suit your new digital marketing campaign. Great attention to detail is crucial during the SEO overhaul stage—as is the desire to win online, which is one thing your SEO team has in abundance.

Tom Desmond and Nick Kringas co-own ApricotDental. They also work for the company and make themselves available for clients. Your marketing budget pays for excellent work done by a highly skilled team of individuals—your hard-earned money isn’t going to a faceless board or group of company investors.

Dental experience isn’t necessary to win in the dental SEO market. Our SEO experts have extensive knowledge and experience in digital marketing, and we focus on doing what we do best—getting more patients for you. It is necessary for our dental content writers and editors to do extensive research and fact-checking, however. That’s a built-in part of our process. We take every word we publish on your website and fact-check it. Then we check it again.

Lack of communication between SEO companies and clients is a problem that plagues the digital marketing industry. That’s why we have a designated client success manager whose focus is on communicating with clients. Kellen Bachman knows dental SEO, and he will be your go-to when you need information about your campaign. We’ve developed a communication strategy to keep out clients informed through every step of their campaigns. Here are some of the ways Kellen will keep you informed:

• You can contact him at any time. He will be there to hear your concerns or complaints because we truly want to give you what you need.
• He will walk you through every step of our processes regarding your website and SEO strategy, explaining each phase so you fully understand what your money is buying you.
• Kellen will describe future strategies so you always know what’s on the horizon for your website and your campaign.

Kellen is our designated client communicator, but you can still reach out to the owners or anyone else on the team. We are all available to hear your ideas, concerns, or suggestions. Your feedback enables us to make your dentist SEO campaign even better.