Link Building for Dentists
If you’ve been trying to learn more about SEO for dentists, you have more than likely come across the terms “link building” and “backlinks.” These terms are a big part of every SEO expert’s vocabulary.
But what if you’re not an SEO expert? What is link building for dentists, and how important is it to your overall digital marketing efforts?
ApricotDental is here to help. We know a strong link building campaign—one that includes diverse backlinks from authoritative and trustworthy websites—is a key part of outranking your competition and getting more patients through your doors. And we know how to build one for you.
The Nutritional Value of Backlinks for Dental Websites
We like to explain backlinks with a metaphor: Backlinks are like food for your website. Some backlinks are good, and they can make your website healthy and strong. Some backlinks are bad, and they can weaken your website’s performance.
More literally, backlinks are links to your dental website included in content on other websites. The process of getting more of these links over time is called link building.
The links on other sites that point to your site are like votes for your website. They tell Google that yours is a website to be trusted—one that deserves to rank well.
Backlinks Can Be Bad
Here’s the problem: You can’t just build backlinks on any website. Some dentist SEO companies engage in shady link building strategies like publishing links in less-than-trustworthy online forums or on sites that have nothing to do with dentistry.
Those efforts may provide a temporary boost in your rankings, but they’re also a one-way ticket to getting penalized by Google. Shady link building can easily get your site thrown out of the rankings game completely.
That’s why we only build backlinks on trustworthy, authoritative, proven websites.
What Makes a Good Backlink?
Backlinks that come from high-quality sources boost the authority of your website. That’s a huge factor in how well your site ranks for high-value dental searches on Google.
Several factors determine the quality of a backlink, and we give each of these factors proper attention when we build links for dentists.
Domain and Page Authority
The strength of websites can be rated on a scale of 1 to 100 in terms of domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA).
When building links to your dentist website, you’re going to want backlinks from pages with high PA. These are the types of links we get for our clients.
Trust Flow
Trust flow (TF) is a metric that assesses the trustworthiness of a given website by looking at the quality of its backlinks.
Build links to your site from sites that have a high TF score, and your own site’s TF will increase.
Relevance
If a movie review website is publishing content with links to a dental website, it’s going to look suspicious. That’s because it doesn’t make any sense—that backlink wouldn’t be relevant to your dental site.
When it comes to link building, relevance matters. You’ll need plenty of backlinks from dentistry-related websites with high TF scores.
Diversity
Diversity is a key component to a strong backlink profile. That means you need links to your dental website from a number of different types of websites, such as local directories, dental directories, Web 2.0s, social media, press releases, guest posts, and blogs, among others.
Focus and Authority
When a link to your site appears on a page on another website, you want your link to be one of just a handful of links on that page. If the page links to hundreds of other sites, the power of that particular backlink for your website is diminished.
On top of that, you’re going to want the sites that link to your site to have plenty of authoritative links pointing at them.
Velocity
Link velocity refers to the speed at which your site gains backlinks. Google isn’t going to like your site very much if you have a suspicious link velocity.
For example, if you only get fifty visitors to your site each month, it’s going to look suspicious if you get 100 backlinks. Likewise, if your site has had only a handful of backlinks for years and suddenly spikes to hundreds, Google is going to think you’re cheating the system.
Anchor Text
The text that contains the hyperlink is called “anchor text.” Search engines read this text and analyze it. You want to have a diverse array of types of anchor text, from exact-match keyword anchor text to branded and naked URL anchor text.
How to Get Great Backlinks for Your Dental Website
Link building is just one factor among many that affect dentist SEO, but it’s a big one. The SEO experts at ApricotDental know how to build the best links in the business, and we’re ready to do that for you.
That’s because we love link building for dentists, and we love to help dentists beat and outrank their competition. Interested in learning more? Give us a call at 877-491-6981 or fill out the online contact form below.