Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the backbone of any online marketing strategy. It makes any size and scale of business visible to its prospective online customers.
If your website fails to rank well on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, then you may not receive much online traffic.
Because most consumers turn to search engines such as Google for information, even an offline or “Brick and Mortar” business will be affected by poor organic rankings.
No matter what type of business you run, you simply can’t ignore the significance of SEO. This holds true even for dentists.
Read on to learn seven important reasons why your dental office needs SEO.
Stay A Step Ahead of Competitors
Let’s assume that you have no idea what SEO is. Let’s also assume that your dental office is the best in your region.
But what if we told you that your closest competitors are investing heavily in SEO?
As a good business owner or manager, you must identify the weapons that your competitors are using to get a leg up on you. Then, figure out a smarter way to do the same and use it against them.
Bottom Line: If your direct competitors are investing in SEO, you should as well.
Increase Online Traffic and Conversions
As we mentioned previously, SEO helps dentists enhance their visibility to prospective patients or clients.
If you are managing your website on your own, you very well could miss out on a huge chunk of your prospective patients because of two reasons:
- You may not have the expertise to know what to post, when to post it, and which keywords to target with your content marketing
- You may not know how to blend visual and static content in order to attract new online traffic, to retain visitors, and to persuade them to convert into loyal customers
“The best way to ensure you have this expertise at your disposal is by outsourcing SEO to an expert.
Such experts will help optimize your website, enhance your content efforts, and do everything else that is needed to appeal to your target market,” according to the SEO experts of Tactica.
Defend Your Online Reputation
As a rule of thumb, prospective dental patients are likely to trust online reviews more than anything else.
If your competitor goes rogue and decides to tarnish your reputation online, you may have a hard time convincing your target market otherwise.
With an SEO expert managing your content, you will be confident that any malicious online attack from your competitors will be countered quickly and successfully.
Addressing concerns without delay is the best way to maintain and grow your brand reputation.
Prioritize Activities: Bring In Help If Needed
As important as SEO is for your dental office, it isn’t the only thing you have to tend to.
You still have IT issues to think about, staff to manage, meetings to attend, and patients to treat.
Even if you are experienced with SEO, find someone else to do it for you. Then, you can concentrate on the core business of your dental office.
It would be counterproductive to spend too much time on SEO to the detriment of other operations. After all, you still have to serve those new patients and run the office if you want them to become repeat customers.
About Managing Your Social Media
If you haven’t realized this yet, social media is a must for any type of business these days.
Businesses which gain a massive following on the main social platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) attract higher volumes of traffic to their websites. As your traffic grows, you should be able to increase revenues over time.
But that’s not all! With a good social media strategy, you should also benefit by increasing loyalty among existing customers.
Loyalists advocate for your clinic to their friends and peers without it costing you a dime. This type of brand advocacy will help you succeed even more with your digital marketing efforts.
All of these benefits are there for the taking. Start out the right way, and bring in an SEO expert to get your SEO strategy off the ground faster and more successfully.
Lower Your Overhead
If you take SEO seriously and bring in the right SEO person, you’ll benefit with reduced overall costs of running your business.
First, with an SEO expert in your corner, you will no longer need in-house web management and content development teams.
An outsourced team can handle all of these areas at a much lower cost than you’ll have to invest when hiring full time employees to do it (not to mention the management time you’ll have to invest in keeping those employees happy, motivated, and heading in the right direction).
Second, such an expert knows exactly who to target with your content, either on the website or via social media. This will reduce your advertising budget by focusing your spend on the right audiences from the start.
Third, your SEO expert will help you avoid accidentally adopting any black hat SEO techniques. Such techniques are often expensive, can get you in trouble with the search engines, and can really mess your finances up.
Become a Global Authority in Your Niche
As we said earlier, modern dental patients want to collect information online before contacting you. It will take more than a pretty website to woo them into becoming a patient.
You need to explain your services and products and also ensure that that information reaches them.
And how do you make sure it reaches them? You have to rank for the keywords they use when searching for a new dentist!
- What information do most people want that is related to the dental industry?
- Which keywords do they search for?
- Which answers do they actually need?
An SEO expert will help you answer these questions, and then help you appear when prospects search for any of them.
Even if you don’t manage to close 100% of those prospects, you still benefit from ranking by positioning yourself as an authority in your niche locally. And if you are recognized globally, your local competitors will never have a chance against you!
And who knows, you may wish to expand your practice globally later in life.
This pre-acquired authority will come in handy when that day finally arrives.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain, sourced from pxhere.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Rilind Elezaj
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