Glossary of terms; SEO and dental websites

When you run a dental surgery, your role is likely to be based on ensuring that all of your patients receive high-quality care and that your staff are performing their work to a high standard.

So, you probably don’t have the time to be worried about things like marketing, search engine optimisation and other parts of attracting new patients to your surgery. Of course, this is a concern for many dental websites, as the majority will need to attract at least 20-50 new patients a week to keep expanding and thriving.

In this instance, you need to contact a marketing team that is experienced in dental websites. That way, you can focus on your area of expertise, and they can focus on theirs. Be aware that they will need your input, so you and your team will need to have a brainstorming session on the types of patients you will want to attract with your dental SEO.

It is also wise to be familiar with exactly what your marketing team will mean when discussing these plans with you. So, here is a very short, very simplified article breaking down some of the keywords linked to marketing, SEO and what the majority of marketing companies will offer you. Enjoy!

Google bots

Your marketing team will talk a lot about Google bots.

What are they? In simple terms, they are internet trawlers that scan websites looking for information. Suppose there is a dental patient who is looking for information about dental implants. They will go onto Google and type in a phrase like ‘dental implants near me’, which will then prompt the Google bots to begin searching. Scanning millions of web pages a second, looking for these keywords, they are what you want to attract to your dental surgery page.

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation is the method of how you will attract the aforementioned Google bots. This will involve having the keywords that are being searched for placed on your website within unique, plagiarism-free content and having a webpage that is quick to load and is also mobile accessible and optimised.

Mobile accessibility

This is a big part of any SEO and marketing program. Your dental surgery page needs to be mobile accessible as, if it isn’t, you will likely be losing out on a lot of potential website traffic. In short, people who are using smartphones and tablets need to be able to load their dental surgery page on these devices. If they can’t, your page will drop in the rankings.

Rankings

Rankings are the system by which the search engines like Google list websites.

In short, having a higher ranking will mean that more people are likely to see your webpage when they search for keywords. The rankings on a search engine page are dependent on the SEO, such as the speed of the site loading, the mobile optimisation and the uniqueness of the content.

Voice searches

Have you heard someone say ‘hey Siri’ on a smartphone? This is a voice search, and in 2022, as many as 40-50% of searches are being conducted this way. So, your marketing team will want to optimise the content on your surgery page to have a format that is more compatible with these kinds of searches.

DISCLAIMER OFFSITE

Any surgical or invasive procedure carries risks. Before proceeding you should seek a second opinion from an appropriately qualified health practitioner.