In this 5-minute read:
- Claim your online profiles
- Get and respond to reviews
- Boost your SEO
- Try Google Ads
Everyone needs a dentist, and thus, everyone is looking for a dentist in the main place that we all look for a new service: Google! Do you know where your dental practice stands against competitors on Google? Are you at the top of the search results or nowhere to be found?
Attract more patients and keep them loyal with reputation management software. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
There are plenty of ways to enhance your visibility online. Try promoting your dental practice on Google with these helpful techniques.
Claim your Google My Business listing
This is a must. Your Google My Business listing is what allows you to show up in the Google maps. It’s the first thing people see when they search for your practice or for dental services near them.
In order to get Google reviews, show your hours on Google, and share directions to your business with Google Maps, you need to have a Google My Business listing.
But don’t worry, it’s a pretty simple process, and it’s free!
Check out our guide: How to claim your Google business listing
Once you have your Google business listing created and claimed, be sure to add and keep the following information up to date:
- Business name
- Address
- Phone number
- Category (i.e. dentist, orthodontist, periodontist)
- Hours (update holiday hours regularly)
- Website
- Description
- Services
- Price range (if possible)
- Photos (at least include your logo and some pictures of the practice)
Get and respond to Google reviews
Now that your Google Business listing is claimed, you can start getting reviews. Online reviews are an integral part of any business as they help to convert customers, and they also help you show up better on Google.
Here are a few ways you can get new patient reviews:
- Provide exceptional customer service. People don’t leave reviews for mediocre experiences.
- Ask for reviews. Find opportunities when patients are happy with their experience and ask for a review on Google.
- Place “rate us on Google” signs in your office. Just don’t incentivize this by saying that you’ll enter anyone into a drawing or give them a gift card. That can get you penalized by Google.
- Try out reputation management software that allows you to send your patients personalized invitations to leave a review via text or email.
Make sure to always be working to get more reviews, because those who are researching you want to see recent reviews that show you are still the best around.
Claim other online listing profiles
Beyond Google, there are tons of other online directories just waiting for you to create a free profile for your dental practice. Creating and claiming more of these online profiles helps Google to verify your information across the multiple sources. This helps increase your opportunity to rank well in local online searches.
Important note: Be sure to keep the name of your business, address, and phone number (also known as NAP) the same across all of your online profiles. Any inconsistencies can cause confusion with Google and actually harm your rankings.
Here’s a great list of 25 free listings sites that every dental practice should be on to get you started.
Boost your website and Google Business listing with SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the strategy by which to help your website show up well organically in the search results on Google without paying for ads. There’s a ton that goes into this, and it’s awesome if you can get help from a professional agency that has experience with this.
But we have a few ways that you can boost your own SEO too:
- Write good content
Every SEO strategy starts with having good content on your website. Include individual pages for each of your services with information that is valuable to your patients. Write a monthly blog post with helpful tips about dental care. All of this will help improve your website’s authority with Google.
- Get other websites to link to yours
When another website links to your website, it says “we trust you.” Google recognizes that, and the more links that point to your website, the better opportunity you have to rank well in the search engines.
Try some of these ways to get links to your website:
- Get involved in the community. Sponsoring local sports teams and getting involved with non-profit organizations will likely result in them linking to you on their websites. Not to mention it’s great for public relations.
- If or when the local news does a story on your dental practice, ask them to link to your website in their online article.
- Write guest posts on blogs that are in the dental industry. Share your expertise with other professionals in your field and link back to your website within your author bio.
Go deeper: 15 free tips to improve local search rankings
Try out Google Ads
Google Ads allows you to show your dental clinic’s website at the top of Google’s search results. All you need to do is set up your ads, allocate a daily budget, and watch as the calls start coming in. With Google Ads, you pay for each click that your ads receive.
Ultimately, SEO can provide the greatest return on your marketing dollars, but it takes a long time to get a new website to show up organically in the search results, especially in a market as saturated as dentistry.
Google Ads are a great supplemental strategy to help you get some patients before your SEO efforts start to pay off.
One key thing to remember with Google Ads is that it can be an expensive strategy, so it’s good to make sure you’re getting a good return on your investment. Let’s say it costs $3 for each click that your ad gets, and you only convert a patient every 30 clicks. That’s $90 to acquire a new patient, but the lifetime value of that patient (or quite possibly even their first appointment) will be totally worth it.
Learn more: Google Maps advertising for local businesses
While this is definitely a lot of work, this is the way that business is going. In order to keep up with your competitors and acquire new patients, it will be important for your dental practice to have a good online presence.
Don’t want to do it all on your own? We get it. That’s why Womply has solutions for dental practices like reputation management software to help you manage your online listings and reviews so you can place your focus and energy on your patients. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!