Keywords are an integral part of your dental SEO campaign.
If you’re not using the right keywords, you’re not going to be attracting the right traffic to your website.
Without the right traffic, you won’t be seeing the increase in patients that you want or need.
How can you tell if you’re not using the right keywords?
How do you pick the right keywords?
And how do you use those keywords effectively?
Here’s what you need to know:
How to Tell If You Are Using the Wrong Keywords
It’s impossible to tell how effective your keywords are going to be when you first start the search engine optimization campaign for your dental office.
It’s possible to predict which keywords will do well and which won’t, but if you jump into the process blinding, simply picking keywords that you hope will bring you the kind of traffic you want makes it very difficult to know whether or not those keywords are right for you.
Here are a few of the tell-tale signs that you are using the wrong keywords:
1. You aren’t seeing a page ranking increase.
The number one reason to implement a SEO campaign for your office is to improve your page ranking on search engines like Google and Bing.
If your page ranking is seeing little or no fluctuation, your keywords clearly aren’t working.
Of course, you have to give your SEO some time to work—you probably won’t see a meteoric rise overnight—but no changes over the course of a month or two means your keywords are dead on arrival.
2. You are not seeing increased page traffic.
Your search engine page ranking (SERP) is not the only metric by which you should measure the efficacy of your keywords.
You might still be lingering on the third or fourth page of Google, but if you are seeing page traffic, you must be doing something right.
On the other hand, you might be seeing yourself rise through the page rankings, but not actually seeing much improvement when it comes to traffic.
The wrong keywords will bring the wrong kind of searchers to your link.
This means they are unlikely to click on that link, and therefore unlike to view your webpage.
3. You are seeing page traffic but you are seeing very few new patients.
Say, just for the convenience of using round numbers, that you are seeing 1000 new visitors to your website every month, most of which are being directed to your webpage through organic search results.
Out of those 1000 new visitors, only 1 is actually calling a making an appointment with you.
While there are many factors that can affect your conversion rate, the wrong keywords that send the wrong traffic to your webpage is one of the most common factors.
In short, the wrong keywords will not improve your page ranking, will not increase your page traffic, and will not promote conversions.
How Can I Tell If I Am Using the Right Keywords?
Identifying the right keywords can be just as difficult as identifying the wrong ones, especially when you are just starting to implement a SEO campaign.
In general, the right keywords will have the following three factors: they will be specific and relevant, they will have low competition, and they will have high search volume.
Keywords that are specific and relevant almost always meet the other two criteria.
For example, an example of the “wrong” keyword for your dentist office would be “dentist.”
Not only is every other office in your area going to be optimizing for that keyword, every other office in the world is going to use that keyword.
You’ll be buried by other offices.
Plus, there are very few people that get online and just type the word “dentist” into a search engine.
An example of a better keyword might be, “root canal in Philadelphia.”
What makes this keyword better?
First, it is specific and relevant.
Optimizing for this keyword will bring you people who are looking for root canals in Philadelphia (or whatever procedure you provide, in your specific locale).
Second, more people are likely to be using search terms like this.
Why?
Because this eliminates the possibility that they will have to sift through webpages for dentists that can’t provide root canals.
Third, this keyword will have less competition than more generalized keywords, as fewer offices may offer this procedure, but largely because fewer offices will think to optimize for these more specific keywords.
How to Effectively Use the Right Keywords
Once you’ve selected a gauntlet of keywords that better meet the needs of your office’s SEO campaign and your overall goals, it’s time to start implementing those keywords so they are effective.
The key to properly implementing these keywords is to think broadly.
Keyword stuffing is a giant red flag for search engines, so don’t do it.
Instead, make sure to incorporate your keywords as naturally as possible into your content.
Blogs give you the opportunity to incorporate a wider range of keywords, in larger bodies of content than you might want to have on your website itself.
Blogs also give you the opportunity to continually update your webpage and to increase its content mass.
Because Google (and other search engines) prefer websites that are large and that have fresh content, a blog that is updated regularly with new, helpful, and keyword rich content should be a large part of your implementation strategy.
Finding and using the right keywords doesn’t have to be hard.
It can be made easier by partnering with an online development company that understands your goals or by using any of the many online keyword research and evaluation tools available to you.