SEO Ranking Guide - Dental Clinics

In this post I'm going explain how to rank dental clinics on Google. I've learned a lot from the people here and I've tried my best to give advice where I can to other members, so I thought I'd create some content to help other SEOs with their client work and regular business owners who don't have the budget to hire a professional but still want to improve their rankings on Google.

That being said, I thought it would be good to make a series of guides based on real website examples - I'll pick a real website that isn't performing well on Google, figure out what they're doing wrong and provide insight on what they need to be doing to grow their business using SEO. For this example, we're going to tackle a local dental client. I've simply picked a random location with a random website that isn't doing well organically.

Target Location: San Jose, California
Business Category: Dental
Business Name: Quality Dental Care SJ
Software/Services Used: Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Surfer Local

Current SEO Audit

The first thing I'd do is perform a quick audit on the current setup. This is local SEO so we need to be looking at local searches and GMB (Google My Business). GMB is very important for local businesses, when a potential customer types in terms like "family dentist", above the organic search results local businesses will appear in the "map pack", which is a map with 3 featured businesses, with shows relevant business information such as opening times, reviews and contact details, as well as buttons to call the business or visit their website.

GMB Listing

I'm using Surfer Local to perform a grid search for keywords related to the business. What Surfer Local does is simulates a search in the service area of the business in many spots to fetch the ranking for the business. The results are displayed as a grid - each small circle contains the current ranking in that area and the radius around the circle is depended on the difficulty of improving the situation (green = easy, orange = medium, red = hard). What we want is a ranking between #1-3, which would place us in the map pack for that search result.

The way to rank well in GMB is by filling out all the information you can, collect regular reviews from customers, create regular GMB posts with relevant updates and create local citations. However, one of the #1 ranking factors is the location of the business - the closer you are to the searcher, the better chance of showing.

Here's the results of my local search for "dentist" in the area around the clinic.

https://imgur.com/3hVsRCS

In the direct area around the clinic itself they rank #1 and #3 for the keyword. Further than that, there's a lot of room for improvement. In Surer Local we can run an "Audit" on every circle that appears in the results. This audit will take into account competitor listings and provide you with suggestions to outrank them.

After I ran an audit on the circles, several few issues were spotted:

• The business description is missing.
• There are no GMB posts.
• A lot of time between reviews (and lack of responses to reviews)
• Secondary categories are missing which could be added.

Current Local Citations

The second thing I did was run a search on Moz Local's listing checker. This tool allows you to search for a business and it'll check socials, directories & GNV for your listing and check for NAP consistency. NAP, which stands for Name, Address, Phone Number, is very important for local SEO. You need to make sure every single mention of your business across the web is consistent with NAP - if you have any of it different, Google may not make the connection. When you create these mentions on the web, they are called local citations.

Here's the results of the scan I ran:

https://imgur.com/OfasEsY

Not very good. 54% of sites searched don't have a listing for the business, 42% have a listing but they are inconsistent (name, address or phone number may be different or formatted different) and only 4% correct.

Overall, a lot to be improved there.

Website

The website itself is fine. A website does not need to be a work of art to rank, it just needs to have decent internal linking, a good amount of quality content (with keyword research in mind), be relatively fast and have some authority (through backlinks).

Some problems with the current website:

• Keyword research needs done
• Page speed could be improved
• Content is a thin on pages
• Page titles/h1 tags/alt text could be optimized

I ran the website through Screaming Frog, which is a tool that crawls websites and returns a lot of useful information like the indexability of pages, the crawl depth, the amount of words on the pages, along with h1/h2/h3 tags etc, the schema on pages as well as a lot more.

From the scan, there aren't any glaring issues. If you check the right side of the tool and click the "Structure" tab, there's a window called "Crawl Depth" just below it. This is how many clicks a visitor needs to get to all the pages on the site, the higher the number, the more effort the Google crawler needs to find the content on your site. You only have a limited crawl budget, so this is important to get right. I recommend requiring no more than 3 clicks to get to every page on your site. This can be achieved by having good internal linking, either through a main navigation menu that links to the majority of your pages, or at least linking to parent pages like "Treatments" and on that main page linking to the internal treatment pages.

Backlinks & Authority

If you want to rank well on Google then you want to make sure you have a good backlink profile. If you have solid backlinks from local directories, local news websites, industry specific sites and in general higher authority sites than you, this is passing authority to your website. For this, quality is better than quantity - if you buy 1000 links from fiverr, you're not going to see any positive impact. One good link is worth more than 10,000 bad ones.

Dofollow links are what matter the most here (although having a mixture between nofollow and dofollow is recommended) as they are the links that authority will flow through.

It's also worth mentioning that you should focus on referring domains when analysis the current link profile, not the total # of backlinks. If a website links to you more than once it's not going to improve much further, the goal is the total number of quality sites linking to you rather than getting multiple from the same site.

In Ahrefs "Site Explorer" the website has a domain rank of 0 and 23 total referring domains. Only 4 of them are dofollow and 2 are useless & spammy. The remaining 2 are directory links.

SEO Work

Step 1: Keyword Research

The first step is actually coming up with a plan of keywords, or search terms, that we want to target. Having a site that's beautiful and optimized is great, but if it's focusing on keywords that don't get any traffic then it's all for nothing.

The way I start keyword research is to search "dentist [city name]", make note of top results and run them through site explorer to see the keywords they rank for. In this case, I searched "dentist san jose ca" and made note of the first page results and ran them through the site explorer tool to look at their keywords.

From that, I came out with the following keywords:
"dentist san jose" - 400 searches per month
"dentist in san jose" - 150 searches per month
"dentist san jose ca" - 70 searches per month
"family dentist san jose" - 20 searches per month
"san jose dental implant" - 50 searches per month
"dental implants san jose ca" - 80 searches per month
"dental implants san jose" - 60 searches per month
"cosmetic dentist san jose" - 100 searches per month
"san jose cosmetic dentistry" - 70 searches per month
"teeth cleaning san jose" - 200 searches per month
"veneers san jose" - 20 searches per month
"emergency dentist san jose" - 100 searches per month
"teeth whitening san jose" - 200 searches per month
"tooth whitening san jose" - 150 searches per month
"braces san jose" - 40 searches per month

A lot of the tools are usually conservative with their estimates - I find the real number is usually higher. You'll also find that some low volume keywords might not have much data available.

Some of these keywords will be secondary keywords, in that you'll mention them in the website content, either within paragraphs, alt text or heading tags, but the main keyword is what you'll use in the page title and h1.

Also, please look at the search results for these keywords and check the search intent before targeting them. The keyword "best dentist san jose" gets 350 searches per month but every result is a "Top 10 Dentists in San Jose" type page - you aren't going to rank for that.

Step 2: Content Planning

Now that we have keywords to target, now we need to make use of them. A good way to do this is create a list of pages on your website, assign keywords to them and decide the page title, headings and content that needs optimized. This includes word count. The best way to decide the word count of your pages is to search for your target keyword, visit the top 5 results and check how many words they use. This is what google is currently rewarding, so make sure to have a similar amount.

If you don't want to do this manually, you can use Screaming Frog to do some of the leg work for you, as it can grab all the different h1-h6 tags, as well as word count on each page.

You'd want to achieve the following on all pages:

• Main target keyword in the page title, h1 tag and featured image alt text as naturally as possible
• Quality content, no keyword stuffing in unnatural places and an overall word count that's close to what the current search result pages
• Answer popular questions in FAQ - If you google your keyword, you'll find a "People also ask" box in the search results. These are perfect for giving Google what it wants. Grab these questions and answer them FAQ style somewhere on the page - if you're lucky, Google will use your site in the featured snippet and you'll get a bunch of extra traffic.

Here's some examples of what we can do:

Homepage
Keywords: "dentist san jose", "dentist in san jose", "family dentist san jose", "best dentist san jose"
Page title: "Family Dentist San Jose | Quality Dental Care"
h1: "#1 Family Dentist in San Jose"
Word count: 1395

Treatment Parent Page (/cosmetic-treatments)

Keywords: "cosmetic dentist san jose", "san jose cosmetic dentistry"
Page title: "Cosmetic Dentist San Jose | Quality Dental Care"
h1: "Cosmetic Dentist San Jose"
Word count: 1423

Treatment Child Page (/treatments/dental-implants/)

Keywords: "dental implants san jose ca", "dental implants san jose"
Page title: "Dental Implants San Jose CA | Quality Dental Care"
h1: "Dental Implants San Jose"
Word count: 1524

Step 3: Backlinks

Having good, optimized content is great, and sure, you might reach the front page for low competitive search terms without them, but longer term, and by targeting competitive keywords (that bring more $$$), you're going to need to get backlinks.

Here's what I do to build a good backlink profile:

• Create local citations - These are mentions of your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) on directory listings. They are mostly nofollow, but they are absolutely needed for local SEO and Google My Business - plus, you need a backlink profile that's diverse. You can use a service like "SEO Builder" to build these for you or do it manually. The more local, the better. The more relevant, the better. Make sure you mix up your business description or the link won't get indexed.
• Use HARO - HARO is "Help a reporter out" and it connects reporters looking for information with specialists willing to provide it in exchange for a link back to their site. You get 3 emails per day with a list of opportunities - I'd ctrl + f and search for "dental" and other related keywords, then reach out. You can get featured on high authority domains this way with minimal effort.
• Start a blog - Not only is this a great way to get traffic on your site from long tail keywords, but websites in your industry are willing to link back to resources that provide value. It's going to be difficult getting high authority sites to link to a dental service page that doesn't offer anything.
• Guest blogging - Reach out to industry related blogs and pitch an article that would provide value for them. They're usually happy to provide a link back, either in the article, or at the end in the author bio box. The best links you can get are from higher authority sites that don't just accept guest posts from everyone.
• Reverse engineer backlinks - Use ahrefs to pull your competitors backlink profile - sort by dofollow and make a list. These sites were willing to link to them, so perhaps they'd do the same for you. What you'll find is the majority are directory links, but if it's working for them, then you might as well get a link from the same site.
• Sponsor a local business/event - This one is common in the law industry. Reach out to events and offer to be a sponsor. You'll pay for this, but a link from a local business is a big deal for local SEO, so it's usually going to be worth it.

Should I build backlinks to my homepage or service pages? Both. If you have very low authority, you should prioritise building to your home page for a few months, but beyond that, a 50/50 split is ideal. Prioritise keywords with decent search volume that are quick wins. For keywords like "dentist san jose" it's usally the homepage people are trying to rank the term for, so naturally they'll have the most backlinks and therefore harder to rank. But for inner pages, what you'll find is there is a lot of opportunities.

Take the keyword "emergency dentist san jose" for instance. It has 100 searches per month - but look at the top 10 results:

https://imgur.com/jm7Fq7k

All the front page results are inner pages (i.e not the homepage) and the majority of them don't have any backlinks pointing to them. In this case, these aren't even high authority sites either and the backlinks some of the pages do have are nofollow spammy links, which means they have zero value.

If you build 1 or 2 good dofollow links to your own page targeting that keyword then you're pretty much guaranteed first page ranking.

Conclusion

SEO takes time and effort. If you give Google what it wants, you'll be rewarded for it. Will implementing these changes put you on the first page overnight? Well, it's possible, but realistically, SEO results usually take a while. If you do everything right, eventually you'll see the results though.

If you saw value in what I wrote above and want me to do the same for other industries, please let me know. Any questions I'll answer in the comments too.