Dental SEO

Your dental website is only useful if people can find it!

Fellow dentist, Dr. David Wank, has developed a modern, streamlined approach to Dental SEO that can help you quickly achieve top search engine rankings for pages on your website - vs. the traditional SEO approach offered by other agencies. We call this methodology , "Dental SEO Sprints" and it's an effective, rapid, and personalized approach to SEO for dentists and physicians with no long term contracts. You only pay for what you need, and that's it!

Why Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your Dental Website?

SEO is one of many marketing channels available to you and the primary goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your website. In its most basic form, we use SEO to help make pages on your website rank higher in Google search results. These higher rankings, in turn translate, into more visits to your website, and more new patients. 

Note that not every practice needs dental SEO nor will every practice benefit from an SEO campaign. If you are unsure if an SEO campaign is right for your practice, get in touch with Dr. Wank for a complimentary consultation to discuss your specific situation.

Keep reading to learn more about why Short Hills Design is your #1 choice for a dental SEO provider.

Our SEO Philosophy

Note that not every practice needs dental SEO nor will every practice benefit from an SEO campaign. If you are unsure if an SEO campaign is right for your practice, get in touch with Dr. Wank for a complimentary consultation to discuss your specific situation.

  1. No two clients have exactly the same SEO needs, and that web pages need to be optimized with the direct input of the client.
  2. Though we strive to achieve top ranking for our clients on all of their pages for all of their keywords, a #1 ranking on Google is not always realistically possible for every keyword.  This situation is especially true for clients in areas with high-competition for keywords and with competitors who are also actively engaged in SEO. Be wary of companies that GUARANTEE a top Google ranking for a particular keyword.
  3. Our clients should not compete against each other and we thus do not take more than two clients per specialty (General Dentist, Oral Surgeon etc.) per zip code.

Modern SEO for Dental Practices

SEO concepts and philosophies have changed tremendously since we started providing SEO services for our clients almost 15 years ago. Gone are the days of "keyword stuffing, " purchasing domains with your city or town in the title, and having a separate website for mobile. 

Modern SEO (per Google's webmaster guidelines) focus on your ability to provide a visitor with high-quality, informative, and authoritative content about the subject matter in question.   

What are Dental SEO Sprints?

A sprint is a short, focused and intense race, and our SEO sprints are conceptually the same. Instead of spending a year of your time "adding some content" or "building some links" or other miscellaneous SEO-sounding services, our SEO sprints are designed to provide you with a planned and carefully executed plan of action. With this approach, you are always in control of the process and the cost, and you will always know exactly what actions we are taking every step of the way. With our sprint approach you can say goodbye to the useless 10+ page marketing reports that tell you nothing actionable, stop wondering what your money is being spent on every month.

There are three Dental SEO Sprints.

In Dr. Wank's methodology, we have three sprints which we'll detail below. They are the:

Strategy Sprint
Content Sprint
Link Sprint

THE STRATEGY SPRINT

We Diagnose BEFORE we Treat!

Like you, we can’t provide a treatment plan without first understanding the nature of the problem – or if there even is a problem! Thus, our first step in our Dental SEO process is our Strategy Sprint, and we perform this unique analysis with all of our new clients prior to commencing any work. 

No more "Shotgun SEO"

From a practical perspective, this change in approach means that the focus of an SEO campaign should first be on evaluating the content that already works for your website in driving traffic and new patients. Taking this approach gives us quick wins to drive traffic (e.g fixing broken links and redirects, refreshing good content to make it great content). This method differs from the other Dental SEO agencies out there in that our approach is targeted on what's working and what can be improved. And unlike many other companies, we're not dumping tons of unrelated content on your website with the hope that something will stick and that your phone might ring.

Instead of spending our time and your resources doing keyword research and on-page optimizations for website pages that generally don't pull in new patients (such as your hygiene page or your office technology page) our SEO Sprint approach allows us to laser focus on the pages that have the best chance of benefiting from keyword research and on-page SEO.

We complete a Website Quality Audit (WQA) which combines a technical audit and content audit of your website. We evaluate every page on your website to determine its potential value and determine what if any actions should be taken for the particular page.

Once we've discovered any potential technical deficiencies on your website we make a plan to optimized your top existing content. We then perform the next step which is a competitor keyword gap analysis, where we explore what content your competitors are ranking for that you in turn, do not rank for.

We combine all of this information into a Content Workbook, which is our treatment plan for the entire SEO campaign moving forward.

We then present you with a comprehensive SEO Strategy review- including the Content Workbook - where we lay out a specific treatment plan of what pages and content we should be focusing on to provide the most value for your practice.

THE CONTENT SPRINT

Now that we have a treatment plan in the form of our Content Workbook, the next step is to start updating existing pages that already rank, and building out new pages we need to compete. The Content Sprint is billed in groups of 4 units of content, and the beauty of this approach is that you can purchase as much or as little content as you'd like -- at any time. Because we always have the Content Workbook as our treatment plan, we always know what's next on the list. It's like a patient that goes on vacation for three months and then returns for treatment -- we look at what's next on the treatment plan and get right back to work with the next procedure in line.

THE LINK SPRINT

Like it or not, link building is an important part of SEO. Depending upon the data we find during our Strategy Sprint, we may determine that it makes sense to build links to a particular page or pages. We offer links in batches of three and we only use reputable link and content providers. Not every site needs link building so not every site needs a link-building sprint.

Why Choose Short Hills Design? Why Work with Dr. Wank and his Team?

  1. We understand you. Dr. Wank is a practicing general dentist - no other dental SEO firm has a dentist at the helm, and nobody can understand you like a fellow dentist can.
  2. You can trust us. Dr. Wank is a member of the DentalTown Magazine Editorial Board and is a prominent public contributor on the marketing forum. He does so in order to help fellow dentists answer their marketing questions, and to provide transparency for Short Hills Design.
  3. Expertise. Dr. Wank lectures across the country about web development, SEO and conversion optimization, and is the author of of the book, "Internet Marketing for Healthcare Providers."
  4. Proven Results. We have a proven track record of helping dentists succeed.  Join 270+ other dentists and doctors in Dr. Wank's private "Internet Marketing for Healthcare Providers" Facebook Group.
  5. Professional Writing Skills. Not only does Dr. Wank (BA in English Literature from Tufts) do the bulk of the content writing, but our ContentDentist.com website is unmatched in the quality, accuracy and affordability for adding dental content to your website.

Does the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) Data Agree with Our Approach?

Yes, it does. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) difference between a keyword ranking a page in the 12th spot vs. the 8th spot is less than a tenth of a percent.  Contrast that with going from position 5 (CTR of 5.1%) to position 3 (CTR of 10.1%)   - a doubling of the CTR.   Or from position 4 (7.6% CTR)  to position 1 (39.6% CTR) - a 5X increase!

Google ranking position change vs. Increase in CTR

Position Change CTR Increase
12th to 8th Less than tenth of a percent
5th to 3rd 200% increase (double)
4th to 1st 500% increase (5x)
Practically speaking, this data means that for a single keyword with an estimated monthly search volume of 1000 , that's the difference between 76 clicks (ranking fourth) vs. 396 clicks (ranking 1st).  This data assumes that every search results in at least one click, which isn't always the case.

The ROI-based logic of our approach

We've clearly established above that increasing the Google rankings of existing keywords on existing pages can result in a tremendous increase in CTR  and can bring the accompanying increase in website traffic.  We can also agree that increasing website traffic will lead to more new patients (unless there's something very wrong with your website or your FD's phone call protocols). 

So you can now see why it makes perfect sense that one of the first steps in our SEO process is to identify the existing pages on your website that already rank well for specific keywords.  Getting these pages higher in the rankings (with focused content and targeted links) requires much less work, has a faster turnaround, and has a much higher ROI than starting out with new pages (which we do later in the process). 

What are the Three Dental SEO Sprints?

Strategy Sprint

Overview and SEO Strategy
  • Analytics Audit
  • Search Console Audit
  • Baseline Data Review
  • Website Quality Audit: Technical
  • Website Quality Audit: Content
  • Keyword Gap Analysis
  • SEO Strategy

Content Sprint

Content Development
  • New Page Keyword Research
  • Development of Content Groups
  • Content Matrix
  • Content Briefs

Links Sprint

Secure supporting links
  • Website Backlink Profile Audit
  • Link Research and Prospecting
  • Target Page Selection
  • Link Acquisition
  • Link Tracking and Follow-Up

Which Sprint(s) are  Appropriate for Your Practice?

Get in touch 

Common Questions About our Dental SEO Model

What is an SEO Sprint?
An SEO sprint is a small project where we rapidly accomplish a series of tasks goals that would otherwise take months under a traditional SEO contractual agreement.
How can you offer SEO for Dentists without a contract?
As we described above, Sprints focus on the 80/20 rule where we execute the only the services you need that will give you best bang for your buck. 
How Many Sprints do you Recommend We Do?
We recommend that everyone starts with a Strategy Sprint in order to establish a baseline and to see the technical and content recommendations that will be instrumental in rapidly driving more organic traffic. From there we will work with you to determine what if any other sprints we recommend.

A standard approach is to sequentially execute a Strategy, Content and Link Building sprint in order to establish an SEO Strategy, a content plan, and acquire links. Once this initial round of work is completed then it's up to you, the client, to decide if you want to continue with more work, or if you've reached your goals. Much of decision has to do with how much potential content there is to write, and how many content pieces you want to produce at a given time.
You talk a lot about dental content and content recommendations. Who writes the content update and new content pages?
Many of our clients take our content briefs (seo-optimized, keyword driven outlines for website content ) and use them to produce their own content. However, Dr. Wank does offer professional dental content writing (he has a DMD from Harvard) and our clients can always purchase Dr. Wank's pre-written content at ContentDentist.com
What about Technical SEO? How do you rank a site if there's no big technical audit?
Great question. And once again the answer is the 80/20 rule. We tend to focus on the most important technical factors such as cleaning up 404s, evaluating 301 redirects, examining page speed and on-page ranking factors, as these are the items that have the most impact on rankings.  

We don't want to waste time and money chasing the technical SEO minutia that is more appropriate for an enterprise website, as these types of fixes will not provide you anywhere close to the ROI that would come from spending that effort elsewhere. A much better use of your budget, for example, is to determine which pages on your website already rank between 3-20 for existing keywords, and analyze what can be done to give these pages a boost in the rankings, as it's often easier to rank existing pages than ones that Google has never seen before.
How much does an SEO Sprint cost?
The initial Dental SEO Sprint is our Strategy Sprint and for websites under 50 pages, the fee is a one-time investment of $2800. 

Complimentary Consultation

Curious about Dental SEO or if your website would benefit from Dr. Wank's Sprint process? Get in touch today to schedule a complimentary consultation.

CONTACT US
(973) 715-9947
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