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What was initially an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage—local SEO for dental practices—has now become a survival necessity as businesses worldwide are forced to expand their online visibility and offerings. According to BrightLocal, two thirds of surveyed business experts believe that Google My Business is “now more important to local marketing success” than it was a year ago. Even pre-COVID-19, the data was already showing that 77% of patients used search engines to evaluate new healthcare providers. Moving forward, this number will only increase.
This shove towards online accessibility will disrupt the already competitive world of dental practice SEO in a number of ways. First, and most importantly, it will drive a large wedge through the market, increasing the already growing disparity between practices with highly ranking local listings and those without in terms of incoming patient streams. Second, as competition for local listings continues to thicken (and as voice search continues to grow in popularity), it means that dental practices will need to embrace more specific long-tail keywords and voice-search-optimized phrasing within their content. In most cases, these increasingly urgent and technical needs will require the help of an SEO company. Before hiring one, however, it’s important for dental practices to know what they’re looking for.
The aforementioned Google My Business tool, Google’s way of providing businesses a way to create and optimize their local listings, offers a number of illuminating insights as to what exactly the search engine needs from a website to award a high SERP (search engine result page) ranking. This tool offers more than a dozen features that allow for said optimization. The most popular features include business description, photos, and posts. Trailing closely behind were reviews, Q&A, services, and videos. When an SEO company sets out to rank a particular dental practice, they need to address these categories at the very minimum.
In order to smoothly facilitate this inevitable pivot into a much more SEO-heavy future for dental practices, iVelocity Marketing is now offering an informational portal (link) that provides a plain-speak breakdown of local SEO basics for dental practices. As specialists in multi-channel dental marketing campaigns, iVelocity is leading the charge into an increasingly digital market with SEO methodologies that have proven themselves for dental practices across the country.
Release ID: 88960027