Dental SEO and Website Blogging Basics

I get questions all the time from practices big and small about why we phrase things a certain way when we write blogs. Living in the world of seo for dentists all day long, a lot of these things come second nature to us, and we don’t always think about how other people may think they’re a little odd. These are some of the most common blog tweaks that our dental practices have questioned:

1. The city vs. your name

You may have seen sentences in a blog that say something like, “….your Wilmington dental office wants you to know…” instead of outright saying the name of the practice. That’s not laziness; there’s a dental marketing SEO strategy involved here. Think of it this way for a moment: If Jane Doe is reading the blog, they’re already on your dental office website, so there’s the understanding that you (the practice) are the author who posts the blog. But for Google ranking purposes, we want to attract people who may not necessarily know you by name when they see your blog elsewhere online. Let me show you…

When you see a blog pop up in your Facebook feed, have you ever noticed certain words in a certain order in the title part of the link? Like this one?

Google actually uses these keywords (also called “title-tags”) when it’s pulling up a site in a search. We’ve got very specific guidelines from Google on how many letters it can be, what it can say and in what order, even the fact that we have to use dashes and not commas. It’s a critical part of the successful dental website SEO process.

When someone searches for something on Google, one of the many pieces of the puzzle is relevancy.  Let’s say they’re searching for a Wilmington Dentist, and Google sees that there’s a practice that hasn’t updated anything on their site or posted to Facebook in 5 years. Google is going to drop that practice down in ranking because they’re not as ‘relevant’ as someone that just posted a blog. Google sees that practice as not being timely and might wonder if they’re even still open or accepting new patients.

So instead, a potential new patient, who might not know you by name, but knows that you’re in Wilmington, and who’s friend said you’ve got a cool blog about easy ways to cut down on sugar, will see this on page one:

2. 5th grade reading level

We don’t recommend ever using words like prophylaxis in blogs. Yes, YOU know what that word means, but Jane Doe, who does not have a degree in dentistry, does not. We write for the audience, which is an average person curious about strengthening their oral health or dealing with a cosmetic issue, not your study group friends. Think about it, would you share an article about the “risks of pericardial effusion with dyspnea and potential tamponade” with your grandma, or an article about “what causes fluid around the heart”?

3. Office vs. practice

This is one of those things that again, as a professional, you may never think about. When writing blogs, we always refer to the place where you work as a dental ‘office’ not a dental ‘practice.’ We do this because statistics show that the average person calls it an office, not a practice, in normal conversation. Also, when people are learning English as a second language, the word ‘office’ is predominantly used instead of ‘practice’ due to another concept of the word ‘practice’ that can make things extra confusing. (Is the dentist practicing on me?)

Writing blogs is an incredibly effective dental SEO marketing tactic that helps reach your current patients as well as attract new patients, all while helping your Google ranking by keeping you relevant. So the next time a patient asks you an interesting question, think about sharing the answer in a blog, just like I did. You never know who else might have the same questions.

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