Link-building 101 for Dentists: How to Dominate Your Local Market

If you’re really looking to put your business on the map, having a solid online presence is a must—even for dental practices. Creating social media pages for your dental practice is a good place to start, but it’s not enough. You also need to create a business website and optimize it for SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your website appear in the top search results when potential patients look for services that you offer in their locality. Keep in mind most users never click past the first page. So, ranking higher can help you book more appointments, reach a larger patient base in your vicinity, and stand out from the competition.

But how do you optimize your website or social media pages for SEO? Link-building is one of the most effective ways!

Link-building starts with writing SEO-optimized content for your website or blog (which can just be a dedicated page on your main website). You can also explore affordable dentist SEO services or professional link-building services to enlist the help of dental SEO experts for this task.

The next step is incorporating high-quality backlinks, local SEO techniques, and targeted keywords in the written content. Before we go over these dental marketing strategies, here’s an overview of some general link-building practices:

Understanding Hyperlinks and Backlinks: Building Bridges to Dental Success

Link building allows you to build bridges between your dental practice and other reputable websites in your industry. These connections, called backlinks, play a significant role in boosting your website’s visibility in search engine results. Think of backlinks as digital recommendations or endorsements that tell search engines your website is trustworthy and relevant.

When exploring the world of dental SEO, you might come across terms like hyperlink or backlink. These terms describe the clickable text you see on webpages, but there’s a slight difference between them. Hyperlinks can be any links, including links to your own webpages and social media accounts. Contrarily, backlinks are inbound/incoming links from another website to yours. The text that is linked, as shown below, is called an anchor text, and it’s extremely important.

Say, a person suffering from toothache looks up “best dentists in Los Angeles” online. The first search engine result page (SERP) might not show the highest-rated dentists in their location, but it will definitely show the highest-ranked dental websites and business profiles.

Luckily, there are link-building strategies you can use to have your site rank among the top 5 results.If you’re not sure where to start, or frankly don’t have the time, we recommend hiring link building services to make the most of your SEO efforts and dominate search results.

Characteristics of High-Quality Dental Backlinks

Adding backlinks can sometimes do more harm than good for your dental SEO. Why? Because the quality of your backlinks makes all the difference!

Let’s explore the factors that impact a backlink’s quality.

Domain Authority: If potential patients get referrals for your services from a reliable source, like family member, they’ll be more confident about trusting you, right? Similarly, backlinks coming from high-authority domains serve the same function. They indicate that authoritative and credible websites are giving you a vote of confidence, lending more value to your webpages as a result.

Recommended Read: The Impact of Link Building Services on Domain Authority and Trustworthiness

Relevance: It doesn’t make sense for a bakery to recommend your dental services, does it? Similarly, it wouldn’t make sense for an unrelated or irrelevant website to link to yours. Relevant backlinks from sites in the same niche as yours significantly impacts their quality.

Placement: If backlinks aren’t included in the content naturally, search engines will pick up on it. Links should also be in a place where readers can actually see them. So, the genuine and natural placement of backlinks and hyperlinks matters for ranking.

Anchor Text: Remember how anchor text is super important for link-building and dental SEO? That’s because anchor text is what allows you to make your backlinks keyword-rich.

 Good Anchor Text

While the second example contains a possible dental keyword (“tooth infection”), it’s too long.

The first example is good, since it features a high-ranking dental keyword (“tooth extraction”) and links to a high-authority web page related to tooth extractions. Like we said, relevancy is key.

Recommended Read: Dentist SEO: The Importance of Backlinks and What Kind of Links to Target

Polishing Your Online Presence – Generating High-Quality Backlinks and Optimizing Local SEO for Dental Practices

Now that you know what a high-quality backlink entails, let’s see what professional link building experts have to say when it comes to creating a foolproof link building strategy for dental practices.

Create Valuable and Relevant Content

Your potential patients are looking for credible information and entering queries relevant to your services.Your first order of business should be to create high quality content that not only answers their questions, but also satisfies search intent.

Here are some example of possible search queries:

• “What is a root canal treatment?”
• “Should I get veneers”
• “How much do dental implants cost?”

Your aim is to rank as one of the websites in the top search results for topics like these. While it may be hard to rank above government organizations’ websites because of their domain authority, you can still rank on the first page by hiring professional SEO services.

Such content titles for blog posts, articles, infographics, and videos offer valuable insights into dentistry-related topics.

Your dental content marketing and SEO strategy should include relevant, updated, and informative content that’s easy to share. When you produce valuable content with an aim of informing the reading, other websites in the dental industry or related fields may be more likely to link to your content, citing it as a trusted resource.

Leverage Local SEO

Local SEO for dentists allows you to improve your website’s visibility in the region you want to target. When your potential patients search for “best dentists near me”, your website should pop up in the results considering most users want results localized to their queries.

Recommended Read: Effective Local SEO Solutions: 5 Strategies Tailored for Dentists

Engage with Local Dental Community

Reach out to dental associations, local dental blogs, online dental communities, and influential dental professionals. Engage in discussions, offer to contribute guest posts, or collaborate on projects. By building relationships and networking within the dental industry, you increase the chances of receiving backlinks from reputable sources.

When these sources link back to your site, it can drive their audience to your website. This referral traffic can be highly targeted and is likely to convert into patients if your website is geared toward local clientele.

Remember, paying for backlinks is a BIG no-no as it can get your site penalized. So, the better and more effective alternative is to build relationships within your community. This network can be beneficial for future collaborations, referrals, or sharing of expertise.

Make Guest Contributions to Other Dental Websites

Many established dental websites accept guest contributions in the form of guest blogs. You can reach out to them with well-crafted, informative blog ideas that align with their content and audience. When your guest post is published on their site, it might include an author bio section where you can include a backlink to your dental practice website.

Hiring the right link building service can help make the most of your guest blogging efforts.

Recommended Read: Unleash the Power of Guest Blogging for Dental Practices: Insider Tips and Tricks for Successful Outreach

Let’s Recap!

An all-encompassing linkbuilding strategy for dentists helps you rank higher on the world’s most used search engines, thus generating more online traffic, booking more appointments, and reaching a larger patient base.

Link building strategies involve the creation of SEO-optimized content containing high-quality backlinks and hyperlinks. You can optimize local SEO for dentists, build connections with the local dental community, and appear as a credible guest contributor on high-ranking dental websites to generate natural backlinks for your own site.

Earn Your Crown As A Top Dentist by Hiring Professional Link-building Services

Now that you understand what you need to do, you can hire link-building experts to support you on this journey.

Our dental SEO experts will boost your online rankings by generating and optimizing SEO content for your website. We can bring organic traffic to your site by helping your webpages obtain genuine backlinks and capture a spot on the first search result page.

We’re ready when you are – give us a call!