What is SEO? Why is it Necessary for Businesses?

Are you one of the many who is wondering what is the big fuss about SEO - search engine optimization? Why do we need it? Why can’t we just create a website and accumulate new patients? These are very good questions to ask and as marketing strategies quickly evolve each year; we should always be up-to-date in order to continuously improve and be successful as a dental practice.

So what is SEO? SEO, also known as ‘Search Engine Optimization,’ is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic and natural search engine results. To break it down, SEO is essentially a great technique in order to attract visitors who are specifically interested in the products or services you offer, helping to eliminate those visitors who are aimlessly wandering the web. Once that is accomplished, you not only have quality of traffic, but you also have increased the quantity of traffic organically.

SEO is the secret to any successful business including your dental practice. Admittedly, SEO can be a big challenge for most people because of the additional steps and time it takes into creating an effective structure in order to generate actual results.

Back in the day, many businesses like dental practices used the, ‘word of mouth’ method, though that might have been effective back then, nowadays it’s less used. The best way for businesses to get recognized is through the internet. The internet is a very powerful and most used platform in our world today. For any business like your dental practice, having a website is just not enough. Investing in SEO will definitely help you generate traffic, increase sales and rank your website on search engines.

So why and how does SEO actually work? There are a few tricky and tedious steps to take in order to successfully utilize SEO. For instance, Google developed an automatic algorithm system that ranks your site. In order to determine your site is valuable or useless, Google sends out what are called “spiders” to “crawl” your site and check it for 100 indicators, including backlinks, domain age, traffic, fresh content, etc.

As a business owner, you can use these tips to successfully utilize SEO for results:

1. Use Long-Tail Keywords:

A long tail keyword is a specific targeted search phrase containing 3 or more words, often containing a head term, which is a more generic search term 1 or 2 words in length. For instance, “dentist in Arlington Heights IL” is a perfect example of a long-tail keyword. Using long-tail keywords will provide your website with better quality traffic and higher conversion rates.

2. Build Relevant Backlinks in a Natural Way

A backlink is when another website links back to your site from their site. This technique is great for driving traffic to your site and will help to show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content.

3. Optimize Your Images

When writing your blog, you obviously will include text but you should always use related images as well. Make sure you are also including the alt text with your image so that the search engine can easily read your images. The alt text also makes for a better user experience as it will display inside the image container if the image does not load. Below is an example of using alt on an image:

<img src=”pic.jpg” alt=”image_description” title=”image”>

4. Adding Content Regularly

You want to always be consistent when you are posting. Posting frequently with actual functional information will allow Google to indicate your website is alive. If it’s not an active website, Google will crawl it less often, making your rankings to decrease and affect your site negatively.

Are you ready to take on the challenge? SEO is what you should be using to increase traffic and sales to your dental website. If you invest now, you will benefit big long-term. Don’t waste any time and start optimizing your website with SEO now.