The Best Success Metric For Your Dental SEO Campaign

Working with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company can be frustrating and feel like it is shrouded in secrecy and baffling to anyone who doesn’t speak SEO. While it is true that successful dental SEO campaigns required a lot of nitty gritty work, the basic strategies and success metrics are pretty simple.

The big question for your SEO campaign

Today I want to talk about the number one success metric for dental SEO you should focus on when evaluating the your SEO campaign – Organic visits to your website. Yes, yes I know, it’s fun to focus on what keywords shot from position #45 all the way to #5 but does that keyword really get searched? Does it bring you traffic? Next time you are on the phone with your SEO company ask to see a report that breaks organic visits to your site down by month. If the SEO campaign is working then you should see an increase in the amount of organic traffic your website is receiving overtime. And fair warning, if you just started with and SEO company last week, be patient, this stuff takes months not weeks.

While an increase in organic traffic is the number one indicator of success not all organic traffic is created equal. Would you rather have 50 visitors to your website from the keyword “Cheap Dentist” or 50 visitors from “Emergency Dental”. I know which one we would focus on. In a world where keywords can be more or less valuable we as SEO companies can also choose keyword phrases that are more likely to be searched and result in more chances to receive a visitor. By using AdWords Keyword Planner we can estimate search volume with some surprising results.

Finding the best dental keywords

Let’s try something together, which of the following three keyword phrases do you think are most valuable for you to use on your website; Teeth Whitening, Tooth Whitening, Whiten Teeth? If we take a look at our AdWords keyword planner we can see some pretty definitive results:

• Teeth Whitening – 201,000 National Searches
• Whiten Teeth – 9,900 National Searches
• Tooth Whitening – 5,400 National Searches

How about Dental Crowns vs Dental Caps?

• Dental Crowns – 4,400 National Searches
• Dental Caps – 1,300 National Searches

Are you surprised? Maybe not, but it’s helpful information to have when you’re looking at optimizing your website content and building a successful dental SEO campaign. If your current website content is focused on low volume, less competitive keywords like “Tooth Whitening” or “Dental Caps” you may be focused on the wrong keywords. Ranking highly for a keyword that has just a few thousand national searches each year isn’t nearly as valuable as ranking highly for keywords that get all the attention. Do you want to know one of the dirty little secrets of SEO? SEO companies have an in-depth knowledge of this, and they know it’s a lot easier for them to Optimize around low search volume (long tail) keyword phrases. (keywords phrases that have more words and less search volume). So, if you keep hearing that your keyword phrases are ranking well but you don’t see more organic traffic to your website or more new patient leads coming from the internet it may be time to ask some tough questions. Make sure that your SEO campaign is focused on increasing your organic traffic and check to see if the keywords being optimized on your site are high volume keywords that give you a better chance of receiving organic clicks.

Contact us today to get your dental SEO campaign started

If you have questions about your SEO campaign, or how content on your website is performing, feel free to reach out. We will schedule some time and walk you through the analytics to make sure you know what you’re getting out of your website.

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