As a dentist, you’ll know that dental practices are key parts of the local community. It’s vital therefore that you are targeting and reaching this community with your marketing efforts. While building a strong web presence and online reach is important, dental treatment is not something that can be completed remotely. So marketing your practice requires a very different strategy to if you were simply selling a product or online service. Here are our top tips for capturing your local audience through digital marketing.

Optimise your Google listings

Google is constantly evolving its algorithms to ensure that searchers are getting the most relevant search results for their queries, and a large part of that is prioritising local results. In order to take advantage of this, you should keep your Google Business profile up to date.

Firstly, make sure that you own and manage your dental practice’s Google Business profile, and then optimise it by filling in as many details that you can, and keep these details up to date. This is key for potential patients to see your address, opening hours, key services and any current offers. You can even add photography and snippets from blog posts, to make the most of your existing content. I’ve written lots more about this in my recent blog post all about optimising your Google profile.

As a dental marketing agency specialising in SEO services, we can build links and citations, correct any errors with name, address and phone number, and manage the profile for you as part of our Local SEO package.

Increase your patient reviews

We’ve mentioned many times before about the importance of positive reviews, as these will have an impact on your listings within Google, particularly in Google Maps. Getting positive customer reviews will help boost you up the rankings, as it shows Google that you are an active and popular business. Make sure you respond to any negative reviews in a professional manner.

Reviews are the digital equivalent of word of mouth marketing, so asking all of your patients to leave you online feedback is a quick, free way of spreading the word about your practice.

Target localised keyword searches

If you’re working with an SEO agency, targeting localised keywords should already be a key part of their strategy to get your dental practice ranking highly. What this means is that rather than targeting a generic keyword search, such as “dental implants”, the focus is on getting you ranking highly for more specific searches, like “dental implants liverpool” or “invisalign blackburn”. These searches are highly relevant to your audience, so they will be more likely to convert once landing on your website.

You can also ask your agency to look at keyword gaps. Using SEO software, we can analyse if there are lots of people searching for terms that your website isn’t currently optimised for. This means you could be missing out on this traffic, so we can then create a plan to capture these searches.

Location pages on your website

Another tactic to capture people searching for dental treatments in their area is to have specific pages on your website for individual locations. This is particularly helpful if your dental practice is in a location with a wide catchment area covering different suburbs or villages. For example, a dental practice in South Manchester may benefit from creating location pages targeting “dentist didsbury”, “dentist cheadle”, and “dentist northenden”, to capture people searching for a dentist in their specific local area.

This is a simple way of both capturing those searches, and adding more useful informational pages to your website. Each page could include information on directions to your practice from those specific locations, along with a summary of your treatments and general information.

Engage on social media

The last point is possibly the easiest and definitely the least technical, but could have a positive impact on your dental practice. You can use your practice’s social media profiles to get involved and engage with your local communities online. Facebook now has many local-based community groups where businesses and individuals share news, events and local updates. This is the perfect place to not only share your own news (open days, offers etc), but to engage with other posts and raise your brand awareness. Imagine it like a digital noticeboard or village square!

Simple actions like reacting to a post or leaving a comment will ensure that your practice profile is seen by many others in your local area. Just make sure that your profile is up to date and regularly monitored for messages and comments, and you can easily use organic social as a key channel to drive new patient leads.

This blog post has hopefully given you a few ideas on getting started with localised digital marketing. For more information and advice on marketing your dental practice, get in touch with the Hive Marketing team today for a free website audit and initial chat.