You would be amazed how many people pick keywords out of the air, or maybe you wouldn’t it could well be this is what you have done for your Dentist SEO campaign, if you have chosen any at all that is.
The right keywords are vital and the only way you know you are choosing and adding the right keywords for your surgery’s site it to use keyword research tools.
There are basic tools that are free to use such as Google’s keyword tool but the information you are given is basic, you get information on search volumes, (broad, phrase and exact) but the competition data is very basic: low, medium or high. What is important with competition for a keyword is not just how many pages use the same keyword but how many actively optimize for that keyword and what pagerank those on the first page of Google have: an authority site may keep you off the top spot no matter how hard you try. Google also like to keep a range of different types of sites in the top ten so won’t have ten dental surgery websites even for a highly relevant keyword.
You need keywords that have low competition and high traffic therefore as a dentist SEO project also needs relevant keywords and this usually means geographically relevant keywords. If you live in a area where there will be few enough people searching for locally focused keywords, such as ‘Dental surgery Gettysburg PA’, they won’t be identified by keyword tools but you can do a search based on a larger city and find out what kind of keywords people there are using and simply swap location names: this works better than using general keywords and simply adding your location on to each!
Even then the proof is in the eating for your dentist SEO attempts and you need to make sure your keywords aren’t not only creating traffic but also leading to traffic that is actually staying on your site and contacting you for appointments.
As an example you may have added an article called ‘Getting rid of toothache’ to your site that gets a lot of traffic who have searched for the keyword ‘dental remedies’ that you have decided to purposely include because your research showed a lot of people searching for this term and perhaps little competition. Those who click on to your article could find you have an article about how you can fix their toothache at your surgery while they are looking for home dental remedies: they will probably click straight off of the page therefore. Even if the article is about home remedies of course they would probably read the page but not convert into customers, though they could come back if they can’t find a home remedy.
As a dentist SEO needs to be based on keywords that lead to business though so try to choose keywords that have a clear buying intention, this includes keywords such as ‘emergency dentist surgeries and ’dental surgery reviews’ where there are unlikely to be people searching for anything other than to choose a dental surgery.
Having said this dentist SEO that uses keywords with lots of searches but little competition may still give you a good return on the small effort you have to put in, as a 2% conversion rate on 1000 visitors is still 20 new customers.