The Dentist’s Guide To Backlinking
Content is king, but only if it gets links — the challenge should be familiar. You have the most comprehensive, best-written, best-illustrated page on dental implants in your city, but you’re getting outranked by the practice with the five-year-old website. What’s the deal? It can be a variety of SEO ranking factors, but the bottom line is that the most powerful tools in the SEO arsenal to turn that around are backlinks. Nothing will move the dial as effectively as relevant, high-quality backlinks.
But earning high-quality backlinks to dental websites is notoriously hard. Most dental sites don’t have very many backlinks or, if they do, they’re mostly local business citations and press releases. Getting high-quality backlinks outside of business citations and press releases is labor-intensive. Thankfully, with the doctor and other medical professionals in your dental office, it can become much easier and bring benefits beyond SEO.
In this article, our San Diego, CA-based SEO digital marketing team will share some proven tactics for getting more high-quality backlinks to your dental website to increase rankings and organic traffic while building your brand. Call (858) 333-8950 to schedule an SEO consultation for your dental practice’s website.
Local Business Citations: Important, But Just the Beginning
Local business citations are websites like Google My Business, Yelp, and Foursquare. They are websites that host reviews and provide customers with basic business information. They often also provide a link to your website. Local business citations are typically built through a local SEO program.
Business citations are important. According to Moz, Google My Business alone makes up over 25 percent of your map pack success and almost 9 percent of your overall local search success. Citations make up over 10 percent and 8.4 percent, respectively. This spills into reviews and links since local citations often provide both.
There are two major reasons why business citations aren’t enough for SEO for dentists:
- They’re highly competitive and relatively easy to build. Your competitors are likely to have the same high-value citations that you have.
- Citation listing backlinks have stunted value due to their nature and this is more so an issue when the backlink is no-follow.
Publish Press Releases
Although press releases are an old trick in the link-building book, the truth is that their value has diminished over the years. Google’s John Mueller has said that Google rarely uses press release links to help determine rankings because they’re often paid links.
Still, press releases are a good strategy for getting some coverage. If you pay for the larger packages, the release will also get syndicated across a wide variety of websites, and how Google treats links across those individual websites may vary.
Write them around charity work, local events you’re participating in, and big giveaways to increase the chances of being syndicated onto a higher-value website or picked up by journalists.
Bottom line: send out period press releases, but don’t make them form the backbone of your link-building strategy. If you have quarterly marketing initiatives, use press releases to support them.
Dental Technology Case Studies and Testimonials
As a dentist, you likely use specific technologies and machines, like a CEREC machine or LANAP. Whatever those technologies are, the company that sold you that machine needs to fuel sales, and to do that they need case studies. If you add value to their company by providing them with a case study, the likelihood is that they’ll add value to yours by giving you not just a backlink, but overall exposure for your brand.
Find a patient willing to take part in the case study. Document the treatment process with notes, photos, and video. Both of the latter are important, as content becomes increasingly visual. These manufacturers will want video and photos so make sure you’re producing it for them.
Then, have your SEO marketing agency for dentists, or someone within your office, reach out to a contact at the manufacturer to coordinate. Alternatively, reach out first, gauge their interest, and then complete the case study — you’ll want to turn the case study around quickly, otherwise, the opportunity may pass.
Sometimes, you may not even need a case study — they’ll often just want a testimonial.
Write for Online Dental Magazines and Thought Leadership Websites
Thought leadership is one of the easiest ways to build both backlinks to your website and an online brand for your name. There are so many publications that dentists can write for, show their expertise, and promote themselves. Here are just a few examples:
- dentalnews.com
- dentistrytoday.com
- dentaleconomics.com
- Dear Doctor’s Dental Magazine
- dentistryiq.com
- dentaladvisor.com
- dentaltown.com
Publications like those above are looking for dentists like you to contribute to their digital magazines, so if you can offer them unique insight, the chances of being accepted for publication are very high.
Thought leadership guest blogs are some of the easiest to pitch if they are tailored to where you want to publish. If you can offer something that piques their interest, the success rate on thought leadership guest blog outreach is high. Brainstorm potential topics with your digital marketing agency for small businesses and have them do the outreach for you.
A big benefit of thought leadership guest blogging compared to other guest blogging is that you can usually target higher domain authority websites, which will pass more link equity back to your website. Dr. Timothy Kosinski is a great example of someone who does thought leadership and regularly publishes in Glidewell’s magazine.
Local News
Local newspapers and local news sites are STARVING for stories.
“And if you do anything remotely interesting (like an anniversary event or ‘grand re-opening’), you’ll probably find yourself with a beat reporter covering it.”
— Brian Dean, “Local SEO: The Definitive Guide”
Local newspapers and magazines are excellent sources of backlinks, both because of the technical SEO benefit and local coverage. It builds exposure for your practice exactly where you need it: in your community.
If you’re sponsoring local events, that would be worthy of local news coverage. Or, if you’re offering charity dental work, that would likely be a story that a local news source would cover. Alternatively, you may consider writing an opinion piece or contributing to an article by giving your expert opinion. You can get opportunities to offer your expertise to reports through platforms like Help a Reporter Out.
Scholarships
This is an old trick in the link-building book, but it works if you’re giving a significant enough scholarship and are persistent in your outreach to local universities. Why are links from universities so powerful? Because their domain, .edu, is highly trusted, and universities tend to have strong backlink profiles of their own.
How big does the scholarship need to be? Think of it from the perspective of the student. The universities just want to help their students by providing opportunities to earn money for tuition, textbooks, or other college-related expenses, so the scholarship must be significant enough to be valuable to students.
To get the links, build the scholarship page and start pitching it to local universities and colleges. Reach out to specific departments or teachers versus admins who may have nothing to do with the department pages that link their students to scholarship opportunities.
Dental Backlink Tactics That Generate Low Return
Buying Backlinks
Not all paid backlinks are bad, and if you do pay for a backlink, you can request that the link be set to rel=sponsored to keep within Google’s regulations. But, if you’re buying backlinks for cheap or buying them in large quantities, the chances are that you’re going to get caught and you’re going to be penalized.
There are high-cost backlink services that produce quality links, but more often than not, you’re paying for the outreach labor and the writing going toward a more traditional PR outreach program.
Unrelated Local Businesses
Backlinks from local businesses that are unrelated to yours aren’t necessarily bad links, but they tend to be relatively low value and are more difficult to secure once you start prospecting higher quality websites. The higher the quality of the prospect, the more likely they are to require payment or the less likely they are to respond.
That being said, if you expect your marketing team to focus on higher-quality links, you need to dedicate time as the expert to give them the resources (and knowledge) they need to secure the best opportunities for you.
Quora
Quora seems like an easy enough backlink to secure and has a very high domain authority. A Quora link can pass a high volume of traffic to your website, making it very valuable. These are outliers and, for the most part, Quora isn’t likely to give you a high return.
For many sites, it can be a great way of building thought leadership and gaining exposure to potential customers. But for local businesses, the value of Quora is diluted by the lack of organic geographic targeting.
Schedule Your Website Consultation With Now Media Group
Dental backlinks are a critical component of a successful SEO strategy for dentists and dental practices. By building high-quality, relevant backlinks, you can improve your website’s authority, visibility, and organic search rankings — ultimately driving more qualified leads and new patients to your practice
Are you ready to dominate the search results and attract more patients to your dental practice? Contact the digital marketing experts at Now Media Group today. Call us at (858) 333-8950 to schedule a consultation and discover how our dental backlink services can transform your online presence.