Today we will discuss 7 Deadly Dental Marketing Sins No. #2: Only going after Suburb keywords.

We have a new Practice Growth Program client, Dr. Mario, from the regional New South Wales of Pokolbin. He approached us because his business has been flatlining, for the last few years. He was growing around 2% to 3% every year.

He has been busy, but he’s just not growing. Even though he’s worked with multiple agencies, he’s just not getting the number of new patients and the type of high-value patients that he was after. After hearing about us from his friends, he decided to reach out.

One of the things we did during our diagnosis was an audit of his SEO, and he was ranking for quite a few local search terms like “dentist Pokolbin”, “implants Pokolbin”, so he’s ranking “well”.

He said to me, “Liza, I’m doing well on SEO, but I’m just not getting new patients. And certainly not the type of patients that we are after.” Now, the problem is that the search volume for those search terms that he’s ranking for, those local keywords, are so low. They’re like less than 10 a month.

This is actually very common, is that practices come to us when they think they’re doing well but they’re just not getting the bottom-line results, which are getting more new patients and getting the high dollar value patients.

What To Do

Our recommendation to him is that instead of going after the local search term, you want to rank for a services search term without suburbs. Go for the region, the city that you’re based in, or better still, no city at all, “implants”, “veneers”, “smile over”, “cosmetic dentistry”, “dentist”. You want to rank for those search terms.

Now, this is definitely a lot harder to achieve because it’s very competitive, a lot more volume but it is worth it. So it’s kind of like climbing Mount Everest. You know, the effort that it takes for the first mile compared to the last mile is very different. It is the hardest. It takes the most resources, a lot of energy, not many people get there, but when you achieve it, it is so worth it. With the right provider, and with the right strategy, you can get there. This can totally transform your practice as we’ve seen for our clients.

One of our clients started with us two years ago, so they’ve been with us for two years now, before working with us in one year, they had 33 treatments that were high-value treatments, like the implants, the All on 4, the Smile Makeover, Veneers, Invisalign.

The high dollar value treatment they had in 2019 was had 33. Last year in 2021 with COVID and multiple lockdowns, they had 337 high dollar value cases.

With the right SEO strategy, going after the right search terms. Granted with this client, we didn’t just do SEO for them. We did a holistic approach. But the thing is we were going after search terms that actually have volume. No city. Not just the local suburb that they’re basing, which would have given them a tiny amount of traffic.

With our Practice Growth Program clients, we ensure that the website has rich content that is related to the search term. It is structured well, the metadata is structured properly. That it has consistent and quality offsite backlinks.

One of the important factors is to have consistent and quality offsite SEO, to build the domain authority because domain authority is so important in Google’s eyes, in the search engine’s eyes when it comes to ranking.

When you build an overall authority of the domain, all your search terms will start moving, not just one or two local search terms, that we see often with what the other agencies do.

We do have another video showing you what an effective SEO campaign should look like over time. Check it out here.

Next Step

In summary, the second seven deadly dental marketing sin is when you are only going for a local search term. What you want is to go for a search term that’s got a lot more volume, not just your suburb, go for the city. Or like I said, no suburb at all, because that’s where the volume is, or “dentist near me”, right? No suburbs.

You want to make sure that your SEO campaign is built around increasing your overall domain authority. All the search terms are moving and also you want to make sure that it is a holistic approach.

If you want to put this into practice for your dental practice, then our Practice Growth Program could be right for you. It is designed to help dental practices double their business in three years or less, which we’ve done over and over again.

So if that’s of interest, click the button below and fill in the application form on our site and we’ll reach out, we’ll have a chat, see whether we are the right fit for each other.

I hope we can help you perform better with your SEO and your overall digital marketing so that you can double your dental practice in three years or less.

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