If a dentist has a website, there are several ways in which they can get visitors to that website with a view to them hopefully signing up or at least making an enquiry about becoming a patient at that dental practice. One way is to pay a platform like Facebook, Instagram, or Google to send traffic to the website, usually on a pay-per-click basis, where they pay a fee for each person who clicks through to their website.

They may also utilise one or more of the dozens of social media platforms that exist, possibly by paying someone to post daily on those sites and to reply to comments. There is a third way that is highly effective and, if done correctly, can bring a lot more traffic to a dentist‘s website than any other means. That way is to have their website appear at the top of Google when someone types in a relevant search term.

The traffic this generates is known as organic traffic, and unlike pay-per-click, the dental practice does not pay for anyone who clicks through to their website. That all sounds great, but the obvious question which arises is “How does the website get to the top of Google?”. It is a question that has vexed not just dentists but also almost every business owner with a website.

The answer is search engine optimisation or SEO as it is usually called. This involves taking several actions to optimise a website so that Google recognises it as a website that should rank high for specific and relevant search terms. How they calculate this is a closely guarded secret, but much research has given us numerous clues as to what works.

Whilst we cannot possibly hope to give details of them all in a single article, we can at least provide a few actions relating to local SEO which have been proven to have the most positive effect on local website rankings, including those of dentists.