Squeezing every penny out of your SEO company
Vanilla Circus has been undertaking dental SEO for over 18 years. Below, we’ll reveal how we work and how you can maximise your SEO spend by demanding the same work output from your SEOs.
Key Takeaways
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Measure return on investment, not just activity: The blog stresses that what matters most is how much revenue your dental marketing generates, not how much you spend or how many channels you use.
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Double down on what truly moves the needle: focus on strategies and channels that consistently deliver high-quality patient enquiries and booked cases, rather than spreading the budget too thin across everything.
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Stop attributing value to empty metrics: Metrics such as impressions, clicks, social likes, or generic views are poor indicators of actual growth if they don’t drive patient enquiries.
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Hold agencies accountable for real results: You’re urged to regularly audit your marketing provider against clear KPIs (enquiries, conversion rates, costs per booked appointment) and push for strategic improvement.
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Use data to refine, not just report: The piece highlights the power of tracking trends, source performance and patient types to reallocate effort and budget toward the highest-performing activities.
Selling cosmetic dentistry
We have had the privilege of working with more than 46 practices and several hospitals across the UK. The vast majority of the dental practices we work for are cosmetic dentists.
“We have developed a proven search marketing process for ensuring that your dental practice ranks for the right keywords, attracts the right patients with the right amount of money in their pocket.”
We refer to this as our six-month plan, and here is how it works.
Month 1: Increase your visibility and reach more patients
The first thing we do when undertaking any SEO or dental marketing work for a practice is to evaluate the website.
The first task in SEO is to examine the website as a whole:
- Does the website encourage patients to schedule an appointment or learn more?
- Do I trust the practice as a whole to deliver the dental solution I am looking for?
- Do I trust the actual dentist?
Sometimes, this involves improving the design or user journey through the site. Sometimes, adding Association logos or reviews is needed.
Sometimes, this involves adding CTAs or correcting grammar. It is a relatively fast process that provides us with valuable insights and the beginnings of a content strategy.
It is often a case of improving the site’s technical SEO to ensure the website functions as it should do; are pages loading correctly on all devices, including mobile and speed?
It is also time to check for any broken links or other website difficulties
The last process for the first month is always to rewrite all metadata. This consists of meta titles and descriptions. This is the first thing users see on Google’s search result pages.
This is a valuable task; we can demonstrate that rewriting metadata invariably leads to a 10% or more increase in SERPs or Google ranking positions.
It is also a handy way of quickly getting to know a website.
Month 2-3: Local SEO
The second and third months ensure the website ranks for all local SEO results, including keywords and locations. This also includes Google My Business optimisation.
Although there was much discussion on what makes the perfect patient when discussing target audiences, we know that one definitive characteristic is that the practice is in a fixed location.
“We have discovered out over the last 13 years through studying enquiries and conversions we have worked out that the average patient is prepared to travel approximately 23 miles to go to the right dentist to receive the right quality (or price) for the dental treatment.”
It is not rocket science that if your dental practice can rank for every keyword, from dental implants to Invisalign Pro and location, this is beneficial for dental marketing.
Pushing your radius and organic reach further
However, the town or the city where the dentist is located is often not large enough to produce the patient numbers the business requires.
This is where an extended local SEO strategy pays off.
If we can ensure that the website ranks for all dental treatment keywords and all locations within a 23-mile radius, then we will quickly expand our pool of patients.
The chances of attracting that perfect patient who requires high-value treatment have increased.
There is more to local SEO for dentists than simply creating a page /dental-implants–Leeds, or /dental-implants–Manchester.
Over time, we have discovered that the website’s URL architecture or structure is imperative to successful local SEO optimisation.
- For example, if we were discussing London, we would create a /london/ page and link to areas within London on this page.
- We would then divide these local SEO sections into three. Here, we are looking at London/Dentist/, London/Cosmetic-Dentist/, and London/Emergency-Dentist/.
- We would further divide these sections into treatments. So, for example, we would have London/dentist/root canal and London/cosmetic–dentist/Invisalign.
This process is repeated for all locations the dental practice wishes to rank. It is laborious but critical.
It is also a relatively fast process. The content has a degree of duplication. This can be mitigated by using Google reviews within the content, video, or other images. Pages will have to be edited based on Google’s reception.
Although these are low-traffic keywords, they are also highly conversion-focused.
We know that if someone is over 25 miles from your practice, the likelihood of them visiting is very slim. Local SEO is an imperative part of dental SEO, but it is not the be-all and end-all.
Month 4-6: Identifying content gaps
We are seeking a comprehensive range of dental treatment content.
For example, we want to rank for all dental implant keywords. We want to rank for Invisalign and ‘Invisalign Alternatives.’
The process involves dividing the existing content into dental treatments, such as Invisalign, porcelain veneers, and dental implants, and also taking into account any blog content that supports these keywords.
We are looking to disrupt a potential patient’s search. They may be asking about the price of treatment or dental finance.
For example, we may want to expand our implant content so that we talk about ‘implant retained dentures’, or we may talk about ‘all on 4’. See our SEO for dentists.
We plan to rank #1 for any search query a patient makes.
With our local search pages, we have already demonstrated to Google that we are a location-driven business. As Google can see a user’s IP address and location, if the user is in the same location as the practice, Google will serve our web pages within a search result.
This is how we attract larger-ticket procedures and patients with financial means who may be seeking a second opinion.
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