How Long Does It Take for Your Dental Website to Become a Top-Ranked SEO Success?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process that website owners use to optimize their sites to rank their sites higher in search results for particular terms. This process leads to greater website visibility for a dental practice like yours.
Dental practices that implement SEO campaigns achieve a higher ranking for particular search terms, increase their web traffic and revenue, and boost brand awareness.
SEO is one of the best digital marketing strategies in use today. As searches for company sites wane, even local businesses need to land on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Focusing time and effort on your Google search ranking can pay dividends while growing your practice.
With such an effective tool at the ready, practice owners are anxious to see a return on their investment. They can’t understand why such a seemingly simple strategy requires so much time to produce higher Google rankings.
Factors That Influence Search Engine Rankings
SEO takes time. Your dental practice has to earn top ranking and search visibility. Several ranking factors influence how much time it takes to see results from an SEO campaign, including:
Competition
If your competitors are ahead of you in a particular ranking, try to analyze how they achieve their current ranking and what actions they take to sustain their visibility. Your strategy needs to include consideration of the strategies of your competition.
Content
Content continues to be one of the top-ranking factors for Google. It is vital to create compelling content that aligns with your target audience’s search intent.
At the same time, review existing content that ranks in local search results and try to improve upon it.
Quality content applies to more than just the written word. Google Image Search is an incredible resource to bring more visitors to your website. It stands to reason that users will search for visual content just as they search for written content.
Keywords
Your content needs to target keywords from online searches to have a strong search engine ranking, which is where keyword research becomes vital to the SEO process.
It would help if you also were mindful of Google’s ranking factor in evaluating content. This requires current knowledge of Google’s algorithm updates and the commitment to staying on top of new developments in keyword ranking.
Looking at the Google ranking algorithm components, a target keyword or keyword phrase plays a vital role in the equation.
LSI keywords, or latent semantic indexing keywords, are terms that are related to the main search words and phrases. LSI keywords help Google show the most relevant results.
Be careful not to overload title tags with too many keywords. A concise title tag is more impactful and creates a better user experience.
Inbound and outbound links
In general, linking root domains with a smaller number of high-quality sites will be more beneficial than linking to several average pages from extraneous websites. Other websites linking to you bring you SEO favor, as well.
Link-building is a process by which other websites link to your site’s page or blog post in order to improve their Google ranking (and yours).
Remember that you must earn high-quality, relevant links and the credibility they bring you. Sites linking to one another without any clear correlation tend to perform poorly. The faster you earn quality links, the more quickly you will rank.
That said, if you follow Google’s guidelines for link-building strategies, your ranking should improve organically, and your site’s linking velocity should grow incrementally.
Be sure to relegate outbound connections judiciously and only to authority sites relevant to your niche.
With a solid strategy in place, most practices see the results of their SEO efforts in 4 to 12 months.
Technical SEO Considerations
You must resolve any technical issues on your website in order to see any improvement in Google’s ranking. The most common SEO issues include:
- Site speed
- XML sitemaps
- Structured data
- Duplicate content
- Crawling and indexing
When working with an existing domain, it’s helpful to examine the site’s search traffic and website visitors. You can do this by logging in to your Google Analytics account and accessing the acquisition channels report.
A technical SEO audit will reveal crawling or indexing issues. Others identify spammy links, unnatural links, and nofollow links. Be sure to disavow them using Google’s guidelines.
In addition, SEO tools such as Google Search Console will deliver a sense of past site performance.
On-page SEO refers to factors on your own website that you can optimize to match user intent, such as the underlying code and the content.
Create a meta description that includes your phrase to entice visitors. Google allows a maximum of 160 characters for meta descriptions, so they need to be short and distinctive from the other descriptions on your web pages.
Additionally, mobile use has become the norm. In fact, over 60% of users who search Google come from mobile devices. As a result, mobile-friendliness is an important SEO ranking factor.
How Search Engines Interpret Backlinks
Next to content, backlinks are one of Google’s top 3 factors in SEO ranking. Backlinks are a sign of approval between two websites and indicate popularity and trust among users. They can significantly boost your practice’s ranking.
It takes time to establish quality backlinks. However, they are worth the time and effort, as high-quality links from other sites have the power to energize your rankings.
You should also include internal links, which will direct traffic to other pages on your own site.
How Long Does It Take To Be A Top SEO Website?
Considering the number of working components necessary for an effective SEO campaign, it is understandable that it will take some time before you see an increase in organic traffic and revenue growth from SEO.
There is no one size fits all timeframe that applies to every dental website. The amount of time necessary depends on your competition, the keywords you want to rank for, and the ease and speed at which Google can index your web content.
Be prepared for a lag time of between 4 and 6 months before you see more traffic as a result of SEO.
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We pride ourselves in creating a collaborative working relationship and help you grow your business online. We look forward to hearing from you!