Link building may be the most daunting, but necessary, items on your SEO list. While link building is notoriously hard, there are some strategies you can utilize to increase your site’s backlinks and boost its domain authority.
Here are 9 link building strategies you can utilize for your dental practice:
1. Utilize your personal and professional network
Personal connections that you have built over the years. Here are some ideas on how to do this:
- If you are a member of a dental organization, chamber of commerce, etc. make sure you are getting a link from their website.
- Leverage the personal connections of other business owners in your area. If you know the owners on a personal level or do business with them, offer to write a testimonial for the business that they can post on their website.
- Get in touch with your former college or your local alumni group to see if they can refer you on their website.
- Attend local or dental conferences and meet other businesses that have an interest in improving their SEO.
2. Collaborate with referrals
If you refer your patients to medical specialties such as an endodontist or dental surgeons, it is not unreasonable for you to reach out to them to see if they would be willing to provide a link to you somewhere on their website. If you are providing them with a significant amount of business, the least they can do is reference you on their website.
Additionally, if a specific organization is providing you with referrals, such as a pediatrician or primary care provider, reach out to see if they would be interested in free content for their site such as a blog post on dental care or a testimonial.
3. Get listed in directories
Industry and local directories are important both for link building and citation building for dentists.
Some examples of national sources for citations and links include yelp.com, yellowpages.com, manta.com and dexknows.com. Listings and links from these high authority sites get picked up by Google crawlers and influence your local keyword rankings in Google Maps and Google.com results.
Niche directories like health and dentist review sites like healthgrades.com, dentistry.com, and Zocdoc help establish relevancy and exposure when potential clients are trying to decide which dentist to use in their area.
4. Find unlinked or incorrect business mentions
Also known as link reclamation, this involves finding online references of your business where there is no link to your website, or finding outdated information about your website and fixing it.
You can do this by:
- Searching for your brand name (or your own name) in Google and manually scanning the search results.
- Doing an image search for your logo.
- Searching for an old business address or phone number.
- Viewing your top linked pages report in a backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs.
5. Sponsor local organizations
Whether it’s a local gardening club, a youth baseball team, or an annual 5K event, there are plenty of organizations in your area that are looking for sponsorships, and many are happy to accept a sponsorship from a local dentist. Most have packages that provide a link to your site from theirs. A few things to keep in mind:
- Links from sponsorships typically only last up to a year, so you will need to renew the sponsorship to keep your link in place.
- Links need to be on pages indexed by Google and the links need to be crawlable, otherwise, Google does not give you “credit” for the link.
- Not all sponsorship links are the same. In addition to the cost of the sponsorship, factors to consider include relevancy, link placement, and the domain authority of the linking site.
6. Make use of your blog
In order to set your dental practice apart from competitors in your local market, you’ll need to acquire links from organizations on a national level – not just in your local area. Using your blog to create linkable assets that you can promote through link building outreach.
A great place to start is by looking at “People also ask” questions in Google search results for a specific topic. For example, when using the keyword “root canal” Google displays questions that people ask about root canals, which you can use for developing content.
Whatever resource guide you choose to create for link building, it is extremely important to verify that 1. there is a linkable audience for your resource and 2. the audience would be potentially interested in linking to your resource. Tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs can help with in-depth research of topic opportunities and find link prospects for those topics.
7. Start guest blogging
There are many dental practices that simply do not have the time to keep up with content on their website. If you are able to provide them with high-quality content that is useful for their own clients, you can find a way to use the content to link back to your own website.
Finding sites that are willing to collaborate with you is not always easy, and you would only want to work with other dental practices that do not operate within your own geographic area. However, building a relationship with other dental practices is a great way to acquire high-value and relevant links over time.
8. Sign up for HARO
Help A Reporter Out, better known as “HARO”, connects reporters looking for content with knowledgeable industry professionals. By subscribing to category feeds like “Biotech and Healthcare” and “Lifestyle and Fitness” you will receive query requests from media outlets three times per day.
The success rate of getting a link through HARO is not always high as there will be many other dentists submitting responses to dental related queries, and you need to quickly respond to queries in order to be competitive, but there is potential to land links on high authority sites that will have an immediate impact on your site’s SEO.
9. Analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles
This requires a paid tool like Ahrefs to download and analyze where your direct competitors are getting their backlinks. These tools also provide a backlink gap analysis to find sources where competitors are getting a link but your site is not.
At Netvantage, we subscribe to multiple backlink analysis tools and analyze competitor backlink profiles at scale – not just a handful of local competitors but hundreds across a local area to find thousands of backlink and co-citation opportunities.
Need some help with your search marketing? Netvantage specializes in dental SEO and knows what it takes to help your dental practice succeed. We have written guides on dental SEO and have helped dentists increase their search visibility in competitive markets. Send us an email or give us a call at 877-204-0234.
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