Posted by Cameron Francis on 07 May , 2015 in News Uncategorized
As a dentist, if you’re not getting more client appointments and bookings via the phone or your website, then you’re doing something completely wrong. You see, there are many Australians out there who have dental problems.
For instance, estimates have shown that more than 50% of all kids in Australia suffer from tooth decay. Also, tooth decay is arguably the most common Australian dental problem. So, why aren’t many people booking dental appointments with you?
Chances are they aren’t doing that because there are many others ranking for keywords that you deserve to rank for.
It is with this in mind that we have researched and tested multiple link building techniques. We collated some of those we have seen to be very effective, and use them to help dentists build effective backlinks to their websites and rank well on the search engines.
The first thing you need to do is find out where the dental practice with higher search engine rankings is getting their links from.
For instance, if you have a dental practice in Melbourne and aren’t getting as much business as you should from the search engines, the reality is that they are probably getting excellent backlinks from great sources.
So, how do you find their link sources? Simple, you can use one of more of the many link discovery tools. For us at eTraffic Web Marketing, Moz’s suite of research tools and Ahref’s plus a few other tools do the job really well. Once you have all these, it’s on to the next step.
You see, the smart thing about this link building strategy is that you don’t need to look for your own link sources yourself. With the data collected from your competition analysis, you can do the following:
Links can be built from the same sources as above. However, it is wise to avoid sources if they are suspect or possibly coming from bad link neighbourhoods.
Be particularly careful about bad link neighbourhoods. Even if they are able to give you a temporary boost in rankings, they can become compromised and result in a deindexing penalty (geek-speak for being removed from the search engine listings).
This is simply making your website so attractive that other people in the same field, industry or even complementary disciplines will link back to you. In this case, it could be you doing something out of the standard looking for links online.
For instance, you could simply give away a few hundred customised floss packs with your web address on it and ask the recipients to tell you what they think about it and how they use it.
That’s bound to get quite a few people talking about your dental practice on the internet. And to successfully do that, they would have to mention your website on their many different forums, discussion boards, social networks and so on. This will eventually result in an amazing flurry of links. The same can be said for events that you hold in the community.
Another effective link baiting tactic is to create succinct infographics on specific tooth problems. For instance, you could create an infographic about periodontal disease distilling all the important information and publishing it on your dental blog. If the infographic is powerful enough, it will compel people to link to it from their websites.
You must be on social media by now. If you are not, stop reading right now. Go create an account on Facebook and Twitter and then come on back. You need at least one of those to make this work. Once you’re done, start creating special promotions and events.
You could for instance, hold a free teeth whitening Friday where one male and female will get their teeth whitened by your dental practice. Then, upload the videos and pictures of the event. In fact, if you can take the winners’ before and after pictures, this will do wonders for your business.
Not only will people want to partake of it, you can incentivise by asking people to spread the word about the event. And when they do, you can enter everyone in a pool and pick two random individuals for another round. It’s a small price to pay in exchange for the tremendous amount of publicity your business will get.
This can be anything from the standard text to creative videos or podcasts about the ills of poor dental habits, or the many dental challenges that people face. The point is that it is important to create high quality resources that people can check out and recommend as valuable resources.
There’s a reason many people frequently visit websites like WebMD. It’s simply because they create excellent content that people can rely on. Now, that knowledge is for a worldwide audience.
The good thing is people are looking for more information that is specific to their countries and locality. So, instead of generic information, you could actually adopt a local authority content style. This way, all your dental articles will be targeted towards people who live in and around your catchment area.
As part of your content creation efforts, you can create question and answer based podcasts or hangouts. On these videos, you can answer important frequently asked questions in layman’s terms by your web visitors instead of providing the typical generic stuff that is all over the place.
We’re serious… you have no idea how many links you can get from sponsoring a high profile event or one that is important to your local community. You’ll get links from some of the best and most reputable sources. The truth is it might seem like a lot of work, but it isn’t when you’re working with a team of highly professional link building experts.
If you want even more creative and clever link building ideas from seasoned link building experts, get in touch with us at eTraffic Web Marketing.