In today’s busy and connected world, marketing your dental practice has never been more critical, and marketing strategies have changed drastically over the last decade.
To reach the most potential patients, a successful dentist must consider all marketing options, but the foundation of any digital marketing campaign is search engine optimisation.
We understand that this can seem overwhelming when you’re trying to manage a busy dental practice and focus on providing exceptional patient care, and we’re here to help. At GDW, we offer marketing services from the ground up, including building or enhancing your website to ongoing monthly services to keep your website relevant, updated, and reaching the new patients you want to attract.
We’ve compiled an SEO glossary to help you stay ahead of the game when it comes to understanding marketing terminology. When you know the correct language to use, you can make sure you’re receiving the right services and creating marketing strategies that will genuinely benefit your dental practice.
Above the fold refers to the content that appears on the page before your reader begins to scroll. This is typically the place to include your most pertinent and attention-grabbing information about your dental practice that you want potential patients to see first.
Alternative (alt) text refers to a written description of an image to explain how it relates to a web page’s content. Alt text may appear if your visitor can’t view the image. Because of its role in Google image searches, alt text is also a small ranking factor for your website.
Backlinks are links to your website that originate from an outside website. So, for example, if the Australasian Implant Institute links to your website, that would be considered a viable backlink for your dental website. Likewise, if you link to them in a dental implant blog, it’s regarded as a backlink for their website. Backlinks can enormously impact your SEO results, but not all backlinks are weighted equally. You can learn more about backlink strategies for dentists here.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website without visiting another page or interacting with your website in any way. A high bounce rate could indicate that your website is not providing the relevant dental information that your potential patients are looking for. If that is the case, you can take these actions to make your dental website more patient-friendly.
A way of helping visitors navigate your website, like a “breadcrumb trail.” For example, Home > Dental Implants > Technology. Breadcrumbs make your site more user friendly by adding easier navigation, and they can also give you an excellent SEO boost.
In SEO, CTR refers to the percentage of users who click on your web page in search engine results. You can calculate this by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions (the number of times your link was viewed) for each page.
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your website that complete your desired actions. For example, this could be booking an appointment or providing their information to sign up for an e-book or dental newsletter. You can calculate this number by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors to your website during a specific time frame.
Crawling refers to the process of gathering data and information about websites so search engines can organise and index them for ranking.
Domain authority is a third party ranking score designed to predict how well a website is likely to rank in the SERP (search engine results page). Domain authority is calculated using machine learning algorithms that try to predict which factors will cause a page to rank on Google.
Duplicate content is when the content on a website is the same as content on one or more other websites. Duplicate content does not rank well. Therefore, it is essential to create original, relevant, and engaging content for your own website that is not duplicated or copied from other websites.
An external link is a link to relevant information on a different website. For example, your dental implant page might link to pertinent information found on the Australian Society of Dental Implants page so your patients can learn more about implant dentistry.
Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google to help track all of the actions on your website, including content performance, visitor behaviour, website traffic sources, and many other things. This tool is a vital component of your dental SEO, as it provides most of the data you will use to inform your decisions.
GMB is a tool that allows you to manage your business profile on Google and optimise it to attract new patients. In addition, GMB provides quick access to things like business contact information, practice hours, and other tools to help you interact with prospective patients.
Google Search Console is a free tool to help website owners understand how their sites perform on Google Search. Among other things, you can track keyword performance, see your site’s traffic rate, and troubleshoot issues to help your website perform better and reach more potential new patients.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. This is the standard markup language for displaying material on the internet, such as paragraphs, headings, charts, tables, etc.
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which is how data moves from a server to a web browser.
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) that encrypts data transferred between a website and browser. HTTPS is a Google ranking factor.
An impression measures how many times your content or ads appear on a screen to a viewer.
An indexed page is a page that has been added to a search engines database of pages. Only indexed pages can show up on Google search results. Website owners can manually request for Google to index new pages or wait for them to be discovered by Googlebot as it crawls the web.
IP address stands for Internet Protocol Address. You can share the IP address between several websites within one server or a group of servers, or it can be dedicated and have its own address.
A keyword refers to a phrase or words that people use to search for information. Search engines then match visitors to websites with keywords relevant to what they’re looking for. For example, a patient interested in dental implants may type in a phrase like “dental implants in Sydney.” Using keywords throughout your content will help optimise it for search engines looking to match new patients with your dental website. Learn more about keyword basics here.
The Map Pack refers to the map results that display first for relevant Google searches. These results will usually display Google My Business listings pertinent to the search term and searchers location. Map pack results are primarily location-based, and they are a crucial part of your local SEO strategy. This is a desirable place to rank as potential new patients will see these results first and may choose to learn more information about your dental practice.
Metadata communicates with search engines and gives them vital information about what your page offers so the search engine can rank it. It also provides the titles and descriptions that searchers will see when scrolling through the SERP. Metadata is an enormous part of your SEO strategy, and you can learn more about optimising it here.
On-page SEO refers to strategies that take place within your website. A few examples of this include providing engaging and high-quality content, easy website navigation, and SEO optimisation with keywords.
Off-page SEO are strategies that take place outside of your website. Examples might be link building, social media marketing, and email marketing. For example, building a brand for your dental practice would be part of off-page SEO.
Page speed refers to the time it takes for a webpage to load completely. Page speed is one of Google’s ranking factors. The ideal load time for mobile websites is one to three seconds. If it takes longer for your page to load, prospective patients may leave your site. Be sure to optimise your dental website for both mobile and desktop users so that it loads effectively on all devices.
Pay-per-click refers to the ads that appear above and sometimes below the results on search engines. You can bid on these ads to gain more exposure or highlight a special from your dental practice.
A visitor will type the words or phrases into a search engine to find websites with the relevant information they’re looking for. For example, a prospective patient might search for a “dentist in Sydney” or “dental implants in Sydney.”
Ranking factor refers to the variables used to display relevant results for a search query. There are hundreds of factors that Google considers when ranking a website. High-quality content, backlinks, keyword optimisation, and page load time are just a few of these factors.
Redirects send users to a different webpage than they requested but with the same relevance.
Schema refers to microdata you can add to your dental website to help give search engines a clearer understanding of your content, allowing them to better rank your site.
SERP refers to results that display after a user searches anything in a search engine.
A sitemap provides a list of pages on a website. Your sitemap is essentially a blueprint that can help search engines crawl and index your website for ranking.
We hope this glossary helps you understand some of the basics of dental marketing terminology. If you have questions or need help with marketing strategies for your dental practice, don’t hesitate to contact your team at GDW.