Have you ever wondered how you can get your practice website out there “organically"? This means via others in the dental profession who find your content and share it simply because they like it and want others to read it also? Here are some helpful ways to get there.
Link building continues to be critically important to your dental search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. But now you need to focus on building high value and high quality organic links. The links must not only be of superior quality to catch the attention of search engine spiders, they must also be numerous to make an impact on your website’s page rankings on search engines such as Google and Bing.
It’s easy to ramp up poor quality link building by using a variety of artificial techniques. This path will lead to a serious rankings downgrade. Google and other search engine algorithms now have the capability to differentiate between good and bad quality links. Truly high quality links are the ones earned organically, purely on merit. This requires a committed effort on your part in terms of online engagement, public relations, and consistent human interaction and exposure.
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Content strategy Your real targets should be social media influencers, print media journalists, leading columnists, and respected bloggers, which can help you achieve top quality organic links. These people are typically very selective in terms of quality and relevant content. You have to bring your content up to a level where they will endorse and promote it, and this will support your link building efforts in the process. To gain the goodwill of these high quality groups, it’s important to create a sharply focused content strategy.
There is no shortcut to building dental-related content. You need experienced professional content developers to create strong and persuasive content. The content building team should be trained in what kind of content is required for your practice. Once they’re trained to handle the content, they should be empowered with executing cohesive content. There should be a system of checks and balances to ensure the content flows in the right direction at any given point.
Workflow plan
In one sense, link building encompasses every aspect of the SEO strategy. Without a comprehensive workflow plan and approach, it’s never going to be possible to achieve high quality organic links. The entire SEO process must be mapped out in the workflow plan, which will help in a logical distribution of time and effort toward link building and other SEO exercises. It will enable you to operate at peak efficiency with regard to your link building strategy, and it will yield real results.
Identifying potential influencers
You can perform an online search for relevant websites, blogs, discussion forums, online publications, and social media accounts that focus on similar areas as your practice. These sites should be authoritative and command a reputation and following in the field. The trustworthiness, credibility, and authority of such sites can be gauged by using a number of third party tools with their unique algorithms or metrics.
The next step is to acquire accurate contact information about these targeted sites, usually available on the website itself. In addition to the contact information, this will also help you collect their social media contacts such as LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The idea of collecting multiple contact points for a site is to ensure that if one contact fails, there are other contacts available.
Reaching out
The database of potential contacts can run into hundreds of names that can serve as key influencers to support organic link building for your content. It may not be possible to reach out to each one with a personalized message. So the first step should be to develop a few solid templates with text targeted at subgroups within the database.
Templates should be created for the next communication in the series because each target may not respond to the first communication. Two or three levels of communication can be created to reach out to each target in a systematic manner. Avoid repeated communications beyond a third attempt. The privacy and confidentiality of the contacts should be respected.
Personalization
The key to success in an outreach effort is personalization. Once the templates are developed for the specific subgroups and communication levels, they should not be sent out immediately. Each template can form a broader text, but each email should be personalized, using the name, contact details, and reference to the website or specific areas of interest of the contact. Most people won’t bother to look at a standardized template email. But when it includes personal information and something that appeals to their interests, it becomes more persuasive.
The results of these suggested efforts will start to show, and the organic link building strategy will pay off in terms of higher search engine rankings for your dental website.
Susan Hutson is vice president of marketing at Ekwa.com, a complete Internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media marketing, and the online reputations of dentists. Vikas Vij is the marketing manager for Ekwa Marketing. Visit the website at ekwa.com.
