In this article, we’re diving into SEO for dentists—what I’ve learned over 10 years about what works, what doesn’t, and how to build an SEO strategy that actually drives patient bookings for a dental office.
We’ll discuss the three pillars of SEO and how each one applies specifically to dental practices. You’ll learn how to get your website ranking on Google, how to show up in local map results, and how to build location pages that attract patients from nearby cities. We’ll also cover content strategies that engage prospective patients, how to earn backlinks without cutting corners, and how to measure your SEO success with the right tools and metrics.
As a dental SEO agency, Sagapixel has been creating effective SEO campaigns for dentists for over 7 years. If you’d like to learn more about increasing your dental practice’s online presence to drive more bookings, schedule a call with us today.
To discover more SEO tips for your dental practice, you can also check out our full video playlist about SEO for dentists.
The Benefits of SEO for Dentists
Unfortunately, between me and my insurance provider, my family has spent somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 at the dentist over the past 5 years. We found our dentist on Google, and I’m sure that we’re not the only ones in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, that found this dentist by Googling “dentist Cherry Hill New Jersey.”
A query like that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars in revenue to a dental practice.
At the same time, there’s a lot of bad SEO information floating around YouTube and Google, and there are lots of less-than-professional SEOs that are out there providing “services” to dentists.
By the end of this article, you’ll grasp what a solid, well-thought-out SEO plan looks like for your dental practice, which you should compare to anybody that you consider hiring to do your SEO. If you’re in a small, not-too-competitive market, you could even try to do it yourself.
The Three Basic Principles of SEO for Dentists
There are three core principles that make up a successful SEO strategy for dentists:
1. Technical SEO
Technical SEO means making sure that Google can optimally crawl and index your website.
This includes everything from the structure of your site to how fast it loads on mobile devices. A clean, logical site structure helps Google understand which pages are most important—so it can pass PageRank to those pages and improve their chances of ranking.
Technical SEO also includes basics like secure HTTPS, mobile responsiveness, proper use of canonical tags, and fixing crawl errors that may be preventing Google from accessing your content. Without solid technical SEO, even the best content can get buried in search results.
2. Content Optimization
The second pillar of SEO is optimizing your content to match what patients are actually searching for. This process starts with keyword research. We identify the exact phrases potential patients are typing into Google—like “pediatric dentist in Cherry Hill” or “tooth pain after filling”—and build content that speaks directly to those needs.
Content optimization also means answering common patient questions, explaining procedures in plain language, and using clear, helpful titles and headings. The more your site aligns with a patient’s intent, the more likely Google is to display your pages in search results.
3. Maximizing Trustworthiness and Authoritativeness
The third part of SEO is about maximizing the trustworthiness and authoritativeness of your website, which has two parts:
- Backlinks: These are links from other websites pointing to your site. The more high-quality, relevant websites that link to you, the more authoritative your website appears to Google. For dentists, backlinks from local news outlets, community organizations, and respected health-related sites can go a long way.
- User signals: Google also looks at how users interact with your website. Do they spend time reading your content? Do they visit multiple pages? Or do they bounce quickly back to the search results? These behavioral signals help Google gauge whether people find your site helpful and relevant.
The truth is, you need backlinks, and you need users—real human beings—to show Google that they like the content that they find on your website.
Local SEO for Dentists: Dominate Your Local Market
When it comes to getting new patients through search, local SEO is where dentists can win big—especially in competitive markets. Most people looking for a dentist aren’t just searching “dentist”—they’re searching “dentist near me” or “best dentist in [city].” That’s why showing up in the Google Map Pack—those top 3 listings with a map above the standard search results—is essential.
The Importance of A Google Business Profile for Dentists
When someone performs a search, the first organic listings that they’re going to see are the map results.
All the information you find here about your dental practice—address, hours, phone number, services, photos, reviews—comes from your Google Business Profile.
If you go to https://google.com/business, it will take you to this page. You can click on “Manage Now” and claim your Google Business Profile. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be eligible to show up in the results here.
Let’s say you’ve already claimed your Google Business Profile. What can you do now to start showing up in the map results?
Three Local SEO Ranking Factors for Dentists
Google uses three main ranking factors to determine which businesses show up in local results:
1. Relevance
Relevance measures how well your business matches a user’s search intent. For example, if someone searches “dentist that accepts Blue Cross,” Google will favor listings that clearly mention Blue Cross insurance—either on the business profile, your website, or both.
This is where your keyword research comes into play. Make sure your website—and especially your homepage—reflects all the services, insurance plans, and treatments patients might search for. Add this information to your Google Business Profile as well, particularly under your services and business description.
2. Distance
Distance refers to how far the person performing the search is from your location.
Google understands that people are more or less willing to travel for certain types of services. You’ll see that if we search for “dentist Cherry Hill,” it’s somewhat zoomed in—this is not showing all of Cherry Hill.
Sometimes, you’re simply going to be too far from an internet user, and there really isn’t much you can do about this.
3. Prominence
Prominence refers to how well-known and trusted your dental practice appears to be—both online and in your community.
Google looks at signals like:
- The number and quality of backlinks pointing to your website
- Mentions of your practice across the web (even unlinked ones)
- The quality and quantity of reviews on your profile
- How much people interact with your listing (clicks, photo views, website visits, etc.)
- Listings in local directories or community websites
If your practice is earning backlinks from local blogs, sponsoring events, or getting mentioned in national publications like Men’s Health, it tells Google that your business is trusted and reputable—giving you a better shot at showing up in local results.
Engagement and Quality Signals in Local SEO for Dentists
When we talk about prominence in local SEO, we’re not just talking about backlinks and citations—there’s also a quality component that plays a critical role. Google considers engagement signals like:
- Do people search for you by name?
- Do they interact with your Google Business Profile?
- Do they click through the pictures?
- Do they click over to your website?
- Do they read the FAQs?
- Do they leave reviews for you?
In short, Google is trying to gauge whether your practice is the kind of business people genuinely trust and interact with. The more signals it sees that point to real-world reputation and online engagement, the more likely it is to feature your practice in local search results.
How to Keep Your Dental Practice Prominent with Local SEO
Make sure you’re doing good on-page SEO for your website. You should have content that is relevant to all the different ways someone would search for a dentist in your market.
Distance may be out of your control, but if you are early in the process of establishing your practice, pick a more central location.
Do everything you can to maximize the prominence of your Google Business Profile by:
- Encourage engagement with your Google Business Profile. Get patients to interact—click your photos, read FAQs, or visit your website.
- Earn high-quality backlinks to your site from local businesses, organizations, or media outlets.
- Ask for reviews—and guide your patients. A quick suggestion like “If you’re comfortable, feel free to mention the service you received” can result in keyword-rich reviews that help your SEO.
The Power of Blue Link Results
Not all local SEO is in the map results.
There are people who scroll down to the blue link results. In some cases, someone may even perform a search like “emergency dentist Millville, New Jersey,” and the first thing they see are the blue link results, not the map results.
This is a major opportunity.
You’ll never be able to get your Google Business Profile showing across every town within a 25-mile radius of your practice. However, there’s nothing stopping you from building individual location pages to target all of those dentist + city queries in the reasonable market that you serve.
In fact, in this search, the “24-hour emergency dentist near me” at position four is not actually physically located in Millville, New Jersey.
There’s nothing preventing you from doing the same thing.
A dentist in Tampa would be well-served and well-advised to build pages on their website targeting:
- Dentist St. Petersburg
- Dentist Clearwater
- Dentist Wesley Chapel
Any city or location that is within a reasonable distance—one that your patients would potentially travel to see a dentist—is fair game when it comes to blue link results.
Building Effective SEO Location Pages for Your Dental Practice
Here are the basics of creating effective SEO location pages for your dental practice:
- Title Tags: Include your primary keyword (like “Dentist Cherry Hill”) and a value proposition (e.g., “Same-Day Appointments Available”).
- H1s: Your headline should clearly include the location + service keyword.
- On-Page SEO Tools: Use tools like Surfer SEO or Frase to make sure your content is just as comprehensive—if not more—than what’s already ranking.
- Internal Linking: Link all your location pages together and back to your homepage or relevant service pages. This helps distribute link equity and makes it easier for Google to crawl your site.
SEO Content Strategies for Dentists
When it comes to SEO content strategies for dentists, blogging and video both aim to do the same two things:
- Targeting Patients Early in Their Buyer’s Journey: SEO-optimized content can help you reach potential patients before they even search for a dentist near them. For example, someone who performs a search such as “what to do if my cavity falls out” obviously needs a dentist. By answering this question, you can position your practice as helpful and knowledgeable.
- Driving Positive User Signals: We produce content for SEO to drive positive user signals. This is a debated topic in SEO, but there’s evidence that Google pays attention to how users interact with your site. When visitors stay on your site, scroll through your content, or click on internal links, it sends a message: “This content is useful.” Over time, strong engagement can create a halo effect, lifting your visibility for more competitive keywords and service pages.
Blogging vs. Video
There are two forms of SEO content: blogging and video. Traditional blogging is fading out. People don’t read long-form dental articles like they used to, but you still need text content to rank on Google.
You can get the best of both worlds by combining video and blogging:
- Shoot a video covering a common patient question or topic.
- Transcribe the video into a written format.
- Optimize the transcript with proper headings, keywords, internal links, and metadata.
- Publish it on your site as a blog post or dedicated content page.
In addition to better engagement, videos help potential patients get a feel for who you are as a dentist. They’ll have an actual expert speaking on the topics as opposed to a ghostwriter who doesn’t have any sort of medical training.
All of this content can also be repurposed for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. If you’ve stumbled upon our SEO for dentists video series, there’s a good chance you discovered it through organic search and not by going straight to YouTube. That’s because we’re doing this for ourselves—shooting the video, transcribing it, and getting it ranking in organic search.
It works a lot better than sitting down and writing an article for three hours.
How to Select the Right Content Topics
Before you start writing or recording any dental content you need to make sure the topics you’re targeting are actually worth your time. At Sagapixel, we use a simple framework to qualify content ideas—we call it BARS.
Each piece of content you produce should meet these four criteria:
- Buyer’s journey: We’re not just writing a topic because it’s about dentistry. We want to touch upon topics that your target patient is Googling.
- AI answer: People are not going to be satisfied with an AI answer to whatever question you are answering. All of that is going to get eaten up by Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) experience. If people are going to be satisfied with an answer from AI and not a dentist, it wasn’t a good topic to cover in the first place.
- Ranking potential: Just because you select a keyword doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to outrank Healthline and WebMD. There are plenty of topics and keywords about dentistry that those websites have not yet covered.
- Search Traffic Generation: Your topic needs to generate “enough” traffic. We usually look at the top search results on Google, use our SEO tools to determine how much traffic they’re generating, and then decide whether it’s enough to warrant making this content.
Off-Site SEO Factors and Link Building for Dentists
Once you’ve executed your local dental SEO strategies, you have already:
- Claimed and optimized your Google Business Profile.
- Built your location pages targeting all the different ways potential patients are looking for dentists like you.
- Executed your content strategy—first, to get in front of patients before they’ve explicitly looked for a dentist, but also to drive positive user signals for your website and demonstrate to Google that you are a trusted website.
Now you need to boost your visibility and authority with off-site SEO—and that starts with backlinks.
Why Backlinks Are Important in SEO for Dentists
Google uses backlinks—links from other websites—to evaluate a website’s authority, trustworthiness, and relevance.
Google is more likely to deem you a credible source if, for example:
- You are the only dentist in your market who has been interviewed by Men’s Health Magazine
- You got a backlink from the local Little League because you sponsored them this year
- You’re listed in all the local directories that people use to find a dentist
- Your hometown newspaper mentioned you but didn’t link to you
Each of these signals to Google that real organizations and people recognize your practice, making your site more trustworthy.
How to Earn Backlinks for Your Dental Website
There are three ways you can get backlinks for your dental practice:
- Beg for them
- Buy them
- Earn them
I don’t recommend the first two.
- Writing an article and emailing thousands of websites asking if they would add a link over to your article is a very time-consuming and inefficient way to earn links.
- Buying backlinks on marketplaces is probably a waste of money, especially the ones that actually list the domains. Google’s AI is capable of identifying websites that are selling backlinks to other websites.
That leaves the third option: earning backlinks. Here are some methods you can use to earn backlinks to your website:
1. Local Sponsorships
Many local organizations—youth sports teams, schools, community events, nonprofits—accept sponsorships in exchange for visibility on their websites. Often, that includes a backlink to your dental practice.
- These are ideal backlinks for dentists because:
- They’re hyper-relevant to your location.
- They show that you’re an active member of your community.
- They’re easy to acquire—simply reach out and offer support.
Start by looking at local sponsorship pages in your area or checking the websites of organizations you already support.
2. Writing Articles for Other Websites
Guest posting can still be an effective strategy—if done thoughtfully and sparingly. Reach out to local blogs, healthcare websites, or community news outlets and offer to write articles on dental health topics that their audience would find valuable.
Keep in mind:
- Make sure the websites are legitimate and reputable—not part of a backlink farm.
- Focus on quality over quantity—a few high-quality guest posts are better than dozens of low-value ones.
- Ideally, get a contextual link within the article itself. A byline link is fine too, but it’s less powerful.
This strategy positions you as a subject matter authority and builds trust while also strengthening your SEO.
3. Creating Content That Passively Earns Backlinks
Certain types of content naturally attract backlinks:
- Data and Statistics: For example, the query “how many root canals are performed in the U.S.?” shows several articles that have earned dozens or even hundreds of backlinks. The Cleveland Clinic is not spamming the internet asking people to link out to them, nor are they going onto marketplaces and purchasing backlinks. People have questions, and they’re looking for a statistic or some sort of data. They put it into the article that they’re writing and then they cite their source. You should aim to be one of those cited sources.
- Online Tools: This isn’t an example from dentistry, but the top result for “roofing calculator free” has earned 740 backlinks from 193 different websites. The second result has 9,000 backlinks from 245 websites, and there’s a very good chance this all happened passively.
The Consequences of Cutting Corners with Link Building
I would recommend not cutting corners with link building.
It’s been many years since Google handed out any sort of large number of link spam penalties, but that’s not to say that it won’t happen again.
There are websites that completely disappear from the search results because of link spam, and the last thing you want to do is crush your dental practice because you bought some backlinks from a spammy website.
Using Google Search Console to Measure SEO Success
After you’ve built your website, optimized your content, and earned high-quality backlinks, the next step is to track whether all that SEO work is actually paying off. With Google Search Console, Google allows you to track how your website is performing in search results.
It’s best to use a combination of this tool and a keyword tracking tool like Semrush, or Ahrefs, to see how your SEO is progressing. Here are the four key ways to measure SEO success for your dental practice:
Measurement One: Pages Indexed
In the local SEO section of this article, we discussed how you should be building new pages—each of which is targeting different service-plus-location queries. We also discussed content strategy, but if that content isn’t getting indexed by Google, it won’t show up in search results at all.
If you’re shooting video, generating transcripts, optimizing for search, or if you’re blogging, you need to know if any of your content is getting indexed by Google.
To start, go to the “Pages” tab and check this report.
There are a few errors you should keep an eye out for:
- Crawled – currently not indexed: Google crawled the page but decided not to index it
- Discovered – not indexed: Google found the page but hasn’t crawled it yet
- Duplicate – Google chose different canonical than user: Google thinks another version of the page is more appropriate
If your pages are missing from the index, click “Request Indexing”—this prompts Google to re-review the page.
Likewise, you could just uncheck this box, look at the data about your indexed pages, and see which pages have been indexed by Google.
This is more about keeping track of what has not been indexed.
Measurement Two: Keyword Rankings
There are a lot of ways to check your keyword rankings. Google Search Console has an “Average Position” report that you can look at—at the page and keyword level.
However, these numbers aren’t always reliable. If you are a dentist in Philadelphia, you may rank very highly for a query like “dentist near me” for someone that is two blocks away from your office—and maybe position 80 for someone that’s out in the suburbs. All of this will be averaged out in your Google Search Console report.
That’s why keyword trackers like Ahrefs exist. These tools allow you to check the search engine results from specific pages on different devices and track trends over time.
Measurement Three: Organic Traffic
Google Search Console can show you trends in your organic clicks over time. You can expand this to view data from up to 16 months. It’s possible to warehouse this data in BigQuery, so you can archive years and years of data from your Google Search Console.
This data is straight from Google. It tells you how much organic traffic it’s sending to your website—and for what queries.
Measurement Four: Conversions
The fourth (and most important) measurement of SEO success is conversions.
For this, you’ll need Google Analytics. Using Google Analytics, you can see how many conversions—how many phone calls, contact form submissions, bookings—you’ve received from organic search.
When your numbers are increasing, your SEO is working. If they’re flat—or worse, declining—it may be time to reassess your SEO strategy.
Drive Leads for Your Dental Practice with Sagapixel SEO
If you’re looking to increase your dental practice’s online presence to drive more patient leads, Sagaixel can help. Our dental SEO specialists will create engaging content, optimize your website, and maximize your authoritativeness to fill your calendar with bookings.
Schedule a call with us today to find out how we can maximize Google’s trust to reach more patients in your area.
