There could be a number of reasons why your dental website is not ranking on Google. It could be that your website is not optimized for search engines, or that you are not using the right keywords.
Additionally, your website might not be updated regularly, or it could be that you have not submitted it to directories. Whatever the reason, there are a number of steps you can take to improve your dental website’s ranking on Google.
In this article, we will discuss some of the reasons this could be and what steps you should take in order to get it ranked higher.
Reasons why your dental practice’s website isn’t ranking
There could be several reasons why your website is not ranking. Here’s a list of things that could be causing the issue.
Strong competition in your area
If there are a lot of dental practices in your area, it will be harder to rank on the first page. What is the keyword difficulty (KD) or the domain rating (DR) of your competition? In areas where there are more dental offices, you’re naturally going to have to do a little more to rank, or maybe a lot more.
You can find out how much competition there is by doing a search for keywords in an area with a tool like Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. Knowing that there is a lot of competition in your area doesn’t mean you should give up, it just helps you know it’s gonna take more effort and time to rank.
Webpages are not indexed
If your dental website pages are not being indexed by Google, then they will never show up in the search results. This can happen for a number of reasons such as:
- The site is new and hasn’t been crawled by Google yet
- There’s a robots.txt file that’s blocking Google from indexing the site
- Your site isn’t being updated regularly
- It isn’t well-linked internally
If you think this might be the reason your website is not ranking, then check to see if your pages are being indexed by doing a site:example.com search on Google. If no results show up, then that’s an indication that your pages are not being indexed and you’ll need to take a look at the reasons why that might be.
You should make sure that an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math is installed on your site to help you get your pages indexed quickly.
Not enough content on your site
If you have a dental website with only a couple of pages, it’s not going to rank as well as a site with more content.
Google wants to see that you have a robust website with plenty of information for visitors. It is important that you try and make webpages for each of the services you offer.
The content needs to be relevant to the search terms that people are typing into Google. Relevance to your content and location are the most important ranking factors on SERPs.
If you want to improve your dental website’s ranking, then you need to make sure that you have enough content on your site.
Your site is too new
If your dental website is brand new, it will naturally take some time to rank. Google needs to index and crawl your site first before it can start ranking for any keywords.
In fact, content, even when it is indexed quickly, still takes time to rank. This is because Google needs to determine the quality of your content and how well it matches up with the searcher’s intent for a given keyword.
The webpages load slowly
If your dental website pages take too long to load, that will hurt your rankings. Google wants to provide the best user experience possible, and part of that is making sure that the searcher gets to the content they’re looking for quickly.
You can check your page speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. If your pages are loading slowly, you need to figure out why and address the issue.
Your site isn’t mobile-friendly
More people are using their phones to search for dental services than ever before. If your dental website is not mobile-friendly, then it will hurt your rankings.
You can check if your site is mobile-friendly with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. If your site is not mobile-friendly, you need to address the issue as soon as possible.
Outdated SEO practices
If your dental website was built a long time ago, it’s possible that the SEO practices used at that time are no longer effective.
For example, keyword stuffing is when you stuff too many keywords into your content in an attempt to rank for those keywords. This used to be an effective SEO practice but is now penalized by Google.
If your dental website is using any outdated SEO practices, you need to update your website as soon as possible.
Poor website structure
If your dental website has a poor structure, that can hurt your ranking. Your website should be easy to navigate and have a logical hierarchy.
Every page on your site should be reachable from the home page in no more than three clicks. If it takes longer than that, then your website structure needs to be improved.
Website needs to be updated more often
If your dental website is not updated regularly, that will hurt your ranking. Google wants to see that you are providing fresh, relevant content on a regular basis.
You should aim to update your dental website at least once a month with new blog posts, services pages, or anything else that is relevant to your business. Doing this will also help increase the amount of content you have on your website.
Another good practice for blog writing is to try and make blog posts at least 500 words. Generally, the longer, the better. However, don’t just add fluff. The whole objective of adding content is to add quality content.
Targeting the wrong keywords
If you are targeting the wrong keywords, that will hurt your dental website’s ranking. You need to make sure that you are targeting keywords that are relevant to your business and have a good amount of search volume.
You can use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to research keywords. Make sure to target long-tail keywords, which are three or four word phrases that are specific to the services you provide, such as “wisdom teeth removal” or “root canal treatment”.
Not enough backlinks
If your dental website does not have enough backlinks, that will hurt your ranking. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Google sees these as votes of confidence and the more backlinks you have, the better.
There are a number of ways to get backlinks. You can guest blog on other dental websites, submit your website to dental directories, or add your website to your email signature.
Duplicate content
If your dental website has duplicate content, that will hurt your ranking. Google wants to see unique content on your website.
To fix this issue, you need to either remove the duplicate content or add a canonical tag. A canonical tag is a line of code that tells Google which version of the content is the original.
Bottom line – There could be any number of reasons why your dental website is not ranking on Google
No dental website is perfect and there are always going to be areas that need improvement. However, if you take the time to address the issues on your dental website, you will see an improvement in your ranking. Even sites that are currently being worked on by professionals will always need improvement.
Just remember to be patient, as it can take some time for your dental website to start ranking higher on Google.
If you want to learn more, check out the basics of dental SEO.
If you think you need help with your website ranking, contact AdPro4U. We have experience ranking our dental clients on Google in their local area. We know what it will take to get your website ranked.