Mention the phrase “white hat SEO for dental practices” and it’s easy to picture cowboys wearing enormous white hats in western movies of the past. These characters face danger as they battle black-hatted villains. However, the man in the white hat always wins at the end of the movie. So do those who practice white hat SEO for dental practices.
By definition, white hat SEO is any strategy that improves ranking while adhering to Google’s stringent guidelines. By staying within Google’s good graces, your dental practice preserves its good reputation and avoids penalties. Black hat SEO only serves to threaten that good reputation. This is all the reason dentists need to embrace white SEO.
White Hat SEO for Dental Practices – A Closer Look
What exactly does white hat SEO look like when you see it on websites? To get a better understanding, this is what it looks like:
- Content is well-written and informative
- All web pages load quickly
- The website is optimized for mobile devices
- Each meta tag is an honest representation of page content
Black hat SEO wants to achieve none of these goals. Black hat marketers want results, and they don’t care how they get them. If they think they can get away with a sneaky practice, they do it. Keyword stuffing, cloaking, thin content… it doesn’t matter to them. If they’re doing harm to their clients’ websites, they don’t really care.
White Hat SEO For Dental Practices – Why It Matters
As a dentist, you’re naturally committed to providing excellent treatment for your patients. That how you build your reputation. Your website, which is most people’s first impression of your office, must also add to your reputation. By allowing black hat SEO tactics to exist on your dental practice website, you put your reputation at risk. Just as you take care of patients in the chair, you have to take care of them online as well.
Is black hat SEO really that dangerous to your reputation? Yes. Black hat SEO can get sites penalized or even banned by Google. Since the vast majority of searches are performed on Google, it’s a bad idea to get that search engine giant mad at you. Most people finding your website are going to find it through Google. If your website runs afoul of their rules, being penalized could seriously reduce your web traffic. For most practices, that would be disastrous.
How to Implement White Hat SEO For Dental Practices
It’s not hard to avoid using black hat SEO tactics. All you need is the desire to be ethical. For dentists, that’s pretty easy to do. Easy ways to employ white hat SEO for dental practices would include the following:
Offer Original Content of High Quality
With white hat SEO for dental practices, the quality of your content takes on extra significance. Good, original content serves to educate and motivate prospective patients. In black hat SEO, none of this matters. Black hat marketing isn’t concerned with quality web pages. Unethical marketers are more interested in using things like keyword stuffing to boost rankings. Any long-term damage may not be noticed until they’re long out of the picture.
True white hat SEO is about original content that your visitors want to see. The emphasis there is the word “original.” All too often, many black hat marketers don’t hesitate to steal content from other sites and re-use it. They may literally steal web pages work for work without bothering to make any changes to it. Google and other search engines can detect duplicated material quite easily. Once they spot a website duplicating content from other websites, it’s a good bet they’ll be penalized.
Stealing content from other sites is self-defeating. Your content is a chance to create your own voice and become a trusted authority to patients. Why would dentists want someone else’s words speaking for them?
Use Descriptive & Accurate Meta Tags
All elements on your website should be in sync. They should seamlessly work together to provide an excellent experience for online viewers. For example, your meta description content should accurately reflect what your practice website is about. Honesty and transparency are key. Black hat marketers don’t care about honesty. They’ll deliver views. How they get them doesn’t matter much.
When meta descriptions are accurate, viewers will be satisfied when they land on your website. They’ll find what they were looking for. That means they’ll stay longer on the site. Google sees when people stay longer at your website, and it tells them your website is of value. Consequently, they will rank your practice website higher. In the end, that’s why you want to employ white hat SEO at all times.
Get Rid of Black Hat SEO
Dental practices depend on their good reputation to gain patient trust. White hat SEO for dental practices helps build that good reputation. As a leader in ethical digital marketing, Dreamscape Marketing is committed to protecting our clients’ websites from black hat SEO. We’ve created hundreds of websites for our healthcare clients, and we’re ready to put our knowledge to work for you.
Contact us today at 888-307-7304 or via our “Contact Us” webpage. Let’s make sure white hat SEO for dental practices is in your tool tray.