Links are mega important for SEO. The landscape of dental SEO and link building is always changing, and today, the importance of building high-quality links has never been higher. The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you’re going to compete and thrive online, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.
There are two fundamental ways that search engines use links:
To discover new web pages.
To help determine how well a page should rank in their results.
Link building needs to be handled carefully. Quality of your links is paramount. You do not want a bunch of spammy links with zero relevance. Google will penalize websites that buy a big whack of links in an effort to game the results. Some of you may have been a victim to an overzealous and amateur SEO who has done this in the past, even years ago, and if so you need to have your links analyzed by a professional. Identifying toxic links is important because you can ask Google to disavow them. However, first, you need to identify any toxic links pointing to your website.
Creating a disavow file full of toxic links can be laborious and costly if there are thousands of bad links. Links to your dental practice website need to stay clean and natural.
You want quality links from local businesses and quality directories. Are you a member of your local Chamber of Commerce? A link there is often worth the annual membership because each Chamber website is an authority in your location. Also, how about the local labs you work with? Your AAID and board certification websites? Do you have a profile on Nobel Biocare or similar? Make sure you get links from authority websites like these if possible. If an authority site offers an “enhanced listing” of some kind, buy it.
Cutting Edge runs tests on potential linking websites for our clients to be sure each link is worth it and won’t create a penalty.
Name, Address, Phone Citations – Ensure NAP Presence and Consistency
At Cutting Edge, we maintain listings for our clients at the five main aggregators of location data that send information to U.S. local search engines: Infogroup, Neustar Localeze, Acxiom, Factual and Foursquare. We push the correct, consistent location information for your dental practice to all of these data sources including 60+ popular online directories such as Amazon Alexa and Apple.
Citation Signals (IYP/aggregator NAP consistency, citation volume, etc.) make up 10.82% of Google’s ranking factors for local map results.
Your dental marketing team should be building your online presence and identifying opportunities for links and listings as routine. Over time these efforts can pay off in a big way.
Find my full article here. Interested in our Dental SEO Services?
Continue reading my next DT blog post: SEO Tips for Dentists #8 -Tracking
Cheers,
Christopher Scott
Dental SEO Marketing Expert
Address: 140 S Spriggs Blvd, Bloomington, IN 47403
Phone: (317) 999-7733
Web: cuttingedge.marketing