How Long Does Dental SEO Take?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process rather than a quick fix. Optimizing all aspects of your website takes time, and then it will take a while before you will start seeing an increase in traffic.
How long does SEO take exactly? In this article, we’ll explore the answer and look at some of the factors that may influence it.
Optimizing Your Website
Optimizing your dental website is a process that takes anywhere from a few hours to several weeks or even months depending on the number of web pages you have and the state of your site.
An effective Dental SEO strategy involves an SEO audit that evaluates the state of your site. Based on the results, you may have to do technical SEO as well as content and web page optimization.
Your dental website design, dental social media presence, and backlinks profile can all influence your ranking in search engines, so you may have to work on improving these to get a better ranking in search engines.
If you’ve carried out an SEO audit in the past and have been keeping your site in good shape, you can focus on updating content that is no longer relevant or creating new content.
Some of the key factors that determine how long it will take before you see results include:
- Whether your website is mobile friendly (responsive design)
- Whether you check all the boxes for technical SEO (including SSL certificates, fast website speed, clean website code, good web design)
- Whether your website already provides valuable content that has been optimized for search engines
- Whether you have a strong brand presence on social media
- How many reputable websites in your dental niche link back to you
- The number of web pages and amount of content that needs to be updated (for example, updating a one-year-old dental practice blog will be a lot quicker than updating a large dental ecommerce website which could have thousands of product pages)
- The dental niche your website caters to and the competition you may have to face
- The overall visitor experience that your dental website provides, from the home page to the contact page with all the other pages in between
So, How Long Does Dental SEO Take?
Let’s assume that your website has been optimized for search engines in the past and that the focus of your current SEO efforts is to add new content and make tweaks.
Let’s assume also that you have a decent ranking in the Google search results page for your targeted keywords and that you are in a moderately competitive niche.
In this scenario, you can start seeing results within four to six months after you start to update content, add new content, and tweak your website. You may see results even faster, but in general, it takes several months for traffic to increase and for Google to start ranking your site higher on the search results page. It may take up to twelve months to see the full results of your work.
That may sound like a lot of time to wait, but keep in mind that SEO improvements can bring you a lot of value at a smaller cost than other strategies for promoting your dental website. At the same time, SEO results often last. If you climb to the top of the search results and make SEO an ongoing effort, you can stay there for months to come.
How Long Does Dental SEO Take – The Bottom Line
Search engine optimization takes time to show results, but when it’s done properly, the wait is worthwhile. SEO depends on many factors that are not entirely under your control, including your competitors and search engine algorithm updates. However, SEO efforts are rewarded with consistent traffic and possibly higher conversion rates.
How Long Does Dental SEO Take – Resources
- Google SEO Starters Guide – If you own, manage, monetize, or promote online content via Google Search, this guide is meant for you.
- Bing Webmaster Guide – These guidelines are intended to help you understand how Bing finds, indexes, and ranks websites.
