Most dentists aren’t too active on social media.
If they are, they tend to just stick with one platform that they find easiest to use, like Facebook or Instagram.
While it’s great to use social media, because it gives you direct access to your patients, you want to expand your thinking of social media, so that it helps you in Google search results.
Creating social media accounts is a great way of improving or owning your brand online.
Here’s Why Dentist Should Create Social Media Accounts
This is especially important for dentists, because the name of just about every dental practice has a keyword in it, for example: Atlanta Dental Spa.
The practice name Atlanta Dental Spa has two keywords in it: Atlanta is a geo location keyword, and Dental is a niche or relevant industry keyword.
This practice obviously wants to show up for Google searches related to “atlanta dentistry”.
I found Atlanta Dental Spa, while searching for “dentist atlanta ga”, a search that gets 1,000 searches a month in Google.
Why This is Valuable
To drive home the point of why you want to do what’s necessary to show up for valuable Google searches, look at the image above.
Under the search result for “dentist atlanta ga” you’ll see:
Volume: 1,000/mo | CPC: $7.74
This is info from a special tool I have that helps me see search volumes in Google. In this example, this search gets 1,000 searches (on average) a month, just for this exact search phrase.
CPC means cost per click. That means if you were to pay Google for Ads, you’d pay $7.74 each time some one clicked on your Ad.
If you could pay Google to buy up all the 1,000 searches a month (you can’t, because it’s an auction process, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post), it would cost you $7,740 per month to purchase that much traffic to your website.
Proof that Branding with Social Media Accounts is Valuable
Having many different social media accounts can help with this because all your social media accounts will have your practice name in the account name, and the account URL.
Atlanta Dental Spa is obviously doing this right, so let’s keep using them as an example.
Here is their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AtlantaDentalSpa/
Here is their Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/atlantadentalspa/
The title of Facebook page is: Atlanta Dental Spa – Home | Facebook. The URL of the page is: https://www.facebook.com/AtlantaDentalSpa/.
This is important because the title and the URL of any web page is where Google goes to look for information to understand what the page is about.
And when Google looks at these pages, it sees the keywords “Atlanta” and “Dental” on these pages, and they point to (link back to) the website: https://atlantadentalspa.com/.
This is why having many social media accounts is so helpful with online branding.
If you create your accounts correctly, which means you need to be exactly consistent with your brand name, it creates a lot of important and relevant signals to Google about your business.
In this example there are many trusted websites (social medias sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are some of the largest websites in the world and therefor “trusted” by search engines), that all say the same thing “atlanta” and “dental”, in the important places to put information.
And they all point back to the website https://atlantadentalspa.com/.
Everywhere a search engine goes they see this same consistent, trusted, relevant information. This means that the business and website atlantadentalspa.com because very trusted and relevant for searches like “atlanta dental” which is very closely related to the valuable search “dentist atlanta ga”.
Does this makes sense?
Here is what it looks like when you enter the brand search for Atlanta Dental Spa in Google:
This is a screen shot of the first page search results for Atlanta Dental Spa. Do you see how the Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram pages all show up on the first page?
How Many Social Media Accounts Do You Need?
The answer to just about every question about search engine optimization is: it depends.
It depends on the level of competition. In this example for “dentist atlanta ga”, it will help to have a lot because this is a very competitive and valuable search to show up for.
You’ll need more than just a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram account.
How many? There is no exact number, but you can create hundreds.
“HUNDREDS? Did you just say HUNDREDS?”
Well, yes.
There is a website you can go to called Knowem.com where you can enter your practice name and see all the different social media accounts that are available.
The reason that you may want to create hundreds of profile for your practice is that it helps build relevance and you don’t know which profiles are going to make it to the first page of your brand search. Sometimes the Facebook and Instagram pages don’t show up till the 3rd or 4th page of the brand search result.
If you create a hundred, there is a good chance you can fill the first page of the brand search with your properties.
You can do this by yourself, or you can hire Determined Solutions to do it for you.
To prove to you that we take branding seriously, you can do a brand search for: Determined Solutions. You’ll see something similar to this:
We practice what we preach. Important.
Hopefully this article makes sense to you and you can see the importance of creating social media accounts. If you have any questions let us know at: seo @ determinedsolutions dot com.