Search engine optimization (SEO) can help drive growth and success for your dental practice. However, building a successful SEO strategy involves leveraging several different factors. In this post, we answer the question "What is crawling in SEO?" and explain how it affects your dental practice's website and marketing strategy.

Crawling for SEO: What is it?

So what is crawling in SEO?

Google and other search engines use bots to evaluate and categorize the content of websites. Since these search engine crawlers are bots and don't have eyes to see and read like humans, they "crawl" pages to determine the type, value, and quality of content they contain.

These bots crawl pages, following new links for updated information, and then use that to index web pages and rank them in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Crawling falls under the category of technical SEO.

So, why is crawling important? By incorporating SEO techniques that make it easier for bots to crawl and index your website, you have a better chance of increasing visibility, boosting your ranking in the SERPs, and driving more traffic.

However, as a service-based business, dentists need to capture local leads that will convert into new patients and more profit. Nationwide traffic won't provide the same results as web traffic from your local community.  

Using Local SEO Techniques to Improve Crawlability

Several techniques can help improve the crawlability of your website while complementing your local dental SEO strategy. At Dental Intelligence, our dental practice software features important tools like Online Reviews, which help you manage your reputation and establish credibility and authority.

Here are more SEO tips to help crawler bots categorize and index your dental practice's website faster and more accurately.

1. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

One crucial SEO tactic that can help your dental practice website with crawlers is mobile optimization. Google uses a mobile-first index when crawling web pages, which means it evaluates the mobile version. As such, optimizing your website for mobile devices, like making sure it's responsive and will adapt to smaller screen sizes, is paramount and supports easier crawling and indexing.  

2. Utilize Local Backlinks

Internal links, external links, and backlinks are essentially votes of confidence for your dental website and establish trust, authority, and credibility. When you have multiple high-quality local backlinks for your website, it creates domain authority and shows the crawler bots that your website contains relevant, useful, and informative content.

However, be sure that your backlinks are from authority websites related to the dental industry. Otherwise, it could negatively affect your crawlability and index score.

3. Focus on Quality Content

Search engine crawlers evaluate the content of your website as a vital ranking factor. Focus on using content for your dental website that is high-quality, helpful, relevant, and provides value to your patient base and target market.

For example, you want to avoid red flags like duplicate content, stolen content, keyword stuffing, and spamming backlinks. Content is king in SEO, and if you use unethical SEO tactics like the ones we just listed, the crawlers will not rank your website very highly, reducing its performance and visibility.

4. Use Structured Data

Another way to improve the crawlability of your dental practice's website is with structured data. Structured data for SEO allows search engine crawlers to add rich snippets from your content to the SERPs, which gives your website a distinct edge over the competition.

Structured data can include schemas like a sitemap, logo, reviews, or a local business markup, the right-hand box on the SERPs containing your dental office's name, address, phone number, and other critical business details. It supports your local SEO strategy and provides easily accessible information to crawler bots when they need to evaluate your page.

Intelligently Shape the Future of Practice

So, what is crawling in SEO? Here's the main takeaway: search engines use crawler bots to "read," categorize, and index your website, affecting its visibility, local traffic, and page ranking in the SERPs.

At Dental Intelligence, we offer a range of cutting-edge software for dental professionals to streamline practice management, increase productivity, and drive growth among their target market. Schedule a demo of our product and learn more about how we can build success for your dental practice.