Once upon a time, practice management consultants stood behind the idea that multiple websites for a single dental practice meant increased visibility online, higher search engine rankings, and more new patients.
Think about it—one website to explain your general dental procedures, another for your pediatric services, and one more to highlight cosmetic offerings. This begs the question: Are three different domain names for a single practice better than one?
Not anymore. If you’re considering (or already have) more than one website for your dental practice, acknowledge the downsides below before getting too caught up in this dated approach.
Dividing Link Authority
A successful SEO strategy for any dental website uses backlinks to build domain authority. Backlinks are links that point to your dental website from other highly regarded and industry relevant websites. But if you’re focusing on multiple dental websites for your practice, which site do you want backlinks pointing to?
Acquiring quality backlinks can be difficult, and deciding to split up link authority means slower growth for your websites all around. Instead, focus backlinks on one website and consider re-directing patients who visit your other domain names to your main site. This way you’re utilizing all domain names, but focusing SEO efforts in one place.
Content Issues
Search engines penalize websites that display content used in multiple places. If you copy and paste content from one site to the next, you could fall victim to duplicate content penalties, where search engines like Google become confused and can lower (or remove) your sites ranking positions.
If you’re considering a multiple website approach to promote your dental practice, it’s critical to write custom content for every single page of each website or hire a professional. Take note of the time and money that this route requires to determine if it’s a fit for you.
Should you decide to consolidate multiple sites into one main hub, make landing pages for the search terms that prompted you to make your additional sites. For example, if one website focused exclusively on cosmetic treatments, feature a landing page on cosmetic treatments with proper on-page SEO tactics.
Blogging
Do you have time in your busy schedule to write one blog post each week for your dental website? If so, that’s great. Adding weekly blog posts can help give your website rankings a boost while offering visitors your professional insight into topics they enjoy. Now, how about time to pen two, three, or even four posts each week for your other practice websites? This is where things can get difficult.
More websites mean more maintenance. Keeping a consistent schedule for fresh content in the form of blog posts is a must. Unless you have a team of professional marketers working for you, having multiple websites means you’ll need to crank out more blog posts each month.
And remember, the posts must be 100% unique.
Invest In A Single Practice Website
Focusing all of your efforts into one practice website is the most effective approach for online success. With the right mix of marketing initiatives, you’ll discover that your website will gain authority, traffic, and even a higher new patient conversion rate.