Dental offices need informative content on their websites to rank higher than their competitors in a prospective patient’s search results. Unfortunately, many dentists have duplicate content on multiple pages across their websites. But why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) includes writing the pages on your site to target local customers searching for specific dental questions or services. In the article below, you’ll learn more about local dental SEO. Removing duplicate content and keyword cannibalization is crucial to dominate the search results in your area.

How a Search Engine Ranks Your Site in the Search Results

Search engines catalog site content using bits of code called “web crawlers” to assign an authority score based on the topics and keywords that appear on your site. If a user searches for relevant keywords, your site should appear in their search results.

Your competition is also trying to rank for the same keywords. When two competing pages have the same keyword, Google ranks the page with the higher authority score first. While this might make it seem like a good idea to include the same content across your site, this strategy actually hurts your ranking.

What Happens When Multiple Pages Have Similar Content?

One common method dental websites might use is to reuse the same content across webpages but change small details like location keywords or the keyword structure. This could include changing the location keyword to another city in your service area or changing a keyword from “dental cleaning” to “teeth cleaning.”

Duplicate content on your site confuses the crawler bots that index your site on the search engine. Since the search engine doesn’t know which page to display to answer a user’s query, it won’t rank any of your pages as high as it would have had the content been on only one page.

What About Location Pages on Your Site?

One key strategy to rank locally for your services includes having separate location pages for your services. For example, if your service is “teeth cleaning” in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area, you would want separate pages for “Teeth Cleaning in (City)” and have original content pages for Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano, Arlington, and other major service centers where you have offices.

While you might be tempted to copy an existing page and change the location identifiers, this can lead to keyword cannibalization. Keyword cannibalization is using the same keyword that you’re targeting for multiple pages on your site. So even if you change your main keyword to “teeth cleaning in (City),” you’ll have to change your secondary keywords between pages.

So why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO? You need fresh content on your site regularly for Google to rank you as an authority for dental information. You should write original content for each page you add to your website and pick different keywords to target on each page to avoid duplication and keyword cannibalization.

Improving the User Experience with Original Content

Writing original content for your site can seem daunting. You need content for main pages like your home page, about us page, and main service pages. You also need individual service pages for each procedure or product, including teeth cleaning, pediatric dentistry, orthodontics, dental surgery, and other services.

For each service you offer, you will also need to create a local service page that targets the city you want that page to rank for in the search results. This can lead to needing content for hundreds of new pages on your site if you have multiple offices or serve a large area. Finally, and most importantly for SEO, you need original blog post content.

Blog articles help you demonstrate experience and expertise in your field. By explaining what happens during a dental crown procedure or a patient’s options to correct a misaligned bite in a blog post, you can improve the user experience for visitors looking for answers on your site.

Dental Intelligence Offers Professional Content for Marketing Strategies

So why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO, and how do you avoid duplicating content across multiple pages? Schedule a demo of Dental Intelligence today to learn more about how our dental marketing tools can improve your marketing strategy.