How to win the plastic surgery online marketing race.

You want to attract high-value patients and grow your plastic surgery practice…

Plastic surgery SEO is the key to both.

updated Jan 2024
At its most basic level, Plastic surgery SEO is all about making sure that when people search for information related to plastic surgery online, the websites of plastic surgery providers (preferably YOURS) pop up at the top of the search results. Plastic surgery SEO agencies (like ours) do this by using a proven process and procedures that includes using smart keywords and phrases related to plastic surgery, creating and optimizing content to be helpful and make its structure relevant and attractive to search engines (like Google), and getting other websites to link back to theirs. This way, more potential patients can find them easily, get the info they need, and schedule their surgeries. It’s the best way of boosting their online presence and reputation in the plastic surgery world.

Some of the specific tasks involved in plastic surgery SEO include:

1. Conducting keyword research to identify the most popular search terms related to plastic surgery in your practice’s location.
2. Optimizing your website’s content and include keywords in a natural and compelling way.
3. Utilizing on-page and off-page optimization techniques to improve your website’s ranking in search results.
4. Building high-quality backlinks from other reputable websites to demonstrate your authority and credibility.
5. Creating and distributing valuable content (such as blog posts and social media posts) to attract and engage potential patients.

Overall, the goal of plastic surgery SEO is to increase the visibility and accessibility of a plastic surgery practice’s website, ultimately leading to more qualified leads and increased revenue for your practice.

Search engine optimization is how you can ensure that when prospective patients go online to find the types of services you provide, they find your practice first.

Proven techniques to establish you as an authority in plastic surgery.

Whether you specialize in reconstructive or cosmetic plastic surgery, you’re in a competitive industry—and the goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is straightforward: to enhance your plastic surgery practice’s online visibility and boost your search result rankings through the use of time-tested techniques. These techniques range from optimizing your website’s structure and code to creating content that answers searchers’ questions and positions you appropriately as an expert.

Expanding your plastic surgery practice with SEO is all about numbers:

• Below the display of ads and maps on a Google search results page, the first result has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 28.5 percent—that means that more than a quarter of people searching click on the very first result they see.
• After that first organic result, there’s a big drop: the result in the second position gets 15 percent of the clicks, and the third gets 11 percent.
• The first organic result gets 10 times the click-through rate that the tenth position does.

The takeaway: The plastic surgery practices that appear in the first few results are only there because of their solid SEO strategies. And SEO is the only way for you to crowd them out.

Whether you’re new to SEO or are looking for a fresh approach, this plastic surgery search engine optimization guide tells you what you need to know to take advantage of one of the most powerful weapons in any online marketing arsenal.

Without question, your plastic surgery website is the foundation of every part of your marketing efforts, both online and offline: If you run traditional plastic surgery advertising, such as print or TV, viewers will go to your website to learn more about what you can do for them. If they happen to find you while they’re searching online, your website will likely be their introduction to you.

Beyond great rankings in search results, these first impressions are critical—you have one chance to keep the attention of prospective patients. If they have to wait more than a few seconds for your site to load or they can’t quickly get a sense that you can solve their problems, they’ll hit the back button and go elsewhere.

Your website is far too important to ignore.

And it’s where a comprehensive SEO strategy begins.

What Google looks for to rank your plastic surgery practice website.

These aspects of your website must be on your website optimization checklist:

• Page speed: How quickly the pages on your site load has been an important search engine results ranking factor for many years.
• Core web vitals: These include page speed loading time, plus a measurement of how long it takes users to interact with your pages and a measurement of your site’s visual stability.
• SSL: SSL stands for “secure sockets layer,” which is a certificate that validates your site as being trustworthy and assures users that their information will be safe from hacking.
• URL structure: URLs that include your keywords support good rankings and provide a hierarchy that makes it easier for search engine crawlers to index your site.
• Conversions: Calls to action (CTAs) should be available to users at each stage of the sales funnel.

For the best rankings, web pages must be optimized in ways that dovetail with the ever-changing Google algorithm. Although technical elements of plastic surgery SEO tactics play a key role, content must also be presented in a way that attracts and engages patients and prospective patients.

At a high level, organic SEO for plastic surgery practices consists of four key strategies:

Keyword research: This process consists of finding relevant terms that have the potential to drive good amounts of traffic to your site and have competition levels that make that goal achievable.

Website optimization: A well-optimized site:

• must be user friendly and easy to navigate
• contains optimized content with new content regularly added that’s of interest to your target audience and that supports your keyword strategy
• has optimized back-end tags that corresponds with page content

Local SEO: This specialized type of SEO focuses on attracting patients in your area and serves as a linchpin element of your overall plastic surgery SEO strategy.

Link building: Your practice will need to get high-quality, authoritative backlinks from a range of relevant sites.
More details about each of these plastic surgery SEO elements is provided later in this guide. If you have questions about them, please contact Dagmar Marketing to get answers and to discuss our plastic surgery SEO services.

Plastic surgery website SEO terms

Before we dig further into the details, here are a few important terms you’ll come across:

• On-page: This refers to everything on your site, including your content and the site’s layout, structure, and metadata.
• Content: This includes your service webpages, blog posts, videos, infographics, and images that can be viewed by site visitors.
• Off-page: These include elements such as directory listings, and link and citation building.
• Technical SEO: Site speed issues, structured data markup, site security, and other more technical tasks associated with plastic surgery SEO fall into this category.

One of the most important things to understand before beginning to craft any SEO strategy is how people search for the services you offer. You not only need to know the words they use, but also their intent—at least how Google interprets their intent—behind the search term they use, or what they may really be looking for.

Add to that the need to consider where your prospective patient may be in their journey toward making a decision, and you can see how a well-thought out keyword strategy is essential to the success of your SEO.

Is the person just beginning to think about having a procedure done or do they have an urgent need?

Are they looking for a particular procedure or are they unsure of what type of procedure can solve their problem?

Do they have medical reasons to search for a plastic surgeon or are they looking for someone who specializes in cosmetic surgery?

It takes time to find the answers to these questions, but the right keywords in the right places are essential to getting the kind of rankings that can bring your plastic surgery practice to the top of search results.

How to find the keywords that target your best prospects.

A good keyword research tool can help you uncover the keywords that people use to find the services you provide. Consider paying for a subscription for one of the more sophisticated tools or outsource this research to a plastic surgeon SEO company.

Recommended tools include:

• Ahrefs
• Google Keyword Planner
• KWFinder
• SEMrush
• SpyFu
• Wordtracker

As a short-term solution, check to see which of these tools, if any, are currently offering a free trial period. That will let you see if you like how the tool works—one that you’d feel comfortable using in the long term (given that SEO is a long-term endeavor).

Ideal plastic surgery keywords:

• are highly targeted for your practice
• have steady to good levels of traffic
• have manageable levels of competition

So, while “surgeon” or “plastic surgeon” are highly targeted and have high levels of traffic, these terms are so incredibly competitive that you’ll need to get more specific to be effective.

Overall, you’ll want to use long tail keywords (often phrases with at least three to five words) to go after the terms that have manageable levels of competition.

You’ll also need to consider what terms your prospective patients might use to search for your services. For example, you may provide abdominoplasty services and want to show before and after pictures.

A look in SEMrush shows that “abdominoplasty before and after” has 590 monthly searches. So, this fits the parameters of an ideal keyword: it’s highly targeted to your practice; has good monthly traffic; and, as a long tail keyword, competition should be manageable.

After considering the procedure through a prospective patient’s mindset, though, your keyword research results show that “tummy tuck before and after” is a term with 60,500 monthly searches. So, consider how your potential patients would search for services you offer.

While conducting research, seek terms that have commercial intent and those with research intent. Keywords with commercial intent often have less traffic than other ones (“plastic surgery services,” for example, has 110 monthly searches), but they have key advantages:

1. You can rank more easily with commercial intent keywords.
2. They typically convert at a much higher rate because the searchers are looking for services (not just for information).

Keywords with research intent often start with “how” or “why” or otherwise ask questions indicating that they’re looking for information. These online searchers may not plan to get plastic surgery in the short term but, instead, might be researching for a future one or gathering information for someone else.

These kinds of questions often work well in blog posts, case studies, white papers, and videos. Questions that people are asking include:

• Does insurance cover plastic surgery?
• How does plastic surgery work?
• Is plastic surgery safe?

In your informative content, quality really counts. When you can effectively educate online visitors in an engaging way, people are more likely to share and/or link to the page. This also helps with rankings in a way we’ll describe later in this guide.

Once you’ve completed your initial keyword research, you can use the results to create a keyword strategy that you’ll monitor and adjust as needed.

Check your competitors’ use of keywords

Besides brainstorming which terms your prospective patients might use and using professional research tools of choice, also decipher what keywords your competitors are using. After all, in a competitive industry like plastic surgery, a strategic approach is required to outrank other practices. As part of the process, research what keywords your competitors are ranking well for and ones of interest where they aren’t.

So, with a focus on outperforming competing plastic surgery practices:

• Investigate how competitors are using keywords and how successful they are.
• Prioritize relevant keywords in the sweet spot: high volume but low competition.
• Strategically use long tail keywords.

Also think beyond the obvious. If you market medical spa services, then you’ll want to incorporate terms like “medical spa” as well as “medspa” and “med spa.” Some terms (like “medspa” and “med spa”) can be written as one word or as two. Although Google is now sophisticated enough to recognize this, it doesn’t hurt to use variations whenever it’s logical.

You probably already have a domain name but, if you don’t, ask us how to choose a keyword-rich domain that will help with your plastic surgery SEO without crossing over into being spammy—and you can skip over the section about auditing your current website.

Note: It won’t take long before people conducting keyword research realize the huge demand that exists for information about celebrities and their procedures (or alleged procedures).

Although it can be tempting to write a post titled “Zac Efron: Plastic Surgery” because there are nearly 50,000 monthly searches on that term, avoid creating any clickbait type of posts. Only use these celebrity-related keywords if it results in valuable information for your audience.

Review your website to find opportunities for improvement.

You can:

• Review the content you have to see if it can be updated, expanded, or further optimized.
• Double-check all of the links that go to other pages on your site and out to other sites to see if they need updating or fixing.
• Update the title tags on your pages.
• Add any missing meta descriptions.
• Add more internal linking to keep visitors on your site longer.

In addition to this list, there’s page speed, which is a ranking factor for desktop and mobile searches. Although Google stated in 2018 that only the pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users” will be dinged from an SEO perspective, that’s not the only consideration.

People are impatient—probably even more so today than in 2018. If a page loads too slowly, they may click off your site and head to a competitor’s. (Consider how often you’ve done that yourself.) That’s why we keep page-speed issues front of mind for our clients. Plus, if your site is among the slowest loading, you’ll have less Google visibility while also contending with prospective patients exploring a competitor’s site, instead.

You can test your site speed at Lighthouse. This is an open source tool that’s designed to improve the overall quality of webpages, which includes page speed. You can enter a URL and the automated tool runs a set of audits, comparing it to other sites before providing you with a report.

If the audits indicate a problem, you’ll also receive information about how to fix the issue. If any seem too technical, you can reach out to us for support.

You can ramp up the speed of your mobile pages with Google’s accelerated mobile pages (AMP). Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly about Google’s AMP.

This is also the time to review and enhance your site’s structure, a process described in the next section. At a minimum, you’ll need a responsive site design.

Focus on structure, engagement, and user experience.

First, structure your website’s architecture so that it’s logical and easy to use while also prioritizing what’s most important for patient acquisition. For example, carefully consider what should go in the main navigation bar of the site to streamline visitor use while putting the services selection to the far left.

Why? Because you’ll want to allow prospective patients to find that button as quickly as possible.  Then, beneath the services navigation, make it equally as intuitive to find the specific procedures that you offer.

The goal: You’ll want your service pages to be super easy to find and for them rank highly in search engine results to help convert more searchers into patients—and this placement helps to send authority signals to Google. (At Dagmar, we’ve studied click patterns on multiple client sites, discovering that, on web pages with this structure, site users go to the services pages before other types of pages.)

So, for cosmetic surgery SEO, you might list rhinoplasty, breast augmentation/reduction, and facial lifts. For reconstruction surgery SEO, it might be cleft palate repair, burn care, and bone regeneration.

Seek other ways to provide a quality user experience (UX), making people feel comfortable as they use the site. Keeping people engaged on your website actually plays an increasingly important role in your plastic surgery SEO. In fact, studies have shown a significant correlation between site visitor engagement and rankings with high-ranking sites typically being ones where visitors engage with their content.

Google has stated that engagement metrics aren’t a direct ranking factor. So, as with some other ranking metrics with this search engine, the algorithm uses it in more complex, less straightforward ways.

What’s most important to know: Having good engagement can help sites, while low on-page/on-site time and high bounce rates are also measured by the algorithm with less desirable results for the site owners.

Additional UX information includes the following:

• Consider every page on your site as a potential front door: When people find your site through organic keywords, they’ll land on the page that ranks the highest for their keyword. If they type in “nose job near me”—and you’ve used that term on your rhinoplasty service page, perhaps in the FAQs—then they’ll likely enter your site via the rhinoplasty page.
• Strategically add new pages: Although it can be tempting to keep adding buttons to the main navigation menu, a more streamlined and effective approach involves creating sidebar navigation elements on certain pages to allow site visitors to delve more deeply into a topic. If, for example, you want to highlight a new benefit of how you perform cleft lip surgeries, you could write a blog post about it as well as a page that links from your main cleft lip reconstruction service page.
• Include appropriate site maps: This allows search engines to more easily find and index your content. Here’s what Google says about site maps.

Strategically optimize your URLs with keywords without overdoing usage. For example, don’t use “plastic-surgery” as a part of every single one; as a “don’t-do”: www.domain-name.com/plastic-surgery-about-us.”

We bring this up as an example of keyword stuffing—meaning, when keyword usage becomes overdone to the point that it can hurt your plastic surgeon SEO. Instead, consider this: www.domain-name.com/about-plastic-surgeons. This can work if the page shares information about each of the surgeons at your practice.

If your services landing page is www.domain-name.com/surgical-procedures, then service pages may look like this:

• www.domain-name.com/surgical-procedures/breast-reduction-surgery
• www.domain-name.com/surgical-procedures/cleft-palate-surgery

Please note: These are tactics to take when creating new pages on your site. If you have already-existing pages, one that you might not have optimized, there’s another important consideration. These pages are almost certainly indexed in Google. If so, then it may make more sense to keep the URLs, as is. If it’s determined that it can help to change those already-existing URLs, this process will involve more advanced SEO techniques. If handled improperly, this can cause your plastic surgery practice to lose your current search engine visibility for those pages. So, please contact us before changing any URLs.

Position yourself as the expert with your plastic surgery content and blog.

Having a blog and regularly adding optimized content is a key part of any cosmetic surgery SEO/reconstructive surgery SEO.

Benefits of blogging include:

• Google’s freshness ranking signal will reward sites with frequently updated content.
• You can use research-based keywords to create engaging content; these terms often have lots of traffic and are ones you usually can’t effectively use on service pages.
• Blogs help to drive traffic to your site.
• Blogs can attract desirable inbound links (more about that later in this guide).
• You can create blog posts to share news about your surgical practice.

For example, “How Does Plastic Surgery Work?” can serve as the headline for an in-depth post—and the fact that it has 480 monthly searches (nearly 6,000 a year) indicates that people want to know.

If you’ve got a reconstructive plastic surgery practice, the keyword question of “Does Insurance Cover Plastic Surgery?” is a perfect opening to discuss the importance of medically necessary procedures that your practice offers—and it has an equivalent number of people asking that question.

You can also add geographical tags to the titles: “How Does Plastic Surgery Work in Florida?” Then, in each post, you optimize the blog content for keyword terms, as well.

These search figures are national in scope, not specific to your state or region, and that’s okay. You may have an in-demand specialty that causes you to have patients from around the country—and, even if you don’t, these national search figures have value.

People inside your typical practice area will read the post and it may help to convert them into making an appointment with you. Plus, when people outside of your geographical region read the post, this boosts your engagement metrics, which can help with rankings.

It can help to think about the multiple audiences you’ll have with blog posts:

• Potential patients
• Site visitors who, by reading it, will:
  • Contribute to your engagement metrics
  • Share it on social media, which extends your digital reach
  • Recommend it to someone they know who needs the information
  • Link to the post, which increases your website’s authority

As you consistently offer readers fresh content, you can build up a steady audience. As Google crawls the new content and indexes it, people can find it when searching on terms you’ve included as well as on related keywords. Write content on a range of topics related to your work, typically using long-tail keywords of at least three to five words.

If, for example, you’re a breast augmentation specialist, here are the types of questions you could answer and information you could provide in a series of blog posts (all found through keyword research):

• What is breast augmentation?
• How much is a breast augmentation?
• Breast augmentation recovery time
• Breast augmentation types
• Day by day breast augmentation recovery

Also consider what questions your patients ask you. These could include things as simple as what to wear on surgery day and how long it will take for them to recover—as well as questions that are more specific, such as whether the area can be tattooed afterwards. End each post with a call to action, such as to contact you for a consultation appointment.

Typically, you’ll want a broad range of topics to keep people engaged, focusing more on ones that are more important to your practice. It can help to plan out an editorial calendar, perhaps for a quarter, or six months or a year.

Leave room for posts that you can’t predict (such as if you win an award or a breaking news story related to what you do) and include long form posts in the mix. That’s because long form posts can benefit your practice in a wide variety of impactful ways.

Consider your audiences as you create editorial calendars, ideally using personas you’ve created. Each piece of content should be created with a specific type of patient in mind and you can create personas to capture the traits of each type—with the ultimate goal being to direct the right kind of traffic to your site and practice.

If possible, interview patients or other surgeons in your practice to gather information about your target audiences. For example, it can help to know how they might research plastic surgery options and on what devices. Create a demographic profile for each one; this can include the person’s age, education, income bracket, and location, as well as their job title and industry. You can fill in with personal details (family, for example) and be sure to figure out their pain points and fears. What would they consider to be “successful” in a plastic surgery procedure?

You will likely find that your prospects fall into categories. You can name each one and provide high-level information about each. Then, you can connect each proposed blog post with a particular persona. It can make it easier to envision that you’re writing to a specific person and it will likely resonate much better with the people you want to reach.

Also segment your content into one of the three steps of a buyer’s journey, making sure you have the right amount of each type:

• Awareness: This is when a prospective patient is looking into a certain procedure. “Maybe now is the time to get my nose fixed” or “I’m ready to look into reconstruction options.” This is where educational content can help you to engage with prospects.
• Consideration: “It looks like I need to decide which surgical option is best for me.” Guides and white papers can help potential patients decide which routes to take.
• Decision: “I’m going to see which plastic surgeon is best qualified to help me.” During the decision making process. pros/cons lists can help along with presenting your unique qualifications and types of expertise.

At each step, choose conversion elements to move site visitors along the journey towards a plastic surgery consultation. Throughout, avoid duplicate content on your site; check for issues at Copyscape.com for a nominal fee.

Web pages: Ramp them up for rankings.

Besides a well written, strategically optimized home page, you’ll also want the following to also rank well in Google:

• Plastic surgery services landing page: Provide a page that describes your plastic surgery procedures overall and why patients should choose you. Then link to pages that describe individual specialties, making sure that all significant services have their own page. Use high-level keywords that dovetail with how people search for those services, logically using geo-modifiers. Include clear calls to action on each page in all available methods: for example, online contact forms, email, and phone.
• Location landing pages: If you have more than one office or surgical center, create a landing page that links out to each, and then individual pages that include the city and state and unique contact information. This is the perfect place to leverage geo-targeted keywords that will attract searches in those regions.
• Compelling About Us: Write in ways that can help people to connect with you, ditching medical jargon to the degree that it’s possible and still convey your message.
• Include testimonials and reviews strategically throughout the site. People respond to what’s called “social proof,” influenced by what other patients have to say.
• Place checklists and bulleted lists throughout your site, along with an FAQ page. Google may pull this content and use it in their Answer Box feature that’s placed at the very top of organic search results (“position zero”).

Optimize each page for relevant keywords, making each service page at least 1,000 words. There is no magic number, but Google does reward longer content. Here are tips:

• Optimize the title of a post/page. This is the H1 tag: <h1>; only use one per URL.
• Optimize subheadings any time you can make them read naturally and well. They help site visitors to navigate your content and provide cues to Google. Use H2 tags (<h2>) on them. If you have a subheading within a subheading, that’s an <h3> tag. You can go through level six, although there is seldom a need to go beyond level two or three.

Optimize body copy in ways that reads well but don’t overdo it because content that Google considers spammy seldom ranks well. Also link between pages on your site (internal linking) to help guide site visitors from one page to the next in helpful ways. Place keywords near or in the internal link for an SEO benefit.

Back-end optimization.

Although back-end tags aren’t visible to site visitors, they play an important role in your plastic surgeon SEO. Let’s say a potential patient searches on Google for “cosmetic plastic surgeon in atlanta georgia.” Top organic search results look like this:

The top line indicates the page URL. Although these top results don’t literally have the same info as the search query, they contain the same elements and it’s easy to see how Google matched them up. The purplish line is the title tag and, in the top result, it contains “plastic surgery” and “cosmetic surgeons” and “Atlanta, GA.” The text below is the meta description tag, containing “Plastic surgery in Atlanta, GA and the word “cosmetic” a bit later.

So, when you write a page or post, also enter optimized text that you’d like to appear in that URL’s title tag and meta description tag. Google doesn’t have to use what you provide, but well-crafted ones are usually used.

Plugins can make it easy to add text to back-end tags: typically about 60 characters in the title tag and 160 in the meta description tag. Adding more characters isn’t useful and can be counterproductive.

Title tags are an important ranking factor in Google (although maybe not as much as they once were), so use as many relevant keywords as is reasonable without going over the character limit; that would lead to a truncated tag. The meta description tag doesn’t affect rankings, but a compelling one entices people to click—which can serve as the initial connection with a potential patient.

Make your meta descriptions stand out in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and include a local phone number when it makes sense. You can also use keywords in image descriptions (your ALT tags).

Improve how Google sees your website pages with schema.

Use this HTML markup enhancer to boost the effectiveness of your plastic surgeon SEO, including on your name, address, and reviews on your website. When using schema, your practice might get rewarded with a review snippet in search results. This is more complicated than adding back-end tags, so contact us with questions or let our experts handle your plastic surgery content development and marketing.

Local SEO is a distinct digital marketing discipline designed to help attract new patients in your own geographic area. We provide local SEO for plastic surgeons that ensure Google sees all of the “local signals” it uses to rank your website and increase your competitiveness in your city. Here’s an example of optimized internal linking, using a blog post we’d written about the benefits of creating long-form blog posts:

Because each office or surgical center you may have is considered local to its surrounding area, you’ll need a uniquely optimized page on your site for each. And, if your local SEO campaigns are more successful than those of competitors, you’ll appear in the three-pack—a highly coveted position—on search engine results pages.

Here’s the map and the listings that appear when we search for “providence rhode island plastic surgeons”:

The map indicates where the three highest-ranking local practices for the keyword exist, followed by prime SERPs listings for each of them. Clicking on “View all” shows more listings. In this example, “Cosmetic Surgery Excellence” is just one spot from ranking in the highly visible three-pack for the term of “providence rhode island plastic surgeons”—one small ranking difference that could make a huge difference on their practice’s ability to get more leads.

How to improve your rankings in local searches

1. If you haven’t yet created or claimed your Google My Business (GMB) listing, do this first. It’s essential to have a complete and accurate GMB listing even if you have a website.
2. Here are instructions to verify that listing.
3. Name, address, and phone (NAP) info on your website and accompanying schema must match that’s on GMB. This is today’s version of the Yellow Pages with inaccuracies being highly problematic.
4. As needed, fix NAP discrepancies to benefit from Google’s local search algorithm, including for the map section; it’s needed to provide the right contact info and accurate driving directions.
5. If you find an online directory listing of yours with incorrect NAP, contact them and request corrections. Google will reference GMB/site information against what’s found in other online directories with discrepancies leading to a lack of trust with Google.
6. Create a unique link to the place where customers can leave a review of your plastic surgery practice. Google reviews are a huge local SEO ranking factor.
7. Ask satisfied patients to leave a review, but don’t ask for a positive review. Never encourage someone to write a fake review (or do it yourself). Don’t leave a bad review about competitors.
8. Formulate a plan about how to respond to reviews, both positive and negative. Here’s more information about Google Reviews and customer engagement marketing.

If you’re new to local SEO or aren’t happy with results with your current provider, DAGMAR Marketing can help. We specialize in local SEO for plastic surgeons and we’ve even won local SEO awards.

Highly effective SEO campaigns must include quality backlinks/inbound links, ones existing on one relevant site and pointing to yours. They must come from a diverse set of domains, too, to rank well. As an example, a Forbes.com article about registering a new domain links to a blog post on our site: Does Domain Age and Registration Length Matter in SEO?

Here you can see blue hyperlinks on Forbes.com that link to other sites:

Here is the article at Dagmar Marketing that received the inbound link from Forbes:

Moz.com allows you to get Domain Authority (DA) scores for sites, including your own. You can use it on a limited basis for free or pay for a subscription to get a wealth of data.The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, for example, has a DA of 73/100, which is a good score. They have more than 585,000 inbound links from more than 21,000 different domains, which is great.

Top ranking backlinks come from very well-known sites:

Check your DA score and those of competitors. What matters is how you compare to direct competitors —not how well you compare to YouTube.com or Google.com. Monitor how your DA score changes as you conduct your plastic surgeon SEO campaign. Are you catching up to competitors? Passing some by?

One way to get quality inbound links: Get listed in quality directories for plastic surgeons; some are free while others have a fee. Here are some directories to consider; if you already have a listing, check for accuracy and request any necessary changes.

Preliminary research, for example, might uncover these possibilities and their DA scores:

• Plastic-Cosmetic Surgery: Current DA of 83
• Plastic Surgeon Directory: Current DA of 62
• BestCosmeticSurgeons.com: Current DA of 33 (we included this one to demonstrate that the domain name can be overly self-promotional; so check DA scores)

Contact local, state, and organizations you belong to and see if you can get listed. As you increase the health of your link profile, Google recognizes your site as one worthy of trust and rewards you accordingly. Other ways to get inbound links include:

• Get quoted in online news sources.
• Monitor request for experts at HelpAReporter.com, ProfNet, and Qwoted.

Plus, as you create high-quality content, other writers and organizations will want to link to your content. You can ask to write guest posts on other sites that, in exchange for the content, will allow you to link back to your site, often in your bio. These can be sites used by other plastic surgeons or ones that potential patients might read.

If you find an opportunity, ask if you’d get a follow link (that’s desirable) or a no-follow link (which isn’t what you want). Low-quality inbound links, by the way, don’t help your site and can even hurt it. Sometimes, you may need to use Google’s disavow tool to let Google know you don’t want those spammy links to hurt you. Before using this tool, we recommend that you consult with an SEO specialist.

Monitor, measure, improve, repeat.

Monitor your success, including how much traffic increases, which pages get the most traffic, your number of inbound links and their quality, and much more. Google Analytics and the Search Console provide a wealth of data, and you can also monitor your DA score. Create a solid baseline report and then collect data monthly. Compare numbers and continue to tweak your SEO strategy.

Attracting the patients you want through SEO goes way beyond researching keywords. To learn more about how SEO can boost your plastic surgery practice online to attract the best prospects, get in touch with us online or call 904-270-9778 for a free one-hour consultation.