Where to put keywords on a website: the eight places on a clinic page that carry weight

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You already know your page has to say what you do and where you do it. Where most clinic owners get stuck is the mechanics: where to put keywords on a website so Google can read them, how many times is too many, and which parts of the page carry any weight at all.

This guide walks the eight places that carry weight on a clinic page, in the order I'd fix them, using a Bondi dental practice targeting dentist bondi as the worked example.

The short version: write your term once into each of those eight places, then write the rest of the page for the patient. Placement is a small job done precisely, not a volume job done loudly.

Eight placements do the work. The rest of the page belongs to the patient.

Here are the eight, with the job each one does:

1. Page title (the <title> element) - the strongest single relevance signal you control, and the blue link people click.

2. Meta description - doesn't rank you, decides whether anyone clicks.

3. H1 - the visible headline that confirms what the page is.

4. H2 subheadings - the sections, and the related searches you also want to cover.

5. H3 subheadings - the specific questions inside each section.

6. First hundred words - the copy Google and the patient both read first.

7. URL slug - the readable words after your domain.

8. Image alt text - what the picture shows, described for people who can't see it.

Two notes before you start. Google doesn't publish how heavily it weights each of these, so treat that order as a practical repair sequence, not a formula. And a ninth placement sits just outside the page: the anchor text of internal links pointing at it, which I've covered further down because it's the one clinics forget.

Get the term right before you place it anywhere

Placing the wrong term perfectly still gets you nothing. Before you touch the page, you want one target term per page, chosen from a keyword cluster rather than picked by gut.

A keyword cluster is a group of searches that share one intent. Patients type dentist bondi, dental clinic bondi and dentist near bondi beach wanting the same thing, so those belong on one page, not three. Splitting them across three pages splits your signals and weakens all of them, which is the cannibalisation problem covered in how many pages your clinic actually needs. The step before this one, finding and grouping the terms in the first place, is in our keyword research guide for clinics.

Once you have candidate terms, three numbers decide which one earns the placements on a given page:

• Monthly search volume. How many people search it in your area.

• CPC. What advertisers pay per click, which is a rough proxy for how often that search turns into a booking.

• SEO difficulty. How hard it is to rank. A term you can't realistically win is worse than a smaller term you can.

Prioritise high volume, high CPC, low difficulty, in that order.

Table 1: What the numbers look like for a Bondi dental practice

Read this by column, not by row. The biggest number is rarely the right target.

Data source: Ubersuggest, Sydney NSW, English, pulled 2026-07-24. Volumes are rounded estimates and move month to month.

Three things worth pulling out of that table:

• dentist near me is the biggest and the wrong target. It's 20 times the volume of dentist bondi, at the highest difficulty in the set, and near-me results are decided mostly on the map. Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence (Google Business Profile Help), and no title tag changes how far you are from the person searching. That search is won through your Google Business Profile, which is a separate job with its own set of levers.

• dentist bondi is the practical target for the main page. Real demand, mid difficulty, and a suburb you can claim without stretching. dentist bondi beach at 70 a month is real but small, so it's a candidate for a service-area page, not a second page competing with your first.

• dental implants sydney is the opportunity hiding in the list. 1,900 searches at $12.92 a click, and a difficulty score of 18, the lowest in the set. Highest value, easiest to rank. That earns its own service page, with its own eight placements, and you'd only spot it by looking at all three numbers together.

Your page title is the single line that does the most work

The <title> element is the one place a keyword does the most work, and the one most clinic sites get wrong by leaving it as "Home".

Google generates the blue link automatically and doesn't always use your title element. It also draws on "main visual title shown on the page", "heading elements, such as <h1> elements", "content in og:title meta tags", and anchor text pointing at the page (Google Search Central). So a strong title element and a matching H1 pull in the same direction.

Four rules from Google's own documentation:

• Make it unique per page. Google is blunt: "It's important to have distinct text that describes the content of the page in the <title> element for each page on your site."

• Don't stuff it. Google's example of what not to write is "Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars", and it warns "this kind of keyword stuffing can make your results look spammy".

• Don't run a template. "Long text in the <title> element that varies by only a single piece of information ('boilerplate' titles) is also bad."

• Front-load it. There's no character limit, but "the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width", so put the term first.

For the Bondi practice: Dentist in Bondi | [Practice name]. Term first, brand second, nothing else.

Your meta titles & descriptions won't help you rank. Write them for the HUMAN, so that they want to CLICK!

Google "sometimes uses the meta description HTML element if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page" (Google Search Central). Sometimes. It rewrites descriptions often, and it doesn't rank you on them.

That doesn't make the description useless. It makes it a click job rather than a ranking job, so write it for the person deciding between five results:

• Include the term once, naturally, so it bolds when it matches their search.

• Name the suburb and one concrete reason to pick you: opening hours, availability, parking, health fund.

• Write a different one for every page. Google warns that identical descriptions across a site, and descriptions built from "long strings of keywords", are "less likely to be displayed as a snippet".

• Aim for about 155 characters. There's no official limit, but the snippet "is truncated in Google Search results as needed".

Worked example: "Dentist in Bondi for check-ups, fillings and emergency appointments. Same-week bookings, two minutes from Bondi Junction station. Book online."

Your H1 should say what the page is, in the patient's words

One H1 per page. It's the visible headline, it confirms the title's promise, and Google may use it to build the blue link.

Don't copy the title element word for word. Write the H1 for the person who just landed:

• Title element: Dentist in Bondi | [Practice name]

• H1: Dentist in Bondi for check-ups, fillings and emergency care

Same term, more information, no repetition. If your H1 reads like a slogan ("Smiles for life"), you've spent your headline on nothing.

H2s and H3s are for the reader first, and Google reads them second

Headings exist to help someone scan a page and find the bit they came for. Google's own starter guide frames them that way: "Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate." It also says, on heading order, that "from Google Search perspective, it doesn't matter if you're using them out of order" (Google Search Central). So the tidy hierarchy is for your readers, not for the algorithm.

Use H2s for the sections of the page, and let two or three of them carry a related search from your cluster:

• Emergency dental appointments in Bondi

• What a check-up and clean costs

• Bulk billing, health funds and payment plans

Use H3s for the specific questions inside a section. Under the costs H2, for example: Do you charge a gap fee?, What if I don't have private health?. These pick up the long-tail phrasings patients type, and they're what a reader scans for.

Two rules keep this from tipping over. Every heading should be a claim or a real question, never a bare keyword string. And you don't need your term in every heading, which is the point at which pages start reading like they were written for a crawler. The same logic applies to structuring articles, covered in our clinic blog SEO guide.

The first hundred words are where most clinic pages waste their best space

Google reads a page top down, and so does a patient with a toothache. If your service page opens with "Welcome to our practice, established in 2014, with a passion for oral health", you've spent your most valuable copy saying nothing.

In the first hundred words, name three things: the service, the suburb, and the patient's problem.

• Weak: "Welcome to our practice. We pride ourselves on gentle, patient-centred care in a modern environment."

• Better: "We're a dentist in Bondi treating everything from routine check-ups to chipped teeth and dental emergencies, for patients across Bondi, Bondi Junction and Bronte. Same-week appointments are usually available."

The second version carries the target term, three suburbs, and three service intents, without saying anything twice. That's the whole technique.

Your URL slug should be short, readable, and set once

Google's guidance is specific. Use "readable words rather than long ID numbers", use "hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) to separate words", and "create a simple URL structure" (Google Search Central).

For a clinic that means:

• Good: /dentist-bondi/ and /services/dental-implants/

• Bad: /page-id-4471/, /dentist_bondi/, /services/general/dentistry/bondi/dentist-bondi-nsw-australia/

One warning that costs practices real rankings: pick the slug once. Every time you change a URL you either set up a redirect or lose whatever that page had earned. Slugs are the placement you should get right on day one and never touch again.

Alt text describes the picture. It isn't a keyword field.

Alt text exists so people who can't see your images still get the content. Google says it "improves accessibility for people who can't see images on web pages, including users who use screen readers or have low-bandwidth connections", and its advice is to "focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page" (Google Search Central).

It also warns, in the same document, that filling alt attributes with keywords "results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam".

So describe the image, and let the term appear only where it fits the description:

• Empty: IMG_2847.jpg, no alt attribute at all.

• Stuffed: dentist bondi dental clinic bondi best dentist bondi beach.

• Right: Dentist checking a patient's teeth at our Bondi practice.

If you're producing your own clinic photography and graphics, write the alt text at the same time you create the file, not six months later. Doing it in a batch six months on is how you end up with forty images called IMG_2847.jpg.

Anchor text is the placement many clinics forget

When one page on your site links to another, the words you hyperlink tell Google what the destination page is about. If every internal link to your implants page says "click here" or "read more", you've thrown that signal away.

• Link with the words that describe the destination: hyperlink the phrase "dental implants in Bondi", not "click here".

• Vary the phrasing. Use the natural variations from the cluster rather than the identical string every time.

• Link from your blog into your service pages. Articles attract the reader, service pages convert them.

External links pointing at you work the same way, though you control those far less. That's a separate discipline, covered in backlinks for clinics explained.

Past those placements, repetition is a spam-policy problem

This is where the "how many times?" question ends. Google's spam policies name keyword stuffing directly, defining it as "the practice of filling a web page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings in Google Search results" (Google Search Central). The examples it lists map almost exactly onto what struggling clinic sites do:

• "Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value"

• "Blocks of text that list cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for"

• "Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural"

That second one is the footer full of every suburb from Vaucluse to Maroubra. The same page also covers hidden text, including "using white text on a white background", "hiding text behind an image", and "setting the font size or opacity to 0". The stated consequence for any of it: "Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all."

Two things worth being clear about, because both get repeated as fact and neither is:

• There's no published keyword density target. Google has never named a percentage. Anyone quoting you one made it up. The line isn't a number, it's whether the repetition sounds unnatural to a reader.

• The test is reading it aloud. If you hear your suburb or your service more often than you'd say it in conversation, take some out. A page written for a crawler reads badly to a worried patient, and the patient is the one who books.

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Placement is a smaller lever than it was a decade ago, and it still decides what your page is about

The instinct to repeat a keyword 40 times exists because it used to work. Before 2013, Google matched the words in a search to the words on a page fairly literally, so thin pages stuffed with an exact phrase ranked. Then it spent a decade learning to read meaning instead:

• Hummingbird (2013) rebuilt the core algorithm to understand the intent behind a search, not just the words in it.

• RankBrain (2015) added machine learning that maps a new search to the intent behind similar past ones.

• BERT (2019) taught Google to read a query in context, so it treats synonyms as one ask.

The practical result: Google no longer needs you to repeat yourself to understand you, and its guidance now asks for content made "primarily for people, and not to manipulate search engine rankings" (Google Search Central). Placement still does a job, because those eight places are how Google knows what a page is for. It just does that job once each.

Two things people add to this list that don't belong on it

Structured data isn't a keyword placement. Schema markup describes your business in code so Google can read it, and it makes you eligible for rich results. It isn't a ranking lever: Google's own documentation notes that a structured data manual action "means that a page loses eligibility for appearance as a rich result; it doesn't affect how the page ranks in Google web search" (Google Search Central). Mark up your practice properly, and don't pad it with keywords.

Your Google Business Profile isn't part of your website. Its categories, services and description feed the map results, which run on relevance, distance and prominence. Your website earns the blue links, your profile earns the map pin, and the work is different on each side.

AHPRA rules some keywords out completely, wherever you put them

Clinic placement diverges from generic SEO advice here, and it's the part worth being careful with. AHPRA's advertising guidelines prohibit testimonials about clinical care, false or misleading claims, and anything creating an "unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment" (AHPRA advertising guidelines).

That rules out a whole family of search terms, no matter which of the eight places you'd put them in:

• Superlatives: best dentist sydney, top-rated physio, number one clinic.

• Outcome promises: guaranteed results, pain-free guaranteed, cure for back pain.

• Protected titles you don't hold. Describing a practitioner as a specialist when they don't hold that registration is misleading, and it's a breach regardless of what people search.

Superlatives carry a second cost too. They're the kind of claim Google's spam policies treat as manipulation when they're bolted onto a page, so you'd be taking a compliance risk for a ranking benefit that isn't there.

What to write instead: factual descriptors that survive both tests. "Bondi-based", "open Saturdays", "bulk billing available", "12 years in practice", "on-site parking". If you've inherited a site carrying superlatives in its titles or headings, change them before you do anything else on this list. Specific, verifiable proof elements do more for a patient than any superlative anyway.

Quick answers

How many times should my keyword appear on a page? Once in the title element, once in the H1, once or twice in the first hundred words, in two or three headings where it fits, once in the meta description, once in the slug, and in alt text only where it describes the image. After that, stop.

Is there an ideal keyword density? No. Google has never published a target percentage. The published line is keyword stuffing, and the test is whether the repetition sounds unnatural when you read the page aloud.

Should I target the same keyword on more than one page? No. Two pages chasing one intent split your signals and Google struggles to pick between them. How many pages your clinic actually needs walks the merge-or-keep decision.

What about pages for each suburb I serve? That's a service-area page, and it's a legitimate pattern when each page carries real local content. Done badly it's a doorway page, so read the suburb pages example before you build twenty of them.

My page has all eight and still doesn't rank. Placement tells Google what your page is about. It doesn't make you the most credible answer. That usually comes down to your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and links pointing at your site, none of which live on the page you just optimised.

The takeaway

Keyword placement is eight lines of a page, written once each: title element, meta description, H1, H2s, H3s, first hundred words, slug, and alt text. Get the term right first by picking it from a cluster and checking its volume, value and difficulty. Then write those eight, and hand the rest of the page back to the patient.

I can't promise you'll rank because I don't work for Google. What I can tell you is that a page that skips these eight leaves Google guessing, and Google guesses badly.

Want to know which terms your practice should be placing, and where the current pages are leaving them out? Book my 15-minute page audit and we'll walk your site placement by placement.