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Rules for Creating SEO-Friendly Website Content
In order to drive new patients to your website, your website content needs to represent your practice. Whether you think about it this way or not, your practice is a brand. It’s up to you build your brand so that it’s positively perceived by patients and prospective patients.
Patients assume that you are qualified. However, with competition patients need to know who you are as a person and a community member. Is your office perceived as being family-friendly with a fun staff? Do people view you as focused on high-quality results with no frills?
Whatever your practice’s focus is, your website should reflect it. The content on your site needs to be filled with pictures, videos, and written content showing off what makes you unique.
In this post I’ll unpack some key items to consider when writing great content that will help with your SEO efforts.
Be Consistent
Consistency is crucial in your branding and positioning. When someone arrives at your website, are they seeing your brand? Your website should effectively express who you are and how you want your practice to be represented.
Once a prospective new patient arrives at your site they should instantly see what makes you special and sets you apart from your competitors. When you use content unique to both your practice, Google recognizes that information and ranks you higher on relevant search engine results pages. It also goes a long way towards leaving a good impression on prospective new clients; they want to know what it’s like to get treatment at your practice specifically.
Include Local Themes
Google gives businesses ranking priority for search results in their physical location. That means that if your practice is physically near the person searching for you online, your chances of showing up in local search results are higher than if the person is physically far away.
This is why a concerted focus on location throughout your content is so important; you will always rank higher for searches where you are physically located.
Topic Relevance and Distinction
The service(s) you are trying to rank for should be prominently mentioned on your website.
If you want to rank for something, be highly relevant for that topic. This is why it’s important to consider a separate page for each service that your practice offers. It gives your SEO Specialist greater ability to target specific relevant topics and gives the practice the ability to showcase results and manage patient expectations.
This is why SEO experts so often promote the importance of unique content. I cannot stress enough how important unique content is in terms of rankings. Typically, most dentists and orthodontists use generic, duplicate, content for each of their common procedures. No matter how successful your practice is, rankings will plateau or take a dive when Google crawls a website and the crawler confirms that the content you have isn’t tailored to your practice specifically.
A Productive Activity for You + Your Staff
With the aforementioned points in mind, there’s one great exercise you can do with your staff to help devise new content.
Take out a sheet of paper and write down your primary services. They will likely be things like cosmetic dentistry, teeth whitening, Invisalign, and such.
Once you have written these services down, go through your website and see if you have an existing landing page for each one. Make a check next to each service for which you have an existing page.
If you identify a primary service you offer and can’t find content for it on your site, circle the service and remember that you will want to add content for that service. If you’re an existing Sesame SEO client, contact your Sesame SEO team and we can take it from there!
Prospective new patients can identify whether or not you are the right fit for them based on the information presented on your website. If you can account for these geographical and personal identifiers it should help your search engine rankings moving forward.
—Naomi Newell, Lead SEO Specialist, Sesame Communications