Is It Worth Paying For Search Engine Optimisation For Your Practice?
Search Engine Optimisation as we have known it for the last 5 years or so, in my opinion is now dead and buried and to be quite frank good riddance. Because effectively Search Engine Optimisation is all about fooling the search engines into ranking your site higher than other sites using tricks of the trade rather than having good content.
Google is working very hard to deliver what the person doing the search is looking for (even in paid for ads) and this is good news for all of us who play by the rules and try and offer good content on our websites.
So whilst Search Engine Optimisation as we have known it e.g. keyword stuffing, link building, article marketing etc. may be much diminished if not finished altogether, there are ways to improve the rankings of your website on the natural search, unfortunately it involves work on your part (or mine if you use someone like me).
Effectively Google wants to give people who use its search facility a good experience so it is looking for things like the following:
- Connectivity to Social Media
- Video (ideally on You Tube)
- New original (good) content on your site
- Blogs
- Mobile Friendly sites
- Local Links
Incidentally Google doesn’t really give you brownie points for having pretty pictures on your site, so this may come as a bit of a shock to those of you who have spent a lot of time and effort having lovely graphics of smiling people put on your website.
So lets’ look at the above. Social Media connectivity, Google likes to see lots of traffic coming to your website from Social Media (whatever the flavour). This is because it shows them that the site is interacting with real human beings, not robots.
You Tube Video. Are you aware that Google actually owns You Tube and that You Tube is the second most used search engine on the planet? Because of this Google really likes You Tube, so all you need to do is create some good video, put it onto You Tube, then embed it into your website. This will do wonders for your rankings.
New original good content It’s no good having a website built, publishing it and then forgetting about it. Your site needs to continually be updated, new video, new graphics (optimised), but most of all new written content. If you do this you are really ticking a box with Google.
Blogging Probably one of the best ways to improve the rankings on your site is to write a regular blog or article. This is relatively time consuming, but will reap great rewards, it’s well worth the effort.
Mobile Friendly Site 20% of all internet searches done today are made on a mobile device (growing rapidly) and Google wants to offer mobile users a great experience too. So for instance if your dental practice has a mobile version of your website and the practice down the road doesn’t, guess who will rank higher on a mobile search, because Google knows what you are using to search the web.
Local Links These are links to other companies similar to yourself in your area, so for instance you could ask the local chemist, hairdresser, beauty salon, chiropodist, osteopath, chiropractor, doctors surgery to put a link on their website to yours.
So whilst Search Engine Optimisation may be dead, you can very much influence Google by doing all the above. Unfortunately all of this takes time and effort, but if you want to rank on the natural search you really need to implement all of these things sooner rather than later.
However if you would like me to help with all the above, call me on 01767 626 398 ore email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website at