SEO concepts and philosophies have changed tremendously since we started providing SEO services for our clients almost 14 years ago. Gone are the days of "keyword stuffing, " purchasing domains with your city or town in the title, and having a separate website for mobile. Modern SEO (per Google's webmaster guidelines) focus on your ability to provide a visitor with high-quality, informative, and authoritative content about the subject matter in question.
I've been doing this for a very long time and at it's core - SEO still hasn't changed one bit. The overriding goal has always been - and remains - to provide website visitors with the most useful and informative content in a manner that's easily accessible.
You simply cannot effectively evaluate the success of any marketing campaign without accurate, actionable data. Thus, you must have GA4 setup and configured properly so that you can measure conversion events on your website (contact form submissions, phone calls, etc) and tie them into sources of traffic (organic, paid, GMB, etc).
Because most people will call your office and not contact you via a form, call tracking is the most important tool we have in tying in a website visitor to their traffic source and their ultimate production as a new patient. If you are going to be using call tracking, you must be using a HIPAA-compliant solution. Services such as our CallOwl product provide this service at an affordable $99/mo.
You two most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are:
1. Number of new patients per marketing channel (organic, paid, etc)
2. Production generated from these new patients
If you don't use call tracking and thus can't directly tie in phone calls to new patients and revenue, use the following secondary KPIs:
1. Number of phone calls from Google My Business
2. Number of contact form submissions
3. Number of appointment form/widget submissions
You've done the hard part and now have a visitor on your website. They are going to want to learn more about you -- and what other people have to say about you. Make sure you have a clean and modern review widget so your visitors can easily see how awesome you are. If you don't have a review widget you can work with ours for only $15/mo. You can see what it looks like on our own review page.
So many dental websites have a call to action such as , "Make An Appointment". And while this CTA is ok for your existing patients, what about potential new patients who visit your website? Assume that you are a new patient first landing on your website's home page. Are you going to click "Make An Appointment" or are you going to try to learn more about the practice before you dive in? Thus, you need to have a second call to action such as "Learn More" or "Get to Know Us" as well so you can give new visitors a proverbial tour of who you are.
At the most basic level, a web page is HTML code that a browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) interprets as what we see as a web page. This HTML code is written in an outline-type hierarchy, and the top-most title of a web page should be an <h1>. Your secondary title or titles should be <h2>s and your other subheadings should be <h3>s. Make sure that you only have one instance of the <h1> tag per web page.
The tab at the very top of your browser contains the text that we call a <title> tag. This tag is the title of the web page and it's what visitors also see when they view search engine listings for a web page. Make sure that your <title> tags are in line with the content on the page. Don't make the mistake of having every page on your website look like this, "John Doe, DDS - Dentist Your Town - Sealants" and "John Doe, DDS - Dentist Your Town - Dental Implants". Instead, make sure that your top keyword is in the <title> tag so that it reads more along the lines of, "Affordable Dental Implants - John Doe, DDS - Dentist Your Town".
Evaluate what pages on your website are already ranking on Google search and figure out what you can do to improve these rankings first (assuming that the topic is relevant). It's much easier to improve your ranking for pages that are already indexed (Google knows about them) for a specific topic vs. writing new content.
Writing content for the sake of having content is a waste of time and money. PLAN what content you need to build on your website that matches the services you want to provide for your patients (implants, RCTs,. etc). Many companies will recycle the same content on multiple client websites or post a "content library" to their clients' websites and call it SEO. Relevant quality content is much more valuable than a large volume of broad content topics.
Stay tuned for the rest of the items on Dr. Wank's list. If you have questions in the meantime feel free to get in touch and schedule a complimentary consultation.
