Dental SEO: Why do you need to be on Page 1 of Google? Part 2
What can we learn about Google to improve our chances of reaching and staying on page one?
Watching it evolve over the years has taught us a few things. Certainly we can say that history repeats itself and there are cyclical motions that we can begin to predict and work with. That is why it is good to know what happened in 2001. You are able to see the behaviours and the mindset of Google alongside it’s growth and what it considers to be important.
What does Google consider to be important?
Google page one is always about relevance. We need to consider how relevant your website is to your product and more importantly, are you the most relevant between you and your competition?
The definition of relevance by Google has evolved over the years, much like how Google itself has evolved. In 2001, it meant keywords. You needed to ensure that you had the same keywords as what an individual was searching for. It coupled this with how many people link to you, which was a reference to how popular you were.
It then began to evolve into deciphering who is linking to you and seeing what those websites were about to ensure authenticity. Here we saw Google counting these links again to decide how popular you are. This is the foundation of dental SEO.
The more popular you are, the greater likelihood will be that your company is one of the first pages to appear on the first page of a Google search.
As we evolve further again over the years, we begin to see the filtering of websites that were not produced cleanly and checking to see whether a website is spamming the system with a keyword density that is too high. The content that is produced will be penalized if it is not readable and authentic.
One page websites are OK, and do OK, but the most successful websites these days are big 30 to 50 page websites with a lot of relevant, readable content. If you want to be number one in the searches, then you need to think big.
Furthermore, we must ensure that the links are strong, such as BBC or strong PR links. It is not just about how many links you have but who is linking to you.
Today, Google analytics has become a minefield. There are about 200 factors that are considered as to whether a website and its content is relevant enough to appear on the infamous page 1. At Dental Focus, we hone in on the most important factors for our dental SEO clients as well as our website development clients.
How can we ensure that we are relevant?
Some honest effort needs to go into producing relevant content and keywords with some emphasis on finding what the most profitable keywords are for a given website or topic. We then must work on growing the content constantly and consistently and then distributing that through social media.
The content needs to have reputable links that we can source from and by distributing what we can through social media, we will be able to link back to many sources as we reach a greater base of followers and potential clients.
The main take home message here for dental SEO is that it is all about content. Content and appropriate activity will deliver that page one result that will bring in those new patients through your doors and allow you to grow your business.
Brought to you by the leaders in dental marketing, Dental Focus.