SEO 101

Learn SEO 101: the basics and 7 quick tips to optimize your website right here!

Everyone has told you that to effectively market your practice, you must get a website, so you went and paid someone to create a website for your practice. Your website is out there on the internet for new, prospective and existing patients to see!

So, now what?

Now you must begin improving your website to lead potential patients to your site when they perform a search on Google or another search engine such as Bing.  A search engine is an online tool that searches the World Wide Web for results in its database based on a search entered by the internet user. For example: “Top audiologists in my area.”

If an individual who believes they are experiencing hearing loss were to type in the aforementioned example into Google, would your practice appear at the top of the search results?  If not, one way you could remedy this issue is to use SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization and means the process of improving your website to improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your site and increase its visibility for relevant searches. Ensuring when an internet user types, “Top audiologists in my area,” your practice appears at the top of the list.

Now that you know what SEO is, you may wonder what the reasons for it are.

Search engines use advanced algorithms (computer instructions) to crawl the World Wide Web, understand and rank pages. But as we all know, even computers aren’t perfect and will need your assistance to understand what the content on your website is about.

If your website doesn’t appear to be relevant to an internet users’ search, then your website won’t appear in the search results. That means a potential patient has just missed out on your excellent and personable care. A search engine friendly website is extremely important because it enables you to maximize the number of visitors to your site.

SEO 101: 7 Quick Tips for Optimizing Your Practice Website

1. Understand the keywords patients may be searching for. Keywords are grouped phrases entered in a search engine.  Find out the most popular ways people are searching for you and other hearing health professionals and add those keywords to your website pages.
2. Create content potential patients will find. This can be accomplished through your service pages, blogs and the other content, such as FAQs. that may appear on your website.
3. Create compelling titles. When your site appears in search engines, your blog titles and other page titles should entice users to want to click and learn more.
4. Keep URLs short and descriptive.
5. Optimize your images. You can do this by asking your webmaster to utilize alt. text descriptions on the backend of your website.
6. Create content that is easy to read. Don’t use big words. Use paragraphs, bullets, lists and other formatting tips to break up big chunks of content. Use photos and apps like Hemingway to analyze your content for simplicity.
7. Utilize backlinks. So, what is a backlink? A backlink is a link that is embedded in a word or phrase on a website. All the words you see on this blog that are in blue and underlined contains a backlink. Backlinks with relevant topics increase your chances of getting a higher search ranking and more traffic to your website.

Like all marketing efforts, optimizing your website to ensure it’s SEO friendly will take time. And since you’re not a website expert, you may want to hire a professional web developer to review, optimize your site and add SEO-rich content that’ll ensure you get the right visitors to your site. In the meantime, you can understand the basics of creating a more SEO friendly site using these tips.