If you are a dentist and your dental practice has its own website, have you ever stopped to ascertain if it is actually bringing you the number of new clients and patients that it should? No doubt you attract new clients from other sources such as personal recommendations, but, unless your website is ranked highly on search engines when someone locally is looking for a dentist, it is not providing you the benefits it should.
One way in which the ranking of your website can be improved is with search engine optimisation, or SEO, as it is more commonly referred to. SEO has many processes but one of its most important is to ensure that a website has all the elements it needs within its structure to help its search engine ranking.
Whilst there are SEO consultants and agencies that can do this work for you, it pays for you to at least have an understanding of what aspects of a website need to be optimised in order for its ranking to improve.
Taking this a stage further if you feel confident that you know your way around a website, many of these optimisation steps can be done by yourself but do tread carefully.
Whether you choose to bring in the experts, or want to try it yourself, here is a brief overview of 7 of the most components of an SEO optimised website. Some are quite technical, others rely more on common sense, but together they can boost your website’s SEO, enormously.
#1 High Quality Content: Any media on your website, be it the written words, images, audio, or video, needs to be as good as you can possibly make it. This helps to engage with those who visit, can gain their trust, and adds to your credibility too.
#2 Excellent User Experience: Your website is how many potential clients will first experience your dental practice, so the better that experience is, the more chance there is of them becoming your client. Simple ways to achieve this are making the website easy to navigate and having a clear layout.
#3 Keyword Optimisation: This relates to you having just the right number of keywords within the content on your website, and that they are positioned in the correct places. These include in the title of the page, and in the first paragraph.
#4 Link To Social Media: Social media is everywhere, and thus you need to be in a position to take advantage of its enormous popularity. It is essential that your website is sharable on social media, and that you actively encourage visitors to do so.
#5 Bot Optimised: In order for your website to rank it needs to be crawled by the search engines. This is done using special programming called bots, so make sure your website is optimised to make it easy for those bots to crawl it.
#6 Suitable For All Devices: Internet traffic on mobile devices has exceeded that of desktop devices, so your website needs to enable it to be viewed correctly on mobile phones, tablets, and other handheld devices. If not, its ranking will plummet.
#7 Use Correct Metadata: Remember the search engine bots we mentioned that crawl your website? Well, much of what they report back to the search engines is contained in your website’s metadata. This means it is essential that all the metadata for your website is in place, and accurate.