Google’s always tinkering with its search engine algorithms, but some changes pack more of a punch than others. Last April, Google released an update that did more to bring site design into 2015 than any motivation to upgrade possibly could. Now, if you’re not mobile-friendly, your rankings are lower than your more responsive competitors. And that translates to a big loss in traffic – up to 5% of organic visitors.

Not only does Google penalize a poorly-responding site, but new visitors are far less likely to put up with a difficult-to-use interface. If they’re visiting on a phone or tablet and struggle to find the information they’re looking for, they’re going to restart their search and avoid your practice in the future.

Instead of worrying about how additional updates could make this traffic loss even worse, take action. With device traffic continuing to outpace desktop, there’s no reason to cling to an old design or a separate mobile site (which can also harm your rankings if it’s not set up perfectly).

How to Tell if Your Site is Responsive

Google offers a quick, simple tool that immediately tells you how it’s seeing your site pages. But that’s not super in-depth – although you can check and see if different pages are more or less responsive than one other by inputting a variety of URLs into the checker.

Even more simply, you can just click and drag the edge of your browser when visiting your site – as you make it smaller, a responsive design will adjust the element size and placement to fit with the new window size.

Make Sure That Everything’s Up to Date in Your CMS

Depending on your CMS, you may be able to find fast, low-effort ways to improve responsiveness. Plugins, themes, and other modules need to be updated (especially on WordPress) to adhere to current design guidelines.

Check On Different Types of Site Content

While some pages might look great on your cell phone, others buck responsive prompts. This might have to do with the type, size, or alignment of images, videos, and other elements you’re using within site pages. Take the time to consider what types of content are displayed on your site, and which pages might be behaving strangely. If you have your site set up in Google Webmaster Tools, you can also check their guide to which pages show errors during crawls.

Get Mobile-Responsive Today

Not sure how to approach a less-than-responsive design? We can help. Request a free website evaluation to learn more about getting to that happy, responsive place!

If you’ve dabbled in SEO, you’ve probably heard of “landing pages.” These are the catchy pages set as destinations for various routes of contact and leads-generators (like PPC campaigns), and they’re designed to act as the final step, where leads submit their information and become patients. Each landing page is designed to elicit responses from a certain buyer/patient profile. So, why not take them a step further and add some geo-targeting?

Local landing pages can make a difference for single-location businesses hoping to cast a wider net. If you’re surrounded by suburbs, one of the only providers in the area, or otherwise standing to benefit from drawing neighboring locations, local landing pages are a great plan. But how do you set them up, how do you choose your targets, and what results can you expect to see? Read on to learn more, or contact our team to bring us into your marketing plan.

Anatomy of a Local Landing Page

• h1 – Your page title and URL will be the city and service that you’re promoting (i.e., “Chicago Web Design”). The h1 is one of the biggest signals to Google, and when paired with a consistent URL and more detailed variations in the content, it will rank.
• Image: Local landing pages aren’t just for search engines. Find content that will help you appeal to the specific patient that you’re trying to bring in with this page.
• Content: The page content should communicate well with search engines, but never sacrifice the user experience. Google’s algorithm updates are continually heightening their quality standards, and emphasizing that the content that really counts is that which is useful, appreciated, and shared. Discuss the service and why it might be appropriate for users in that business area.
• Form: Give leads a simple way to reach you. By including a form directly within the landing page, you give your visitors a way to get in touch immediately, without even leaving the page.
• Meta Title, Meta Description: Make sure your meta data supports the other keyword phrases you’re using across the page, and include the primary keyword phrase in both (Yoast’s SEO plugin helps make this simple). As always, your meta title should be catchy enough to bring in folks that glance it in the search engine results.

How Do Local Landing Pages Rank?

This all depends on where your office is, and the kind of competition you’re facing. Unless you’re up against a big city, the results are typically good – especially if you focus on long-tail keywords and specific suburbs or towns. By pairing common search terms (i.e. “city” and “treatment”), you provide patients seeking those out with relevant Google results.

Ready to get ranking, and build your patient base? Let’s talk local SEO.

There are 26 letters in the alphabet – which are really working for your practice?

Feeling a little exhausted? We understand – when you’re handling your website’s upkeep, it’s a nonstop fight for relevance. While larger practices and companies have more extensive teams that can handle to-the-minute publishing, those of us on a smaller scale found ourselves struggling to get out regular blog posts.

There’s some good news ahead: new content doesn’t necessarily have to be unprecedented. In fact, there’s already awesome content lurking on your website – and it’s ready to be repurposed. This not only saves you time and energy, but actually boosts your search engine rankings.

Whether you’ve already got a content well to draw from, or are interested in moving your content production in a more valuable direction, we’ve got some tips for making your text really count.

Need some help with the writing process? Get in touch with Doctor Web Solution for some dental marketing expertise, and copywriting resources.

The Secret to Simple Content Marketing

If you’ve done some research into the modern marketing world, you’ve no doubt come across the term “content marketing.” Your target audience values excellent content over empty ads and flashy promises. By creating articles and images that educate, entertain, and inform your (current and prospective) patients, you show them that you care about their business.

Content marketing is especially important for healthcare professionals. You never want to appear desperate for new patients, because those individuals will wonder whether the care you offer is flawed in some way. It’s a catch-22 – how do you gain the new patients that you want without showing that your practice needs more business?

That’s where content marketing comes in. Create how-to’s, guides, before and after collections, and other engaging pieces to show that you care about adding to your site viewer’s lives and health – whether or not they follow through and schedule.

Digging For Content Treasure in Your Website

So, you get it – content’s important. Now, how do you find the time to keep creating? Fortunately, the content that’s already working for you has quite a lifespan. With a little tweaking and retouching, you can actually republish old posts and have them garner further attention. This practice not only saves you from having to sit down and churn out new blog posts, but has some added benefits:

• Older content is already ranking – When you publish a new page or post, it doesn’t show up in Google’s results immediately. It takes time for search engines to index the page, and further time for the posts to rise up the ranks. Why not take advantage of the valuable age of your old posts, and simply refurbish them?
• It’s a chance to update and improve past posts – Time changes things. Some of your posts may no longer be relevant, whether it’s due to a service or technology that’s grown outdated or a conscious shift your practice has made. Take this opportunity to make that content speak to your practice’s current landscape.

Recycling Old Content That’s Already Working For You

“Content” is a purposefully vague term, because it can mean so many different things. Any unique media that you create will ultimately serve your practice. Taking photos of your office, creating before and after image pairs, writing guides to oral health, and sharing treatment options are all valid routes to content creation.

Wondering which pages of your website are performing the best? Google Analytics has the answers. If you’d like to learn more about engaging with this process, get in touch with our team. We’re here to bridge the gap between you and your website.

Google just released yet another update to its algorithm – and it immediately impacted thousands upon thousands of businesses. How can you be sure that your SEO is evergreen? The key lies within the bigger picture.

SEO can seem overly concerned with the micro level – editing the title and heading tags of pages until they seem perfect, tweaking URLs to bring in the most clicks, building citations in the best directories, and choosing the most valuable links with the right anchor text. While these things have been important in the past, the SEO landscape is changing. Today, we need to focus on the thing that has remained a priority throughout Google’s algorithm juggling: content.

Awesome, relevant content not only benefits you in the moment, but acts as an ongoing boon for your practice’s website. And with Google’s new focus on the searcher’s location, it’s become one of the most prominent factors in determining the order of search results. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to change the weight Google places on location – so we need to make sure our sites speak to those places, and look good while doing so.

SEO continues to be complicated. But putting in a little extra site work today will reap rewards in the months to come.

Algorithm-Proof SEO Tactics

Just to clarify: Google isn’t the only search engine out there. Many of your patients may use Yahoo or Bing instead, and these engines have different qualifiers for which sites show up at the top of the rankings. But we’re focusing on Google because it’s the number one method by which current and prospective patients try to find a healthcare professional.

In order to appeal to the Google gods, you can always count on the following:

• Frequent publishing – Showing that your website remains active is one simple way to stay relevant in Google’s (and other search engine’s) eyes. Google values domain age, but it also respects new content being added to established sites. By creating new site pages and posts, you show that you’re keeping your website up with the times, and continuing to work toward improving user experience.
• Patient-specific content – In order to find the patients you’re looking for, you’ll need to consider their demographics. Who might want dental implants? Who could be interested in porcelain veneers? Decide on the services you want to promote, and the locations you think may want them. Then create content that incorporates both those factors. One of the simplest ways to achieve this is with:
• Local landing pages – A local landing page snares patients in specific cities looking for specific services. The page is structured to appeal to a certain area, and mentions local factors to draw in the right patients. These pages double as fresh content, and can be quite valuable in your marketing efforts.

Is Your Website Prepared for Google’s Wrath?

Despite Google’s best efforts, bad SEO is still lingering on the Web. Make sure that your site isn’t contributing to the problem. Even if you haven’t seen a drop in rankings, it’s coming – and spammy practices could lead to your site being de-indexed, at which point it won’t show up at all. Keyword stuffing, use of machine-generated content or duplicate content, hidden keywords, and building links on site copies will all bring down the hard fist of Google justice.

Since they’re so tricky, why still use keywords at all? Google doesn’t recognize them, but other search engines do. They’re a vestige of old SEO that hasn’t quite faded from the existing face of optimization.

Feeling anxious about your dental website’s on-page SEO? We’re here to help. Get in touch for some advice.

Modern advertising has taken a gentler turn. On the one hand, ads are everywhere – from concrete expanses like buildings like buses to the omnipresent sidebars of your Facebook. But these ads are increasingly sophisticated and subtle.

Once upon a time, an ad came right out and said what it was trying to accomplish. “Buy our delicious potato chips.” Today, a sidebar ad for the same product might show a picture of a potato chip accompanied by a purposefully vague, intriguing tagline (that inspires the viewer to click it).

As we move in this direction, it becomes more important than ever to ensure that your business’ marketing is never obnoxious. Thus, getting the physical word out about your business (we’re talking mouth-to-ear, doctor to patient to patient) is a bit complicated. You want patients to be talking about your practice online and in person, but you don’t want to seem like you’re forcing them to do so.

This post details a few ways to manage your online authority – and bring in new patients through a bit of carefully-targeted work.

Patient Authority and Dental Reviews

Medical professionals bear a special kind of burden. When someone’s health is at state, they’re incredibly picky about the kind of treatment they’re looking for. And they’re especially grateful when they receive some personal advice as to which doctor could be right for them.

Patients always value their friends’ and family’s opinions and trust their recommendations more than the ones they can find online. They know that these people are for real, and they know the standards that their healthcare needs to measure up to. For this reason, we recommend that you embrace one tried-and-true method of inspiring patient-to-patient communication: social media.

When you’re active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and other social platforms, you’re tapping into your patients’ social circles. They’re already connected with their friends on these networks. When you get even one patient to share content that you post, review your practice on the social site, or even mention you, your name and services are exposed to everyone they know. And it’s that kind of publicity that makes patients really take notice.

The Secrets to Yelp

As we mentioned, recommendations from people your prospective patients actually know are the most valuable. But that doesn’t mean that review sites like Yelp are out of the picture.

Yelp, and other sites like Google Places (which is responsible for the top-of-the-page, abbreviated listings that come up when you Google your business name) are closely tied to your online reputation. Every time someone tries to find you through a search engine, these listings come up at the top of the results. And patients are almost definitely going to check them out before they call and schedule.

It’s important to remind your existing patients that Yelp exists and that you’re on it. Once they receive great treatment, they’ll then be able to tell the rest of the world about it. At the same time, you never want to seem desperate for reviews. Try not to engage in outright solicitation. Begging for reviews not only makes you look desperate, it suggests that your online reputation is lacking.

Get ‘Em Talking, And You’ll See Results

Your current patients care about you, and they want to help you succeed. They feel loyal to you, and they’ll take pleasure in being a part of your practice’s growth. The best thing you can do is continue to provide them with superior treatment. They’ll do the talking (and typing) on their own. Just offer great treatment, and then provide online venues for your patients to follow up.

Have any other questions? Get in touch for advice.