How accurate are search engine results?

How accurate are search engine results?
23 February 2012 | | Search Engine Optimisation

Many dental practices have the view that if they aren’t number one on the organic search engine results page for multiple locations and for all of their treatments, there must be a problem and that they are going to receive no business from their website.

However, many  dental practitioners do not realise that the results they receive on their screen may not be the same as the person sitting next to them in exactly the same practice on a different computer. This can be for a variety of reasons, including Google+ personalisation, Google ‘remembering’ previous searches and where Google set your location to be.

This therefore means that search results can be misleading and you shouldn’t get too hung up on where you appear on rankings, as you may appear at the bottom of page one of your computer, but on a patient’s you could be at the top!

“Experts say this lack of precision is tolerated in the name of speed. The super computers behind the scenes have to work very quickly, mixing and matching lots of documents, throwing out spam and pages where the words surrounding your search term are the same – all this in less than a second or two”- (Ruth Alexander BBC News 2012)

A good measure of how your website is doing is by measuring traffic to your site, if it has an upwards trend that’s fantastic news, if it is going down however, there are lots of strategies we can employ to increase your visibility. This is also true for measuring contact forms through to your site and the amount of phone calls your practice receives, which all should be constantly measured.

Improvement strategies include optimising your Google Places listing, which has become ever more prominent on the search engine results page, investing in a Google Adwords PPC campaign, social media, patient reviews, on page optimisation and link building.

All of these can be discussed with your personal dental design seo account manager, to create a strategy which is perfect for your practice’s needs; ensuring that you are getting exactly what you want to achieve from your website.

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