How to love and respect your Keywords
Keywords remain a cornerstone in organic and paid search practices. Without
defining,targeting and constantly moulding your keywords strategy, you are never going to get your site in front of many human faces, let alone a human who is looking for exactly what you offer and eventually result in a patient.
The idea of keyword strategy starts with match making. In the same way you can imagine Cupid calibrating his arrow to the best matches, the most successful strategies begin by weighing up whom they want to attract to their site, with what their site can offer those people and then with that information fill in the gaps by adjusting any design or offering.
The design of a website and its success in attracting relevant traffic are integral, and the subject fills many more blog pages. For now, let’s assume your site is in A grade nick design-wise, and the content perfectly reflects the treatments and services you offer. In keeping with the match making theme, find below some essential relationship advice for you and your keywords.
Spend Time Getting Acquainted.
Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for your right keywords can make or break your website. In order to start, you need to know your patients, or more importantly your prospective patients.
You also need to understand the language they use, what’s topical in reference to the treatments or services you provide. Think about your unique selling point and use the knowledge you have of your patients to best imagine what they would actual type in to find you. Fundamentally it’s not really about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. With the local element of dental practice search terms, think about local areas and colloquial terms for these. For example, there is a North Devon and South Devon divide, with search terms often using these to determine location.
Also, think in terms of how valuable that keyword is to you. In a paid search campaign, this can become a very real term as you can determine the cost-per-click based on the value of this. So for example, you are promoting a new treatment, you want more patients in the area to uptake this treatment, so it’s best to place a high value on this keyword over some others which are less value to you. And of course ensure your site is optimised to receive this traffic from your high value keyword. Match making in process!
Think About Your Competition
Most likely your competition are SEO savvy too, with some having bigger budgets than you (paid search), Trying to compete on single keywords doesn’t tend to work and creates a focus of resources which could be better spent. It’s best here to return to the research, keeping in mind some longer phrases that may be searched for i.e ‘costs for Invisalign in North Devon?’ Here you can use the word ‘cost’ in your content along with ‘Invisalign’ and ‘Devon’, or even head the phrase on a page and then go on with your content to answer this question.
This type of search is extremely satisfying for the user, as their answer is fully explained and gives you a big tick trust-wise, potentially tipping their decision making thought into picking up the phone and making a query.
Remain Faithful
Simply stuffing every keyword you can think of into your content does not work. This can produce really poor quality content and have a negative impact on user experience not to mention hinder your Search Engine Optimisation as Search engines are getting more clued up in picking up rubbish content. What they do like to pick up is rich content with many signals showing that the page is relevant to the keyword.
As described previously, let’s assume your page content is spot on for your keyword, the best practice is to remain faithful to the strong keywords for that page, and utilise other pages with equally strong content for another keyword. Obviously, there is room for adding in your most important keywords, into most pages, but discretion is the key.
Give Them Time
With new dental sites, we tend to utilise the ‘big ticket’ keywords in order to help the practice gain a ROI for the site as quickly as possible. However, we are at the mercy of search engines and when they decide to crawl and index the site. This can take time, so it’s best with new sites, or when making big changes to be patient, and give the search engines time to get used to the changes. If you treat your keywords with respect, optimise your site and content and make them relevant they will work for you, providing you with the potential to reach your target audience (patients ready for treatments)
Learn To Let Go
There comes a time when it’s best to face up to the fact that a keyword is not bringing you enough of the right traffic and just let go.. Trends changes and this includes search trends. One example (which could be highlighted back in the research process), is the change in trend for users who previously searched for tooth whitening. Nowadays, it’s the plural, teeth whitening, that’s popular. Using tools like Google Trends helps to confirm suspicions
On the reverse of this, don't go giving up on a good thing. If a keyword is not performing as well, then perhaps it is the on-site optimsiation that is lacking and a bit of time spent ensuring there is relevance between the keyword and the page you are using it on can help with it's performance.
Like any meaningful relationship, the process requires constant work and evaluation and, as time goes by, repeating these steps to determine if your keywords really are helping you to achieve your online marketing goals, will be a worthwhile activity. To find out more about keyword strategy, call Dental Design on 01202 677 277.
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