Planning and Measuring an SEO Campaign
When it comes to SEO, many practices just don’t know enough to truly understand how to plan an effective campaign. They receive emails from businesses promising they will achieve “guaranteed first page results” on Google and often this can seem too good to miss out on.
Unfortunately, there can be huge consequences from what is known as “Black Hat SEO”. Some practices could get hit by a penalty they had no idea about due to the work the company was doing.
…At Dental Design we only use White Hat SEO techniques!
Rule Number 1 – Plan
Without a plan, it’s impossible to track progress or measure success. Every practice website is different and each has its own unique goals and objectives that need to be established. So to begin you need to determine the best path for reaching those goals.
The main thing to remember about online marketing is that it’s an ongoing process. The need to check your website for technical issues, adding unique content and acquiring links never ends. Equally important is to understand that unlike PPC, it takes time to see results from SEO. From when the website goes live and we begin work on the SEO, you will begin to see results within 6-8 weeks.
Even though every plan is unique, some of the following elements for a successful SEO campaign will be the same:
- SEO Audit: Check a website for technical and potential SEO problems. Once you have an idea of the problems, you can then develop the correct action plan.
- Keyword Research: Modern SEO is much more than ranking number one for a key phrase. That said, including highly searched and relevant phrases into the optimisation is still important.
- On Page Optimisation: This is where we look at the following elements:
- Meta Tag Optimisation
- HTML Tags
- Keyword Optimisation
- Link Optimisation
- Citations
- Image Optimisation
- Competitor Analysis: The best way to stay ahead of the competition is to fully understand who your competition are and what they are doing themselves. A comprehensive competitor analysis will provide you with this information.
- Content Marketing: The saying goes, “Content is King” and this should be considered an endless task. Part of your strategy should be focused on attracting links and creating content designed for that purpose.
- Social Media: Keep in mind that social media marketing requires genuine human to human interaction in order to work.
Define Goals
The only way to know if you’re getting a good return on your investment is to have some kind of metric for evaluating your site traffic. Regardless of budget, you want to be getting a good ROI. During the initial planning stages, you need to decide how you’re going to measure success.
When talking about SEO, many people immediately think of success as being at the top of search result. You may therefore use ranking as one form of measurement, but don’t make it your only or most important metric.
Instead of measuring where you appear in the search results, you should look at things such as increased appointments or an increase in the number of new patients joining the practice. One goal might be to see your new patients numbers increase by a certain percentage each month or to gain “X” amount of new email addresses/subscribers.
There are two important factors when looking at measurements. You should make it something that is measurable and make your goals reasonable. It’s very hard to measure something like interest in a particular service offered at the practice as you don’t know if people viewing the treatment on the website are truly interested or not, and even if you have some kind of way of knowing that they’re interested, you don’t know that everyone who is will click through to that page. However, you can very easily measure unique visitors and page views to that particular treatment offered.
After you’ve begun your SEO campaign, don’t expect a huge jump in online traffic straight away.
…Online marketing is a marathon – not a sprint!
Measuring ROI
All practices rely on patients coming back to them more than once by retaining a “customer for life.” Failure to calculate the lifetime value of a newly acquired patient distorts the true ROI.
Dental Design…
Online marketing continues to offer one of the best ROI’s of all marketing channels which we can offer your practice. If you would like any further information then give the Dental Design team a call on: 01202677277.
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