We know without a shadow of doubt from our ears being very close the industry ground, but also through our own experience, that creating websites with unique, engaging, fresh, and relevant content will improve your SEO and rankings by a substantial amount – all things being equal and working well!
Google even tells us that ‘Quality Content’ is essential:
“One of the most important steps in improving your site’s ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.”
We’ve witnessed dental practices located 15 miles away from their major town they are desperate to target, being able to turn their frowns upside down, by getting fully on-board with this advice and enjoying top three page rankings for keywords such as; ‘dentist + Location’, ‘cosmetic dentist + Location, ‘treatments + Location’. One practice has been super-proactive and the rise in rankings has even surprised us!
We have recently employed a part time copy-writer, who has been cajoled (in a thoroughly positive manner) into doing more hours here at Dental Design in order to offer our practices the opportunity to save their precious time for dentistry!
But what the heck does ‘Quality Content’ mean?
Using industry articles, Google webmaster tools and our own expertise, find below a breakdown of what constitutes Quality Content with which to populate the pages of your dental practice website.
Studies show that ranking factors such as word count and Flesch readability have increased. One study of a bunch of search terms over the last year has found that average text length of the top 30 pages increased by 24% since 2014. This suggests that Google is increasingly valuing longer content that is easily digestible.
If your content is too short it’s unlikely to go very deep into the subject and it’ll put off readers who will click away more likely. Readability is very important, no matter how much content is on the page, if it’s full of convoluted language and pointless jargon it’s also not going to keep the reader on the page.
Good UX can impact Google rankings.
If the content is well structured and easy to navigate then people are less likely to get fed up and go elsewhere. More time on the page signals to Google that your content is relevant and interesting.
These days, however, it is not enough to only focus on desktop. Making sure your website works well on mobile is important. Again, studies show that 30% of the top 30 pages use responsive design. We can only expect this trend to increase overtime.
When you’re writing a piece of content, whatever it is, your primary aim should be to make it fit for human consumption. This means it needs to be both readable and enjoyable.
The search engines will no longer respond to keyword stuffed text such as found in this well-meaning SEO company’s text…
If the content you’re writing is actually relevant to the search term, it should naturally contain keywords relating to that subject anyway.