Is Your Website Attractive to Google?
e-Marketing for Physicians
This is our third article in a six-part series for M.D. News.
M.D. News
Greater Akron/Canton Edition
March/April 2008
With over 100 million websites on the internet, it may seem futile to try marketing your website online. You may be thinking, "Is it really possible for prospective patients to find my website?"
Virtually all internet users use a search engine like Google or Yahoo! to find what they're looking for. If your site is missing from the top search results, then you may not be maximizing your ability to add new patients and revenue to your practice.
It may seem as if the websites appearing on the first page of a Google search are products of chance, but nothing could be further from the truth. Websites on the first page or two of the search engine results are there because they are "attractive" to the search engines.In other words, this means they were most likely optimized for the search engines, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of increasing a website's rankings - or placement - in the search engines. SEO makes the pages within your site more attractive to the search engines by adjusting their structure, programming, content, and links.
The higher your website's rankings in the search engine results pages, the more likely users will visit your site. Obviously, a site with a result on Page 1 of Google is going to get a lot more traffic than a site on Page 8.
Through SEO, you have an entirely new channel to reach out to potential patients and increase the size of your practice.
Local Search
As a physician, chances are your patients come from a limited geographical region. That's good news when it comes to web marketing.Instead of trying to compete on a national level, you can focus your efforts on a more local area. To start, there are a few popular sites where you'll want to make sure you have your practice information listed:
- superpages.com
- Yahoo! Local
- Google Local/Google Maps
- yellowpages.com
- local.com
- citysearch.com
- (Note: some of these sites charge a fee for inclusion.)
I already have a website. Why isn't it at the top of Google?
You may have a website that's been developed properly. But if the site is not strategically marketed, the search engines may not be able to find and rank the site. You may want to consider having your site evaluated by marketing professionals who specialize in the online medium.
A good search engine optimization firm should target the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) for optimization. Together, these engines provide more than 95 percent of Web traffic.
They can do everything from little tweaks here and there to all-out battles for first place rankings through custom-made online marketing campaigns. It just depends on your budget and how aggressive you and your competition are.
How much does this cost?
The good news is that SEO is incredibly affordable when compared to yellow pages or print advertising.Consider also that while a print ad confines your message to a small space, SEO allows you to market yourself using an entire website that can be updated at any time.
That�s why you should consider SEO just as important than your offline marketing initiatives. And like any investment, SEO will pay for itself in the end. What other marketing tool offers an average cost per lead of $0.29? (source: Entrepreneur Magazine)
Final thoughts
To give your site the Web presence it deserves, SEO is your must-have marketing method. Through SEO, your site will be made search-engine friendly so that engines like Google and Yahoo! can find, index, and rank your site at the top. And when the search engines rank your site at the top, your website is exposed to throngs of search engine users.
