Search Engine Optimization

Let’s say you’re wanting to find swimming lessons for your child. You’ll pull out your phone and open a search engine to begin searching for swimming lessons in your area. In the search engine box, you’ll type in swimming lessons Lincoln, NE. This will bring up a map of the area with three main listings for you to review. If you scroll down further, you’ll see website options to click.

You click the first option and look over the website. As you begin reading, you’ll notice all of the different pages available with information to help guide you in your purchasing decision. You aren’t sold on this company, so you go back to your search engine and select the next website to examine. You may do this with a few websites, but typically never go past the first page on the search engine.

So the next question is how do you get your website to show up in the first three listings, so patients click your website?

Using keywords in your website that your patients will search for is imperative. Think about what the average person would type in for an eye care provider. Words like eye doctor, vision, eye exam, optometrist, eye care, eye care provider, eye care professional, those may be keywords your potential patients are using to find you! The area you serve is also important to list on your website. You should include more than just where your practice resides in. Look at your patient database to see where you are currently attracting patients from, how far are they driving? This will give a good idea of surrounding communities to include in your keywords. Many people type in near me, but there’s also a good chance they could also type in the specific city name. So, be sure to include the communities you serve in the footer of your website. This will show up on all of the pages you have within your website, which helps your search engine optimization.

You can also increase your search engine optimization by frequently updating your website. Now, you’re probably wondering who has time to consistently come up with ideas to even make changes to a website. This is where your blog can help. By creating a new blog at least monthly and uploading it to your website, search engines will read that as you updating your website and help you rank higher in searches.

Reviews will also help determine where your website should rank on search engines. We’ll discuss this in another course how to implement asking for reviews to help increase the number of reviews your practice has and although having a 100 5-star reviews isn’t the only factor in ranking higher on search engines, it definitely does help! When you have numerous 5-star reviews, search engines see your website/business as the expert and that your visitors trust you.