Now more than ever, websites are beginning to rely heavily on trendy “buzzwords” to hook your attention and get you to click. While stuffing your medical marketing website with these popular terms may seem like a good way to attract more patients, the results are unpredictable and are only relevant for the short-term.
At Crystal Clear, our 16 plus years in the digital marketing industry have shown us that these gimmicky tactics don’t work and do not translate into a smart, informed digital marketing strategy to drive traffic to your practice’s website. So, what should you do instead? The three most important letters of the webspace alphabet – SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Don’t let any other marketers convince you that SEO for cosmetic surgeons is unnecessary or unimportant. For those who are new to this vital component of your digital marketing strategy, here’s a short glossary of the words you need to know.
Search Engine
These are the websites that patients use to search for treatments and services. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and similar sites are search engines.
Ranking
When patients use a search engine to search for treatments and services in your area, where you show up in the search results is called your ranking. While everyone wants to be ranked #1 on Google, a ranking in the top 10 search results or even the first page is still a great position.
Algorithm
This is the formula used by search engines to evaluate websites and determine which ones are the most relevant to the patient’s search. To give you an idea of why it’s important to stay on top of algorithm updates, Google changes its search algorithm more than once a day and around 500 times a year. While many of these are minor changes, there are also major changes that affect search results.
Spider/Crawler/Bot
How do search engines keep track of every single website on the Internet? Spiders, crawlers, and bots “crawl” the Internet and track what’s fresh, relevant, and designed with the user in mind.
Traffic
What do we mean when we say we want to drive traffic back to your website? We want more people to find it through organic search, blogs, email marketing, social media, and the other components of your digital marketing strategy. And we want to keep them there until they find what they need and either call the office or fill out an online form.
URL
Short for Uniform Resource Locator, the URL is the address of a page on your website such as https://crystalcleardigitalmarketing.com/about-us/. Having specific information such as the procedure name and sometimes the location can help improve your overall SEO.
Internal Links
Linking one page to another within your website is not only a great way to keep patients on your site, it can also help contribute to your overall SEO for cosmetic surgeons and give you the boost you need to edge out your competition.
Keywords
Keywords are the words and phrases that bots and spiders use based on searches to pull websites into search results. If your top procedure is rhinoplasty, then chances are you won’t come up at the top of the rankings if someone in another country simply searches “rhinoplasty.” But, optimizing for more specific keywords such as “cosmetic surgeon in Orlando” or “rhinoplasty in Orlando” can give you an advantage.
Bounce Rate
Among the data you may never have known you needed is bounce rate. This is the percentage of patients that immediately leave your site. Yes, we can track this, and double yes it is important to your overall SEO to understand why this happens and fix it at the source.
Domain
Your website address, such as https://crystalcleardigitalmarketing.com/, can help increase your rankings by major search engines such as Google depending on what domain you use. Addresses that end in .com and .edu, to name a few, can be given preference over others, so it’s important to do your homework before committing to a domain for your medical marketing website.
Are you ready to bring your practice into the 21st century with SEO for cosmetic surgeons? Contact Crystal Clear today to find out more and get started. We look forward to hearing from you!
