SEO can be a tricky topic to wrestle for your Medical Practice. There are so many different topics and buzzwords to understand. Here at Telos Digital Marketing, we believe in teaching our clients so that they can better understand what we offer for them. In this article, let’s take a look at “on-page SEO.”
On-page SEO for your doctor’s office is the optimization of the actual website you own to help it rank better. This is in contrast to off-page SEO, which focuses on things like building links to your site or building social media profiles for your site. On-page SEO looks at many factors on your website that can be optimized.
The first thing that any SEO will look at to optimize is the content. Google (and most other search engines for that matter) often factor the quantity and quality of the content on your site into how well it will rank. Search engines often look at the total number of words on any individual page on your site. While Google states that 400-500 words per page are what they look for, the actual number can vary greatly, and often more is better. However, most search engines are able to also asses the quality of the article. Anything from simple typos and spelling errors, to things like duplicated content, can negatively affect the ranking. For this reason, it’s essential that you have a large quantity of quality content. Good on page optimization comes from good keyword research.
Written content isn’t the only thing that Google looks for. In addition to well-written text, videos are a very powerful factor in the content equation. Having a video embedded on every page can go a long way towards boosting the position of your site. Linking out to other web pages, such as Web M.D. Or the Mayo Clinic, has also been shown to have a positive effect on a page’s rankings.
The speed at which your site loads can also have a significant impact on the ranking of your site for two reasons. The first reason is that the algorithm that decides the rankings factors in the load time of a website as a quality factor. This can be easily remedied by an SEO in many ways. Sometimes unnecessary plugins can make a page load much slower than it should. Likewise, lacking specific plug-ins that can mitigate the load time also factors in. Sometimes, a simple change of the theme of the site can even help.
The other reason that site speed matters, along with the overall quality of your site, is what is known as the “bounce rate.” This is the rate at which visitors to your site viewed one page and stayed for 0 seconds. When pages load slowly, some people will just leave. Likewise, even if they remain for a short amount of time, if they leave quickly because they find the actual content uninteresting this can also affect the ranking.
Finally, one of the significant factors in on-page SEO is images. Google considers images a significant type of content. The more images, the better. However, the images have to be properly optimized. Not only to make sure they don’t negatively affect the site speed but to also optimize the metadata of each image.
Other smaller factors can go towards your ranking, but now you know some of the most important on-page SEO items of interest.
