SEO isn’t brain surgery. However, if you’ve decided to handle your own SEO campaign, especially if you’re a novice, confusion can occur easily. This is largely because there’s conflicting information online about SEO best practices.
Below are four ways to tell if your medical practice’s website engages in bad SEO practices:
1. Failing to conduct proper research
Did you think after you left medical school that you were done doing research? Think again.
Yes, research takes time. But keyword research really can help. Furthermore, even if you think you may know your target audience, you might be missing opportunities by being too narrow. Take the time to do some research to be sure you know your audience.
2. Failing to vet linking opportunities
Inbound links to your website are vital to your practice’s survival. However, what you might be missing is that you need these inbound links to be relevant to your practice and the content found on your website.
Having backlinks from websites that don’t share a similar audience is a waste of your time and money.
3. Creating low content
In the marketing industry, we like to say that content is king. However, mediocre content isn’t doing your practice any favors. Ensure that the content you publish to your website is content that your target audience will want to read and find valuable.
Rather than slapping some short, cheap posts on your blog, consider investing in longer, more high-quality pieces. Additionally, make sure you’re incorporating your keywords into these pieces naturally and keeping SEO practices in the back of your mind.
4. Taking an SEO sabbatical
The thought of taking a step back from search engine optimization and not performing SEO tasks while focusing on your practice may seem attractive. However, disrupting the flow of SEO work, even periodically, can hurt the organic presence you may be trying to achieve.
What’s more, search engines actually want to see an active and well-optimized SEO presence — one that’s constantly uploading new content and creating new inbound links. While failure to do this won’t necessarily cripple your practice, it isn’t going to do you any favors either.