Search Engine Optimisation for the Medical Aesthetics Industry
SEO is a shadowy art and many of the people selling it can be likened to the double glazing salesmen of old. Because most of us only know a little about it but know how important high Google rankings can be, we are vulnerable to unscrupulous practices.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Essentially, SEO is the practice of getting your website up the natural or organic rankings on the search engines; most importantly Google. In technical terms, SEO is made up of: content, keywords and social media.
Organic vs Paid Search
The organic rankings are the main results you see in the body of the results page when you do a search on Google. The two or three results you see in the yellow box above these and in the column on the right are directly paid for by companies by a method called Pay Per Click. This is essentially an auction held by Google with the company prepared to pay more each time someone clicks on their advert appearing higher in the list. Pay per click advertising is the main income generator for Google and is what makes them into a billion dollar company.
Every time you click on one of these adverts the company is paying a certain amount. This can vary from upwards of £10 for some very competitive industries like insurance to pennies for long tail search phrases. Long tail key phrases are very specific phrases which have low search volume but which are very specific to you. Hence they are probably not worth anyone else bidding for and will be of very low cost whilst being highly specific.
Of all the searches performed on Google approximately 15-20% are via PPC- the rest are via the organic listings as many people find these are more trustworthy that the paid for results.
How do you get your website to appear higher in Google searches?
This is the million dollar question and one that SEO “experts” may bamboozle you with information on. Essentially it boils down to 3 factors:
- On-page optimization
- Inbound and Outbound links
- Freshness of content
Each of these topics would merit a book in their own right! But essentially…
On-page Optimisation – SEO
on page optimization is how well Google can access your site and tell what it is about. Google wants to provide the best, most relevant search results to people doing a search on it. Providing the most appropriate search result is the bedrock of Google success and the reason why it has become the most commonly used search engine out of all the ones that existed 10 years ago.
Google need to understand what your site is about so it can list it in the appropriate search. Your on page optimization should provide Google with this information. This is done by using the search terms you want to rank for in the title of your website, the titles of each page, in the descriptions of each page and in the text on each page. The repeated use of your selected search term should not be overdone as this can result in clumsy copy which is not easy for the user to read and understand
Link Building for SEO
Links are the number of times other websites provide a link to your website from theirs, or you link to them. It is better if they include a link like ‘watch a video of inverted nipple correction’ with the underlined text being the link. This is known as anchor text and the words that you choose to underline and show up when you hover over that underlined section are very important: you can directly influence your rankings for those chosen terms with selective links to and from respected pages.
Google sees a link to your website as a vote of confidence in your website- if other people are mentioning it must be good. The text contained in the link is called the anchor text. This tells people what the vote is for. Therefore the above link tells Google that my site is good and that it contains information about inverted nipple surgery.
Provided your on-page optimization is good, the main factor in rising up the rankings on Google is the number of links you have compared to other sites.
Fresh Content
Recently Google has begun measuring the freshness of the content held on a website by rewarding sites that change regularly and include new content with higher rankings. This is because Google tries to serve the most relevant results to their users. If a website has not been changed for months it is not going to be providing up to date information and will be marked down in the rankings.
If you are interested in more in-depth business marketing training for the medical aesthetics industry, Cosmetic Courses are experts in providing this. Call us today on 0845 230 4110 or [email protected]
