Speaking of current, Google also prefers fresh, or at least updated, content. The underlying thinking here may be that the most recent information is more authoritative and useful.
If you’re like most dentists, you have a “fire and forget” approach to your website. You put it up, it was good, and you got back to the business of helping people and making money doing it.
It’s not uncommon for us to see dental websites that haven’t been updated in 6 years or more. When was the last time you updated your website’s content Dental Chair?
And that’s just the content side of Google’s rules. There’s also the search engine optimization (SEO) work required for your website or blog to have a fighting chance just to make it onto the first or second page of search results.
SEO is a constantly evolving field, and yesterday’s common practices can draw a penalty today. In part, that’s because “black hat” SEO providers can’t seem to keep from trying to game the system.
For instance, when keywords first became important, the black hats decided that if some keywords were good, a ton of keywords was better, and they stuffed as many keywords as possible into their clients’ website content dental implant machine.
The same goes with “backlinks” from other websites to your site. Quality backlinks are a plus, but the scammers would create bogus sites just to backlink to their clients’ sites in hopes of boosting client rankings.
It takes Google a while to catch onto the latest tricks, but once it does, it’s ruthless. Keyword stuffing draws a very heavy search results penalty today, as do bogus or spam backlinks. The result is that your website can be exiled to Internet Siberia contra angle handpiece.
Your prospective dental patients aren’t looking in Internet Siberia.
What You Need to Do
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it takes to be found on the Internet today. Most dentists have neither the time nor the inclination to learn and follow Google’s constantly changing rules. But if you’re not playing by those rules, you’re at a huge competitive disadvantage.
Rather than trying to add several more marketing chores to your current dental specialty, why not find a reputable dental marketing provider that can offer proven results to manage your online marketing? That way, you can get back to doing what you spent a lot of money to learn to do and do it for more (and hopefully better) dental patients.
Colin Receveur is a nationally recognized dental marketing expert and speaker who has appeared as a featured speaker at Infusionsoft’s PartnerCon in Chandler, Ariz; at Capacity Academy in Nashville, Tenn; and at the Dentaltown Townie meeting in Las Vegas. He is also the author of a number of bestselling books on Internet marketing. His company, SmartBox Web Marketing, is an Infusionsoft Top 5 partner and works with more than 500 dentists on three continents to help them get more patients, more profits, and more freedom. And, his Patient Attraction System has revolutionized how dentists attract the patients they want to treat.