You may have heard about the acronym “SEO” before. Maybe you’ve taken the time to Google what it means and have a surface-level understanding of what it is. But, you’re always wondering: why is SEO important for businesses? In today’s blogpost, we’re walking you through all things Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s 2024 and Google is really amping up their game on what websites they’ll prioritize over others. The sooner you understand how, the better.
Search Engine Optimization has really become more of a buzz word in the last 10 years of the internet. In order to spare you of your time, SEO is the reason why when you Google certain queries like, “best pizza near me”, that certain restaurants and websites appear.
Sure, there might be several best pizza places near you, but only a few will make it on the first page – and let’s face it, nobody looks past the first page of Google Search.
For private practice clinicians like you – it works the same way. Not only is a branding and website essential in boosting brand awareness for your online practice, but that’s step one. Step two involves scaling and growing your business, one of those methods should be SEO. As a dietitian, you might want to rank for your specialty, “gut health dietitian“. For a therapist, you might want to rank for “postnatal therapy in california”. And for a PT, you might want to rank for “holistic physical therapy practices”. Each of these are definitely possible, but are they searchable?
That’s what SEO works to find out.
SEO should be a large part of your scaling and growth strategy for one reason: it can be passive. But really, why is SEO important for businesses?
While at first, it might take some dedication to an SEO and blogging strategy, eventually your website will have a high enough domain authority that your website will be highly prioritized over others over time. Most of our clients who rank well from an SEO strategy consistently get website hits per month along with other metrics (i.e. Pinterest hits, email subscriptions, etc).
A good SEO strategy won’t just put your website on a pedestal – it will flow into all aspects of your business!
It should also be within your scaling and growth strategy because the internet isn’t going anywhere 🤪. If anything, it’s steadily growing over time. More users are on the internet now than ever! So, if you are considering where to put your time and efforts, blogging for an SEO strategy has a very lengthly shelf-life.
Earlier this year, we actually had a client find us from Google Search on a blogpost we wrote nearly 3 years ago!
Search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing, have a basis criteria on how to rank certain websites over others. This is the reason why if you Google Search the query, “affordable women’s clothes”, Amazon, Target and Walmart are at the top of your results whereas a local small business boutique, isn’t.
This helpful article from Google explains their criteria for rankability – but where we start as a design studio for clinicians is the quality phase.
Our team is responsible for ensuring that the website’s user experience is quality enough in order to begin ranking your website to begin with. For example, if your website is using a free trial on GoDaddy with the domain name including godaddywebsites.com in it, it’s likely not going to be prioritized because this is bad user experience.
When clinicians are ready for this type of scaling and growth or just want the basis set for them, they hire us. Here’s where we start to understand why is SEO important for businesses:
Brand Design: Branding design contributes a lot to the user experience of a website. Consider looking at two websites side-by-side: one with a full brand and one without. 99% of the time, you’ll emotionally connect with the website with the branding. This is our step one and why we always recommend completing a branding before the website.
Website Design: After the branding is established, we begin the website design phase. Hiring professionals from our studio will ensure that your website is formulated with user experience at the forefront. Because our studio is familiar with your branding and ideal audience, we can understand and get into the minds of your ideal client and what will work for their experience within your website. There are many other factors we focus on within our website phase such as page speed, initial SEO setup, blog creation and more.
So, appearing on Page 1 on Google Search is all that you get for honing into your SEO strategy? Nope! There’s so much more. Let’s dive into all the benefits of implementing SEO and why is SEO important for businesses:
Search Engine Optimization is a large reason to why certain healthcare professionals are trusted over others on the internet. Going back to the statement that not many people will look past page 1, those that are on page 1 are seen as credible and reliable resources.
When you invest in an SEO strategy, you are showing audiences that you care deeply about the growth of your practice. As you grow and scale, your audiences will grow and with that, comes more trust and credibility.
As much as we’d like to think this isn’t the case – someone who has 500K followers will appear more credible than someone who has 150.
Think of your SEO strategy as another method where you can “compete” against your high-level competitors. Now, I’m a business owner who loves and supports community over competition. However, when you are growing & scaling your practice, finding areas where your competitors aren’t is such a sweet spot.
As you do competitor analysis, look for gaps in marketing efforts. Maybe that’s website growth and SEO. If it is, focus your efforts on putting your brand as the professional over theirs on Google Search.
Normally within an SEO strategy, you have a comprehensive list of keywords you are attempting to rank for – they could be location based, specialty based or more generalized to your specific profession. From what we’ve experienced in our own SEO strategy, the individuals who have found our company via Google Search (i.e. our SEO strategy) are our most ideal, easy-to-work with clients.
I attribute this to the fact that SEO addresses their deepest desires and needs because we understand what queries they are searching on Google.
With that in mind, this can enable you to have clients for a very long time. The initial understanding and deep desire that you communicated to them via your website copywriting and finding your website via queries, it’s a hole in one.
When you are formulating your marketing plan as a clinician, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. As an example, putting all of your efforts within Instagram would be a mistake because the “shelf-life” of a few days and at most a week.
SEO has a shelf-life of years. This is the same case with Pinterest, which is why there’s nearly 7 million users actively on Pinterest daily.
That said, SEO should be an additional marketing strategy in order to target a specific pool of people. You might be targeting a very specific audience on your website via your SEO strategy while your email list and Instagram target very similar, but more broad audiences.
In order to measure the success of how your SEO is performing, there are multiple performance indicators we look at. Before we dive into these, we recommend giving them at least 6 months of a consistent SEO strategy before really taking these seriously:
Keyword rankings: This is the most obvious to start with – SEO tools such as SEMRush can track the keywords you are working on and spit out a report to see how many positions you’ve changed on Google Search.
Backlinks: As you grow your website, it would be amazing to grow your backlinks as well. These are other websites linking to your website, and thus giving it more traffic. Because you may be growing in credibility, this will normally increase as well.
Organic traffic: With an SEO strategy, more traffic should be coming your way because your SEO is an “in addition to” strategy. Meaning, at bare minimum, your website should be getting traffic simply by you linking to it. Now that you focus on SEO, your website should be appearing more on Google Search organically, without you needing to link to it as often.
Domain authority: We talked a bit abut this above, but domain authority is a score that SEO tools provide your website as it’s growing and scaling. A website that doesn’t do much will have a low authority score because it’s less likely that it will produce authoritative content. As your SEO strategy is implemented, you’ll see this score increase, which Google takes into consideration on how to rank your website in page search.
SEO has changed even in the last 5 years that we as a team have focused on it. It’s important to be subscribed to SEO newsletters or be generally in-the-know about what changes Googel makes on a frequent basis.
For example, in March of 2023, Google changed it’s entire methodology of analytics tracking from the Universal Analytics to the now GA4. This in turn affected some websites that were once ranking well and users saw a drop in their organic traffic.
In knowing this information, you can alter your strategy accordingly such as blogging more during the harder times or changing up the keywords you were focusing on.
This blogpost was created so that you understand the importance and need for SEO within your private practice. No matter where you are in practice, you can take the time to invest in an SEO strategy to begin growing your website organically.
We have a few resources that will help you alongside this blog if you are considering SEO and wanting to learn more about it. Firstly, is our SEO Checklist.
To understand why is seo important for businesses, the SEO checklist is where to start with your SEO strategy. We’ll walk through setting up your Google Analytics, Google Search Console and where to begin as you hone into your strategies.
After you have consumed our SEO Checklist, our SEO & Blogging Guide is your next step. This is a $25, 40 page guide that gives you in-depth prompts on how to write blogposts with SEO in mind. We also walk through how to alter your website copywriting to ensure it’s smartly written with SEO at the forefront.
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