What is SEO, Anyway?

Many business owners with a website may have heard about SEO, and that’s it’s a great option to gain visibility for your site. This sentiment is very true, but it’s still important to make sure your clinic knows what SEO is and how it works before your team decides to add SEO to your marketing plan.

SEO Defined

SEO stands for “search engine optimisation,” and it affects how both businesses and users find businesses online. What SEO means to you depends on who you are in the process of locating a business:

• For digital marketers, SEO is the process of getting traffic to a website through organic tactics, building prominent business citations, and staying up-to-date with Google algorithmic changes.
• For businesses, it’s the art of guiding users who are searching for certain goods or services to what products and services you offer on your website.
• For the user, it’s simply the experience of searching for information and the ease of finding a website that matches what you are looking for.

Google’s Relationship to SEO

Google’s mission is to be the ultimate interface of the internet, doing their best to deliver the most accurate results for the user. Depending on how you phrase your search or searches, there is almost always a website out there that is “optimised” to accommodate that search and match you with the best possible information.

This relationship with Google is what makes SEO necessary and possible. Google’s mission is to provide the most accurate user experience by best predicting the “user intent” behind each search. Simply put, Google sets and drives the standards for the web. 

Year after year, Google improves and becomes more sophisticated through algorithmic updates that are rolled out several times a year. Although we, as SEOs and users, will never know what Google’s algorithm is, Google will sometimes provide some context as to what the change pertained to, and from these changes, SEO best practices emerge and shift to accommodate them.

How SEO Works

SEO, at its core, is the implementation of various best practices and tactics to help a website rank as high on a Google Search page as it possibly can.

To achieve results that best benefit dental clinics, our SEO specialists pay close attention to how Google evolves and grows. Even though Google is ever-changing, there have been a few constants.

Websites are generally rewarded for quality design, good user experience (UX), strong reviews, original content, and no penalties against unethical tactics. As of 2018, through tried-and-true research, there are a number of accepted established major rank factors that SEOs prioritise.

Moz, a leader in SEO research, lists major rank factors as follows:

• Business Signals: Proximity to searcher, correct business categories, keyword present in the business title, etc.
• Link Signals: Inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, linking domain quantity, etc.
• On-Page Signals: Presence of an accurate name, address and phone number (NAP), keywords present in titles, high domain authority, etc.
• Citation (Business Listing) Signals: NAP consistency, the volume of business listings, citations organically created
• Review Signals: Review quantity, review consistency, review diversity, etc.
• Behavioural Signals: Click-through rate, mobile clicks, user activities
• Social Signals: Engagement, user actions on social media: Review quantity, review consistency, review diversity, etc.

Learn More About SEO With Great Dental Websites

Interested in adding SEO to your clinic’s marketing plan? Give our team a call for a free website audit and marketing plan — free of charge with no hidden commitments.