Content Generation
What is it and why does it matter for digital marketing and SEO?
If your digital marketing team is up-to-speed with the latest techniques to help promote your dental business in Google and other channels, then they have probably discussed “content marketing” with you and the important role it plays in digital strategies.
However, if you aren’t already aware, this blog will try to give you a working insight into why generating fresh and interesting content is so powerful to help build your digital foot-print, improve your search engine positions and ultimately, gain new patients for you. But first a little bit of history.
Before 2012, it was relatively easy to gain prominent search engine rankings by pointing lots of links at your website from 3rd party sites. The quality of the links didn’t matter too much and so it was a popular way of doing really well in Google without spending too much time and effort. Indeed, two or three of the large UK dental marketing companies built their reputation for being SEO “gurus” by outsourcing this type of work to cheap off-shore agencies whilst charging a handsome price to their clients.
Undoubtedly this worked initially and lots of dentists did very well out of it. However, some were a little more cautious and realised that Google would catch up on this “manipulation” at some point and the house of cards would come crashing down. And so it happened, when in the early part of 2012, Google introduced severe penalties for websites which abused this technique and as a result many dentists ended up with the website tanking from the top positions to complete obscurity. Suffice to say that the days of “easy” SEO were well and truly over.
Since 2012, promoting dental websites in Google has been a much more rigorous discipline, focused on quality and full compliance with the web publishing guidelines set out by Google. You can’t simply build your website, forget about it and hand the digital promotion to a cheap, third-party link-building company. You won’t get anywhere and worse, you are likely to have your website penalised as a result. Instead, you need to embark on an ethical and holistic marketing campaign which incorporates a variety of techniques, including content generation and broadcasting.
So what is content generation?
Whilst good quality links are still a primary quality indicator for Google, the amount of content you have on the web and it’s quality is almost as important these days. In fact you can’t compensate for poor content simply with more back-links to your site. Content comes in two distinct forms, the content you generate and publish on your own web domain (for example this blog) and the content you generate and publish via third party channels such as external blog platforms and social media channels.
Adding content to your website
Periodic updates to your main website pages are extremely useful, not only for presenting your users with the most up-to-date information, but also to add authority and credibility for search engines. If you add high quality content to your website domain, either via additions to your main pages or through regular updates to your blog, you will see improvements in your Google rankings overall and increased traffic too.
Adding content to third-party channels
Building your brand presence on third-party channels is also essential to flag your presence to users and to build your authority and reputation with Google. If you publish credible, unique and useful information, Google will pick up on this and boost your search positions. You can publish your own content to social media channels, high-quality blogging sites in your own dental niche, online industry publications and more. If you look closely, there are quite a lot of opportunities to get your content out there; sometimes with the opportunity to add a powerful back-link too.
Doesn’t all of this take time?
Short answer – yes! Creating and distributing high-quality content as part of your digital marketing takes time and effort and this is why good SEO campaigns are no longer cheap. This is a key difference to the “dodgy” old link-building practices of old where off-shore agencies piled up anything they could find without any concern for quality.
One way of spreading the workload (and reducing the cost with your marketing agency) is to delegate some of the activity in-house. Of course you need to evaluate what resource is available but we work this way with many clients and it’s surprising what can be achieved with a little focus and some appropriate guidance. Keeping the practice blog going as well as the main social media channels will certainly pay dividends and also complement the other work your agency should be doing in the background.
Summary
The days of “fire-and-forget”, easy SEO are well and truly over and if your marketing team claims otherwise, it’s time to look elsewhere. A campaign which will move the Google needle and help to build your on-line footprint takes time, effort and planning and consequently needs a reasonable budget too.
If you’re serious about promoting your dental business sustainably in Google and would like to discuss in more detail, please call the digital marketing team at Dental Media on 01332 672548.