Optimising web content for improved search rankings

8 tips for writing content that ranks – SEO copywriting for dental websites and blogs

When writing copy for the web, what are the key elements to consider when trying make your content as search engine friendly a possible?

Just before we delve into this topic, it is worth a quick reminder about the increasing sophistication of Google and how it is more adept than ever at identifying attempts to spam the results index. Clumsy attempts to outfox Google simply aren’t worth it and invariably result in penalties. This can mean that your website is demoted in the search results by 10 pages or more, often for a number of months. In some cases, sites never recover.  So web and blog copy must be of high quality and not contravene any of the Google web publishing guidelines. With that established, let’s take a closer look at how to optimise our web and blog copy ethically and in an SEO friendly fashion….

1. Write your copy for humans first – then optimise it for search engines.

It used to be the case that “stuffing” a few extra keywords into web copy would improve you chances in Google – not anymore. Google is now extremely adept at identifying keyword stuffing so please don’t even consider it. It is important to make sure your keywords are there a couple of times but no more than that. Thereafter, just ensure you article is relevant, well written and supports your main keyword targets with other contextually relevant phrases. This is actually a great step forward in that it removes the temptation to create copy that is just written for search ranking and consequently makes it much more readable for your users. Happy, interested readers = better conversions i.e. more new patient enquiries via your dental practice website.

2. Write in-depth, substantial articles

We’ve all seen the 250 word, low quality blog articles that are keyword stuffed and designed to gain some traction in the search results – no surprises that these don’t really help much, particularly now that Google has tightened its quality criteria. What does work are longer articles that are well researched, carefully crafted and useful for readers. Google can differentiate between the good and the bad so unless you can afford to spend time on your copy, then you won’t get far. When I say “substantial” I mean a minimum of 400 words and better still, 600 – 700 or more.

3. Don’t duplicate content

I saw an article recently where a competitor implied that you can duplicate some content without risk. This was incredibly misleading. Content must be unique unless it is clearly attributed to the original author – and even then it’s risky. “Re-purposing” content is also risky unless it is done very thoroughly so that the new copy is essentially unique. Remember that Google is looking to promote the most relevant and useful content for its users so copying text is not going to get you very far. There is some evidence to suggest that a very authoritative and prominent website can get away with using non-original content and even benefit from it but this is not recommended for the average dentist’s website. So please take time to make sure that your content is unique and adds value.

One major pitfall for dentists is where a dental design company offers free treatment text and then delivers 150 words of copy that is nearly identical to that which they’ve used on many other dentists’ websites – ‘free treatment text’ sounds great but we recommend taking a closer look to ensure you know what is being delivered.

4. Optimise for “long-tail” keywords as well as your main targets

This means identifying keywords and phrases that may be less popular than the generic ones but still attract good quality traffic. Blogging against a list of well-researched, long-tail keywords is a great way to increase targeted traffic to a dental website.

5. Answer your audience’s questions

This is a smart in that it acknowledges how lots of people use search engines i.e. “how much is…?”, “how does xxxxx work?”, “where can I get dental implant?” etc. So you provide the ready-made answers for those search queries in Google.

6. Share your content socially

Use of social media channels is now essential for broadcasting content to your audience to encourage engagement and back-link opportunities. We’ve covered before how Google is identifying “likes”, “shares”, “retweets” etc as an indication of popularity and then using these signals as part of its ranking algorithm. You simply can’t ignore the impact of “social” in the search landscape now.

7. Google+ and authorship

Google tends to reward those who use its suite of products, for example you can gain some search engine ranking improvement from well structured posts in G+ and significantly improve click-through rates by gaining “authorship” status. Where you see a thumbnail picture appear against a search result, this is where the author of that content has been deemed “authoritative” by Google and awarded authorship status. You gain this status by tagging your blog and website posts and linking them through to your Google profile – after a while, if Google thinks you are worth it, authorship status will result.

8. Structure your blog and web pages correctly

This sounds like a simple task but there are a number of elements within a website and blog page that are used to ensure that the data is structured correctly. Title tags, urls (the actual http://www… stuff), ‘h’ tags, meta descriptions etc are all important to ensure that a page framework is as receptive as possible for the search engine ‘spiders’ that crawl the web to acquire content before the ‘algorithm’ ranks it. It’s not uncommon to see dental website pages and blog posts where considerable time has been spent on the content but very little on the critical structural elements that are so important for ranking purposes.

New ‘markup’ techniques are now available to construct ‘rich snippets’ which help Google to identify what your are covering in your text. Careful implementation of such snippets can improve click-through rates and ranking.

Summary

Now, more than ever, ‘content is king’ on the internet. It must be well structured, of high quality and useful for the target audience. There are a number of structural techniques to use with your website and dental blogging content to ensure that Google interprets it correctly and ranks its appropriately. It is well worth spending the extra time needed to optimise your web content to reap the benefits in the search rankings.

If you’d like to discuss this in more detail, please call us for a no-obligation discussion on 01332 672548.