Making Your SEO Efforts Worthwhile

SEO Ranking and Keywords

When you are doing your SEO, don’t allow yourself to be tempted by  just “high rankings”. You have to ask the questions “high rankings for WHAT search terms?”. It’s  low class SEO is to find the least competitive and least important keywords and offer to make a website to rank #1 for that. You may have a website like “rollingoakdental.com” and with very little work you can boast that this website is ranked #1 for the keyword “Rolling Oak Dental” or “Dental Clinic in Rolling Oak”. Which seems peachy and fine but in fact is not. 

The problem is that when you go ahead and check traffic on these keywords, you find next to nothing at all. In fact, I ran a check on those search terms using some internet advertising I was running and found that search term example showed up 55 times out of 3,000 different searches. So that’s a problem. It means that you are spending money doing SEO on your website to get ranking for terms that will never result in any significant increase in traffic on your website. 

I do mostly dental websites but it’s the same for all websites – traffic is all that matters. You need visitors and if you are paying for SEO that is not resulting in an increased level of traffic – you are throwing your money away. Or if you are doing the work yourself, you are throwing your hard work away.

For this reason it is really important that you have some kind of keyword research done before you start doing SEO.  The simpler and broader the word, the more traffic it will pull and the more competition there is. Very broad words are highly competitive and may result in a long runway before you see any effect of your SEO.  So finding keywords that are not too competitive but which will still provide a decent increase in traffic is incredibly important. If you are embarking on an SEO program for your dental office make sure you see the keyword resarch before you start. I am a San Antonio SEO consultant and have done search optimization on quite a few websites in central Texas and I always do detailed keyword research before I start any search engine optimization.

The other important factor for SEO is to set very specific goals. If you are not interested in brand awareness or number of visits you need to know this before you start doing keyword research. Some websites live on advertising and care only about number of visits. A dental clinic or other medical practice is not really interested in how many people are visiting the site, the interest is in inquiries.  And again, it is possible to waste SEO on keywords that do not result in people inquiring about your services. So another step before embarking on a SEO campaign is to ask yourself this question: “Will this list of keywords result in new patients calling my office for dental services?”. 

How High In The SEO Rankings Before I See More Traffic?

A troublesome aspect of SEO is that if you are going to invest anything in improving your website’s ranking, you really need to be willing to go all the way. If your website currently ranks number 150 for the search term “San Antonio dental clinic” then getting to number 100 will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.  You will get the same number of visits – zero or close to it.   Same when you go from 100 to 50. You should see perhaps a tiny volume of visits when you go from 50th place to 30th.  It is only when you reach the second page of google will you see anything even worth mentioning in terms of traffic.

Studies over many years have never changed. You don’t see any significant traffic until you are placed on the home page of the search results. And then, you only start getting an important percentage of the traffic when you are in first, second or third place.

So if you are not willing to go the whole distance, don’t start the race. SEO is not about simply improving your position- it is about dominating in search. Then and only then do you reap the rewards of your hard work.