There’s always a long list of SEO action items physicians can and should be focused on. But like anything, a good portion of success often comes through paying attention to the basics.
Below are three monthly SEO tasks you should spend some time focusing on.
1). Keeping Content Up to Date
Content is king and is the overall most important part of successfully marketing yourself online. This includes developing new content, updating existing content, and pruning content.
Develop New Content
While you don’t need to publish a new post every day, being on a cadence of consistently posting will prove beneficial.
The minimum recommended dose is monthly, but bi-weekly or weekly is better.
Updating Existing Content
If you’ve had your website for some time, odds are you have quite a few pages and posts that haven’t been reviewed in a while. It’s a good practice to go through your previous posts and see if any of the content can or should be updated.
Google also sees this as you making an investment in your content and is a ranking signal.
Pruning Content
Content pruning is when you remove pages or posts that are no longer relative.
In general, if you can update the content, that is the better way to go. But sometimes, that’s not possible, and removing the content is perfectly acceptable. Just make sure you add in redirects to the appropriate active page on your website.
2). Update Internal Links
Internal linking is important for two reasons:
- You’re making navigation and reading easier for your patients.
- You’re indicating to Google that you believe your own content is valuable.
As you add new content to your site, it becomes easy to overlook older posts that could be linked to your newer ones.
Making the investment of time to go back through your old pages and posts and updating the internal links can prove to be a good SEO payoff.
3). Review Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool that can provide you with fantastic data to optimize your website and SEO results.
You don’t need to be a master of Google Analytics, but a few things you should be reviewing and thinking about are Audience Overview, Acquisition, and Behavior Flow.
Audience Overview
Audience overview provides you with an overall picture of how your website is performing.
You can see how many visitors are coming to your site, the bounce rate – how long they are staying on your site (the lower number, the better), new vs. returning visitors, and how that data compares with previous months.
Acquisition
This information is helpful to review so that you know where your visitors are coming from. This is broken into four primary categories:
- Organic search – visitors who came to your site through non-paid search
- Direct – visitors type in your URL
- Referral – visitors who come to your site by clicking on a link on another site
- Social – visitors who come to your website from one of your social media properties
Ideally, organic search should be the most significant percentage of visitor acquisition.
Behavior Flow
This data is valuable so that you can see what your most popular pages are and get a picture of how visitors are flowing through your site.
Pay close attention to the number of visitors flowing through to your Appointments page, as that should be a key performance goal for your site.
If you focus on these three monthly SEO tasks, you’ll put yourself in an advantageous position over much of your local competition.
