What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It involves working on your website in a way that improves its digital presence (also known as visibility) on search engines. Google is by far the largest search engine, so SEO tends to focus on it.
Why is SEO Important for Businesses?
As a marketing channel, SEO is important for businesses because it enables them to tap into a wealth of relevant and engaged prospective customers. In its essence, SEO ensures your digital presence can work effectively for you. For healthcare practices and hospitals, this means when people are searching for help, you can be there.
The great aspect about SEO is that it works in conjunction with other disciplines (product, development, content teams) and marketing channels (e-mail, social, paid) because of its work on optimizing web content for visitors and search engines.
How Does SEO Work?
There are a few things we need to talk about first to understand how SEO works.
The Focus on Google
Google is by far the most popular search engine. We see an 83.84% market share for Google, whereas the second most popular search engine, Bing, has 8.88% market share (source).
| 83.84% | |
| Bing | 8.88% |
| Yahoo | 2.58% |
| Others | 4.70% |
You want to understand how Google works and its latest developments, given how they own an insane amount of market share. It’s no wonder “Google” can also be spoken as a verb!
How Google Makes Money
Google makes money from its advertisers. Though there are various advertising and related services, the bulk comes from advertisements from searches. By providing the most relevant search results for free, then using algorithms to match ads with the search results, advertisers can market their businesses and Google can take its share by charging the clicks.
With the lion’s share of the market, advertisers work hard to figure out the best way to capitalize on this advertising channel known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), or specifically Google Ads.
| 2022 | To be announced |
| 2021 | $257.6 billion (41% increase) |
| 2020 | $182.5 billion |
What Google Wants
Google wants SEO practitioners and webmasters to implement the best practices they have to provide the most relevant search results. To accomplish this, to the best of every SEO practitioner’s interpretation, there are key objectives of their Quality Raters Guidelines (big guide, we know – 170 pages and growing). Ultimately, it boils down to two matters:
- Serving searcher intent
- Meeting page quality guidelines
The 4 Components of SEO
When it comes to SEO work, there are 4 components we break down SEO work:
- Technical SEO
- Content
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
Technical SEO
Technical SEO deals with the efficient and effective tuning of website and web page performance. You want your website to load quickly, for different device screens, and do so with no errors in experiences on your website. This means no broken links to broken pages or pages with terrible user experience.
Content
When we think about content, we think about coverage and in terms of the buyer’s journey. You want the content to be written in a way that addresses the intentions a visitor may have. For example, if someone wants to find information on how to pick the best psychologist, then you can include insights for conducting due diligence, questions to ask, and what the person needs to consider when deciding on the right psychologist for them.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is making the elements on your web pages that have an impact on your search engine rankings better. This involves having the right title and heading, website structure, link architecture, structured data markup, and so on. The tweaks we do for on-page SEO help search engines better understand, categorize, and rank your web pages.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is taking action to better affect the elements outside your website that have an impact on search engine rankings. This involves earning new links, brand and author mentions, proper Google Business profile, and business reviews. With off-page SEO, search engines can recognize the popularity, authority, and trust of your websites to judge how to rank you.
Understanding The SERPs
To do proper SEO, you need to understand the search engine result pages (SERPs). This means noticing details such as:
- what rich results show up in different keyword channels;
- what search queries (keywords) people use to find what they need;
- what SERP competitors have as content that is ranking well in those keyword channels; and
- what it would take to outrank those competing web pages.
What SEO Isn’t
Building a digital presence where your potential patients and clients appear sounds brilliant. However, SEO on its own is not an end-all and be-all to growing your practice.
Solution To Poor Business Conduct
Unhappy customers are bad for business. SEO can lead patients and clients to you. However, if your practice has trouble converting prospective patients and clients, no amount of new business can help. There are some theories how Google detects this. Once they notice, they start rewarding less visibility for the business.
All About Rankings – Sort Of
Though rankings tend to be monitored and focused on, strategy is equally important. Do you want to focus on bringing in visitors who are searching about how to whiten their teeth at home or drive visits from those searching for teeth whitening services? It could be both depending on the strategy and need, such as building greater authority around the topic of teeth whitening.
For Marketing Never-Before-Heard Products or Services
SEO, in its essence, is tapping into the demand of search engines. If there is no one searching for an unknown product or service, SEO won’t be of any use; you are better off focusing on other marketing channels.
SEO is Free
Ultimately, SEO practitioners need to have an understanding of numerous disciplines: engineers (finely tuned website), content (well-written, quality work), public relations (relationships with external stakeholders), and we can’t forget about the search engine latest developments, too! All of this requires an intense amount of work hours, coordination, and skill to pull off excellent search engine optimization work.
How do I learn SEO?
You can learn SEO in several ways. We believe it’s important to begin with listening to what buzz is going on in the space, followed by taking the time to study great guides written by others.
Daily SEO News & Updates
- Google Search Console Blog
- Bing Search Blog
- Search Engine Journal
- Search Engine Land
- Search Engine Roundtable
Best SEO Guides
- How to Get Your Website on Google
- Google’s SEO Starter Guide
- Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Ahrefs
- SEO Basics by Semrush
What Is SEO FAQ
Is SEO right for my business?
Are your business services and products something that people commonly search for? You can verify this by doing searches yourself to check how many similar businesses there are near you.
Alternatively, see how many search results there are from common queries. For example, if you are a dentist, you can search for “dentist near me”, “teeth cleaning”, and “pediatric dental care” for ideas.
SEO is great for businesses to tap into existing search demands, especially on Google. For healthcare providers, this tends to be the case.
What is SEO in simple terms?
SEO in simple terms is making your website work harder for you. We accomplish this by making changes to the website that better suit what people are searching for, and making it clear that our website is indeed the more relevant and better choice. By performing better in terms of technical, content, on-page, and off-page SEO aspects, our businesses can be rewarded with better visibility on search engines.
How long does SEO take to work?
SEO results tend to be measured in months or years. No one knows the exact reason why – search engine algorithms tend to be sophisticated. However, with fierce competition investing in SEO, billions of pages on the web to sort, and measures to prevent the gaming of search results, it’s no wonder preventative measures are in place; search engines need time to better understand your website, and to serve only the most relevant and accurate results.
What is search intent?
Search intent is the purpose of someone looking something up on search engines. There are 4 types of intent:
- Informational: searches for information, such as “what are flu symptoms” or “how to get the flu shot”
- Navigational: searches for specific location or website, such as “walk-in flu shots in my city” or “flu shots at [store name]”
- Transactional: searches for specific products or services, such as “flu vaccine appointment”
- Commercial investigation: searches to learn more about transactional opportunities, such as “best FDA-approved flu shot” or “which flu vaccine should I get?”
We can see there can be overlapping intentions, and that is okay. The reason we care about search intent is to ensure we are considering what an SEO campaign is about and producing the right content suitable for the audiences of a particular keyword channel.
What is website authority?
When we think about “authority”, we refer to the likelihood and ability to rank content as it is published. When a website has reached a certain level of authority, we can see new content published and can immediately start climbing the rankings. It isn’t known how this “authority status” is achieved, but the generally accepted theory is to have links from other trusted and authoritative websites, have a lot of links from different ones, and ensure you are doing an excellent job serving quality content relevant for its intended audience.
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