SEO is a vital factor for business websites to ensure visibility, traffic, and ranking. During the holiday season, you have to publish content optimized for that particular period. For instance, if you have a website selling gifts, you can publish articles with titles like ‘5 Amazing Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Parents’. In healthcare, it is not that simple. The demand for healthcare services does not magically increase over the holidays. Many people put off their appointments or procedures until after the holidays. Even so, to improve your healthcare website SEO, you have to publish content optimized for that particular season. This year, the holiday is different, and people prefer shopping and obtaining healthcare solutions by avoiding maximum physical contact. For instance, if yours is a plastic surgery practice, publishing content like “Latest painless hands-free body-contouring methods that help you recover fast” or anything like that can improve your website traffic as well as conversion rates. So, your audience who need this treatment will be recharged and ready to work on their health again.
To improve the site visibility and traffic during this period, the following tips can help:
Update relevant keywords: There are a number of tools that can help you create a list of relevant keywords to target. Google’s keyword planner lets you segment keywords by month. During the holiday season, you need to identify high-volume keywords. Tools such as Moz Keyword Planner, Neil Patel’s UberSuggest, SEMrush, and Ahrefs Keyword Explorer are the other tools that can help to find relevant keywords. As the holiday season comes with increased traffic, it is crucial that websites focus more on relevant keywords. So, check your current rankings and traffic first and integrate holiday-related keywords that fit in with your content.
Use correct internal linking structure: Rather than ranking websites as a whole, search engines rank individual pages in SERPs, so internal linking should be a vital part of your SEO strategy. Your e-commerce website may have hundreds of pages; all of it needs to get traffic apart from the home page, and here internal linking becomes important. To transfer some traffic from the homepage to your product page, you can link your homepage to that product page, you can also link blogs or informative content to the relevant product page.
Launch new products: The holiday season is an excellent time to introduce new products. If you are aware of the potential best sellers for the future holiday season, ensure that you have started writing content about these products now. The more you write about the new products in advance, the chances are more that the sales pages for these products will rank when it matters. Ensure all pages you made upfront are linked to that one main page that you will establish when the product is launched and available to buy.
Add structured data: Adding structured data, also called schema markup, communicates to search engines what your data means. When you add or change the product pages to fit the season, you should not forget to optimize them. It is because, when rich snippets are displayed in Google search results, the additional data you add is usually pulled from structured data. So, check whether you have added structured data to your product pages, because the rich snippets for the products on the results page, including ratings and prices, can give you an edge over your competitors.Image Source: https://www.trustyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Meininger-Rich-Snippet.png
Optimize for speed and mobile: It is important to check and optimize your website speed and for mobile. Today, these are the recommendations you commonly get from an SEO expert. Mobile, website speed in mobile, and website speed in general are becoming more important and it matters in everyone’s life. When preparing your website for this holiday season, it is best to re-check your mobile website and the site speed, and if needed you have to update or improve it. It is crucial for your business, otherwise, you may be losing out on many potential buyers. To begin with, you can check Google’s Core Web Vitals and use these to improve your website.
Promote on Social Media: According to a survey mentioned in an article in makewebetter.com, 50% of companies that ignore social media marketing struggle to get good ranking for their website. Having a good social media marketing plan helps you attract maximum target audience. Make sure to optimize your social media posts and be consistent in posting. It allows you to engage with potential buyers, increase the website ranking, and boost conversion rates.
SEO is vital for websites to increase their visibility and traffic all the time. During the holiday season, it is essential to focus more on publishing content for that particular period and optimize them using the right SEO techniques to improve ranking. Medical SEO experts can help you implement the right SEO strategies for your website to achieve better visibility, traffic, and ranking during the holiday season.
One of the questions a Long Island SEO company gets from its clients is how relevant SEO is. And you can’t blame them for asking, since there are many viewpoints that are splashed across the web. Some raise your anxiety level while others are more reassuring.
Will we be celebrating the death of SEO soon as a result of the disappearance of the concept of the keyword or search term? Or will SEO still be around for a long time while passing through an evolutionary stage?
There are many sites that claim “SEO is dead”, which is why people search for this phrase in the first place. These viewpoints claim that even if the practice of SEO may not be dead, it is ineffective. And there are the others that maintain the view that whatever happens, SEO will never lose its importance. Obviously there is a middle ground here, and you need to figure that out if you must implement the right SEO strategy to help your business or organization succeed in digital marketing and get its earnings on track.
SEO Isn’t Dead, It Has Just Evolved
SEO has indeed changed significantly, but that doesn’t indicate it isn’t there. It’s just that SEO and digital marketing aren’t just about keywords and links anymore. It is about providing a better user experience, which is what Google focuses on. That’s why it is important that you give users value in all that you do. That would involve quality, relevant and comprehensive content that’s also attention grabbing and share-worthy, a website layout that is well optimized for user-friendliness, a link profile that’s strong, and a strong brand. You need all these factors working together to ensure your online visibility is great and you manage to draw traffic to your site.
Providing the Optimal User Experience
Ultimately it is user experience that matters, and you must be able to provide it in a manner better than your competitors do. To do that, you need to ensure the user experience you provide is optimized for the device your potential customers could use for accessing the Internet. That involves incorporating a responsive web design that ensures your website loads well on mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop.
It’s No Longer Just Typing Search Terms
You also need to understand that search is no longer just about typing words on the search engine, it’s also about asking questions verbally with voice search. People could ask stuff randomly, such as “What’s the weather?” or “How to check blood pressure?” To ensure Google selects your answer to place directly on the search results page along with your link, you need to ensure that relevant bits of information are splashed all across the content of your web pages.
Sometimes it is video content that Google finds appropriate for certain queries. It is therefore important to incorporate informative and engaging videos and infographics in your page content, depending on the field of work your organization deals with. Make sure that your page design isn’t confusing or cluttered. You want visitors to be able to find the information they need fast, without having to scroll through paragraphs of content. Highlight relevant points in your website pages.
Google considers loading time an important element of a website’s performance, making it a vital ranking feature. While responsive design ensures your website loads equally on all devices, you need your base design to be efficient too.
Optimizing for Smart Speakers and Connected Devices
And it’s no longer safe to assume that people would search only through mobile or desktop. This is the age of connected devices, and the typical home now has its residents using smart home speakers such as Google Home and Alexa, smart watches, smart refrigerators, etc. This Internet of Things (IoT) revolution is spreading rapidly in the United States and globally too. People search by asking questions to their smart speakers. Many times, they don’t search at all but just give voice commands such as, “Play Justin Bieber” or “MLB game scores”. For information-related questions, the smart speaker reads out the most appropriate answer.
In fact, it is artificial intelligence (AI) that is powering the connected experience. AI helps understand the interaction of users with the connected devices and thereby offers them an improved experience. SEO needs to evolve to the connected experience. Businesses need to get their websites and digital marketing strategies optimized across all the smart devices to be successful in the present and the future.
To sum up, SEO is still alive. But the basic tenets have evolved significantly. SEO needs an integrated approach targeting textual and video interactional content, smart and responsive website design, typical efficient user search process, general user behavior, and connected devices.
An experienced Long Island SEO company has the resources required to design successful digital marketing strategies, make changes or even totally overhaul your SEO strategy.
Medical SEO is vital to ensure a strong online presence for your healthcare business. The rush to rank high is fierce with businesses employing the latest SEO strategies to beat the competition. Traditionally, SEO has focused on attaining the highest position possible for maximum targeted keywords and key phrases. Now, SEO is changing in keeping with users’ search patterns and consequent changes in search engine algorithms. The question is whether number one ranking is still important.
1. Rank One Is Under Some Threat, We Could Say!
People Google for anything and everything nowadays! And the last time you searched for something, did you notice the many changes in the search results page? Or did you just click on the first link that appeared there? It is likely that you might have noticed something there, and these changes in SERP are not doing much good for the organic number one ranking! For example,
While searching for some specific-field physician or hospitals, you might have noticed the ‘local 3-pack’, a collection of 3 most rated, and most relevant results for your query.
You also would have come across the ‘rich answer set’, the box that gives you a quick answer to your query.
The thin green border on white background with ‘Ad’ written on it (previously, with many other design versions), is a thing to look out for. These ads can appear anywhere in the search results page. If your ad position is ‘1’, you can be assured that yours will be the first ad on that page, but it is not necessary that the ad will be shown above the search results. Ads can appear on the top or bottom of a results page. It is very likely that the viewers see and click your ad if it is on top of the search results page.
Google Knowledge Graph
Google’s Knowledge Panel, the relatively new type of search entry, is weakening the organic number one ranking to an extent.
To improve the search experience, Google came up with Knowledge Panel, powered by Google Knowledge Graph – the large information box on the right side of your search results page. There’s no way a business or a user could request or manipulate the Knowledge Panel for their business. Google solely depends on information from SERPs, your Google My Business listing, your online presence as a whole and most importantly, your website. Hence, to have your information neatly displayed in a box on the right side of the search results page, you must ensure your online presence should be proper – a well-structured website, active social media channels, local directory listings and a 100% consistent and accurate NAP (name, address, phone).
2. Semantic Search – Its Effects on Rankings
The word semantic means ‘relating to meaning in language or logic’, and when applied to our topic, i.e. search, semantics relates to study of words and their logic. In simple words, semantic search is about improving search accuracy by understanding a user’s query through contextual meaning. To state it simply, semantic search is about natural language algorithms, synonyms and concept matching, and gives its users more interactive search results. It is about understanding the user’s intent and delivering personalized results. A typical example of semantic search is Google Knowledge Graph.
With semantic search, the relationship between keywords and phrases has become fuzzier. Google now tries to match user queries with relevant content rather than just matching the keywords in the content.
Say, you’ve written and published a piece about a smoking cessation program you attended. You’re getting a lot of links for that and these will greatly increase your website’s dominance and will be ranked for almost any related keywords, even those you were not intentionally targeting! That is, as long as you write and publish great, unique content, your rank will show up.
3. Click-through rates affects ranking
Click-through rates (CTRs) are a ‘proportion of visitors to a web page who follow a hypertext link to a particular site’. There is a correlation or a mutually beneficial effect between CTRs and higher rankings, and it goes this way: the higher you rank, the more clicks you receive; the more clicks you receive, the more relevant you appear and higher you rank! But your high rank doesn’t guarantee you a high CTR. You could receive a great deal of traffic for your chosen query but suppose your competitor in the second ranking position has a more attractive offer, they may receive a disproportionate number of clicks. You will then have to optimize your site and metadata to appeal to users.
4. Value – Both Yours and the User’s
High ranks, high CTRs and traffic are important for any brand, but the ultimate value of your SEO strategy is determined by the value of a user on your website. For example, if the users, majority of them, bounce from your website without taking any action with your brand, it won’t matter how high you are ranked. This also depends on how successful you’re branded, your conversion optimization and your UIX.
The SEO landscape has changed but it doesn’t mean you should dump your old SEO strategies. Your company could still have valuable keywords and phrases that are worth targeting as a number one position on SERPs. For the best results, it is not one single strategy that is needed but a holistic approach that considers all possible strategies and focuses on the most relevant/appropriate ones for your healthcare brand. To ensure that you benefit from such an approach, it is best to seek help and advice from a reliable SEO company that can help you achieve your goals.
Content marketing is a powerful way to gain visibility, build trust and drive traffic to your website. It is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing because that helps you attract new visitors, increase customer loyalty and boost sales. Content marketing gives you an opportunity to showcase your expertise in your industry and make people aware of the value you can provide them. A company providing professional content creation services in USA will use its expertise and experience to help you create content that will attract visitors who are interested in your products or services. Experts also keep track of the latest trends in content marketing to deliver quality solutions.
Content marketing helps build relationships with potential customers by providing them with valuable information on matters of interest to them. With the increasing integration of artificial intelligence in content generation, content writing service providers act as facilitators, leveraging sophisticated algorithms and natural language processing to produce high-quality, engaging content. The synergy between these services and AI content writing not only enhances efficiency but also ensures the production of compelling and contextually relevant content.
A successful content strategy will help drive sales and boost the growth of your company. Informative content with the right target keywords, high-quality back links etc. improves visibility on search engines. By improving brand awareness, quality content can generate leads, build credibility and trustworthiness with your target audience, and boost your SEO ranking.
Many marketers mistakenly believe that SEO and content marketing are two entirely distinct tactics. The fact is that SEO and content marketing are inextricably linked and work together to enhance search rankings. Publishing accurate, relevant and useful SEO-optimized content will increase your online visibility and boost your search engine page ranking (SERP).
Good content produces strong CTR: The more users you can persuade to click on your links, the better your chances are of ranking higher in search engine results. Google takes your CTR into consideration when determining where to place your website.
Gain high-quality backlinks: Getting high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites can improve your site ranking. Quality content aids in backlink generation. In Google’s eyes, high-quality backlinks are a sign of authority and trust. Your chances of ranking higher on Google increase with the number of high-quality backlinks you have.
Use keywords for SEO in your content-Conducting effective keyword research and incorporating the right terms in the content you publish, can improve your search engine results, attracting more traffic to your website.
Good user experience: Quality content provides a great user experience. Visitors land on your site seeking information-be it customer reviews, product prices, contacts, or store specifics. Every bit of it constitutes content. How you prioritize, present, and ensure the quality of this content significantly influences whether visitors will choose to engage further with your site and, ultimately, make the decision to convert.
While content and SEO are so connected, many marketers still struggle with leveraging both for their audiences and search engines. Understanding Google’s regularly changing policies and algorithms, following the guidelines, and learning from what has worked for others is important to ranking higher on Google.
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing is the process of marketing a brand using top quality and valuable content to retain existing customers, attract prospective ones, and build a relationship with your target market. A content marketing strategy refers to a specific set of tactics used in the development and management of content. It aims to create effective content that the audiences will respond to and help you achieve your marketing goals.
A content marketing strategy uses various media, such as blogs, videos, podcasts, and/or social media posts to achieve specific business ends. Companies also use their content marketing channels to get feedback. But regardless of the goal, the final “content mix” – whether it’s a blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter account, or all of the above – should consistently and effectively promote messaging, provide a great user experience, and enhance your business’s image.
Tips to Improve Content Marketing and SEO
10 Ways to Make Your Content Marketing More Effective
Given the importance of both SEO and health content marketing, let us look at some ways to make your marketing more effective and win more business.
Begin with Clear Goals – A successful content marketing plan begins with a clearly stated goal. Different types of marketing tactics work to achieve different goals. Some common goals include – generating brand awareness, increasing web traffic, generating new traffic, converting new customers, improving customer retention and upselling. The specific goals you choose will determine the type of content and channel for each marketing tactic. It is perfectly acceptable to have multiple goals. But as not all content will work for every objective, it is advisable to focus on creating specialized content.
Identify Your Target Audience – Start by identifying your target audience, including their demographics and their pain points. This, of course, will largely depend on the specific product or service. Basically, it is important to talk to the right people, in the right language. Ways to find this information include mining digital data, sending out surveys, and interviewing customers. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, and marketing databases are all great sources of information.
Create Targeted Topics – Create a compiling a list of potential topics that are relevant to your specific content strategy. To analyze a specific topic, determine how it will fit with your organizational goals. For instance, if a camping supplies company is seeking to educate consumers about their brand, a blog post on a topic “Top 5 Campfire-Building Mistakes” could draw in curious web searchers. This can build familiarity with the brand.
Develop the Right Content and ChannelMix – Choosing keywords and crafting top-notch content is the initial hurdle. Next, pinpointing effective distribution channels emerges. Each content type finds its niche platform: concise posts suit Twitter, while longer pieces thrive on LinkedIn or Medium. YouTube excels for videos, Instagram for images, and infographics find success across networks. A devised content strategy maps out optimal distribution across diverse channels and devices. Understanding the preferences of target audiences is crucial-some prefer mobile discount coupons, others enjoy tablet-based blog reads in bed. Researching preferred audience channels and their respective best practices is key.
Engage the Customer – As customers are at the heart of content marketing, every specific strategy designed must be geared towards their particular interests. Everything in the strategy – right from the content’s voice and tone, to the types of content created and different channels used – must work towards this end. While designing strategy to engage target audience group, it is important to keep two things in mind –
Which stories will delight target audience – Does your audience want to read about sales promotions or about success stories? Do they enjoy lists and quizzes, or how-to guides? Do they enjoy reading about science or do they prefer light cat memes?
Which stories will make the biggest impact – One of the biggest strength of content marketing is its ability to turn customers into advocates. For example, a video demonstration of a product performance can encourage people to share it with their friends, creating even more potential leads. Therefore, always think about what stories will influence target customers.
Think Small – Smaller content doses often prove more effective, avoiding overwhelming the audience. Tailor content type, length, and features to each specific piece. For a groundbreaking product update, start with a demo video on YouTube, followed by a blog interview, FAQs on the website, and enticing short tweets.
Have a Checklist in Place – Creating and executing content strategy requires plenty of time and resources. So, it’s important to develop a clear and definite plan. While creating a checklist, cover the following elements right from the start –
Content Marketing Goal – This involves having a clear understanding about the content marketing objective – whether it is to increase users, website traffic, social shares, gaining feedback. Always set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely) goals.
Current Market/Industry Analysis – Analyze the current market situation to check whether the industry is growing/shrinking, company growth (their performance analysis in the last quarter or year), competitive analysis, size of the content marketing budget and analyze how target customers are rating a brand. Base your content strategy on this.
Implement the Strategy – Consider how to put a specific strategy in place and how to allocate the required time and resources towards that strategy. Alter strategies based on your budget.
Measure the Strategy’s Effectiveness – Have analytics tools in place for all marketing channels and determine the schedule for reviewing analytics.
Build SEO-Friendly Pages – If you have built all your pages and loaded them with great content, but find people are not visiting, it could be because your content is not optimized for search. This means people can’t find or locate the content that you posted. Proper SEO ensures that a website page is “search friendly,” and shows up near the top of search engine results when users search for products and services within your industry. Including relevant keywords in the content is one of the most important measures that can be taken to build SEO-friendly pages. However, as overdoing it can prompt search engines to penalize the content and place it lower in search rankings, strike a clear balance in this area.
Measure Analytics -After you create and publish content, evaluating its performance is crucial. Look into analytics beyond mere shares, clicks, or website purchases. Seek the ‘why’: understand successful content types and pinpoint where others faltered. Analyze why certain content thrived on one channel yet failed on another. Utilize Google Analytics for invaluable insights in this phase.
Key Performance Indicators – While analyzing content performance, it is equally important to find key performance indicators (KPIs) to back it up. Again, what you measure will depend on the specific goal. Some KPIs that may be considered include – organic web traffic, sales opportunities generated, keyword ranking changes, social shares and engagement, inbound links, and cost-per-lead.
Many companies struggle in content marketing due to poor planning. Determine the optimal release timing for each piece, considering the audience and platform. Regular content creation demands significant effort. Without a content calendar, falling behind is probable. Plan ahead, preferably several months or a quarter in advance, maintaining a pipeline of ready-to-go content. This approach allows flexibility for unforeseen opportunities or emergencies, alleviating content creation pressure.
Boost your content marketing to the next level and unlock its true potential.
The future of content marketing is bright. Creating high quality, informative content is the key for improving search engine ranking. An effective content marketing strategy will improve your online visibility, boost your company’s image, and improve sales and lead to conversions. However, creating a good content strategy requires significant amount of time, effort and resources. Partnering with a reliable provider of content creation services can help you develop high quality, optimized content that can attract and engage your target audience and achieve top ranking on search engines.
Today, most individuals rely on the internet for the information they need including healthcare information. According to Jupiter Research, a Forrester Research Company, 81 percent of the users find their desired destination through search engines. It has therefore become important for all businesses including medical entities to optimize their websites to improve online presence and drive more customers. Healthcare businesses meet this requirement with medical SEO services. Among the solutions available are – search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC). Both techniques help you to get on the front page of search engines for targeted audiences. However, each of these has its respective pros and cons.
SEO is indispensable for start-up businesses to establish authority, develop a good online reputation, and increase organic traffic. This strategy is also good to obtain back links and returning visitors. SEO is a long-term activity, and results don’t show up overnight. But when it starts showing results, you are ensured consistent and quality traffic. Experts consider it a more reliable digital marketing strategy because you achieve a high rank on Google via “natural” strategies with Google recognizing your website as reputable and trustworthy. The disadvantage of PPC strategy is that internet users often ignore sponsored ads and paid advertisements. Studies show that organic results are more likely to be clicked on than paid results. PPC requires heavy investment on your part to obtain advertising space for specific keywords. To be successful with PPC, you do need some basic search engine optimization to be performed on your website.
Let us look at these two strategies and the advantages they offer.
Search Engine Optimization
There are various methods available that help to increase the usability of the website and make it appear higher in organic search results and it is a combination of technical expertise, creative elements and strategic planning to increase traffic, rankings and conversions. Although search engines are intelligent, they require some assistance to understand what the website is about and to verify its credibility. With the help of some SEO tactics you can eliminate any confusion search engines may have at the time of positioning your website for success.
SEO Advantages
Increase organic traffic: One of the main reasons for web traffic across all sites is organic traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. Designing an appropriate healthcare digital marketing strategy and optimizing your medical website helps search engines to determine the value of your website. This will improve website traffic and allow the site to be found quickly.
Trust and Credibility: Having your website at the top of organic search results significantly increases your credibility in the perception of users searching for a business like yours. When you are on Page 1 of the search results, it will portray legitimacy and trust over a business showing up on Page 3.
Long-term strategy: This strategy is different from PPC campaign, because the efforts do not stop the moment you stop paying. Instead, SEO efforts will continue to generate traffic and help your website to grow and flourish.
Position advantage: Once you have gained a good position in the organic search results, your competitors cannot simply pay more to rank above you. What matters are quality, usability and credibility of your website.
Pay-per-Click Advantages
Pay-per-click helps you to be on the first page for targeted keywords within a day. In this strategy, you run online ads and pay a fee when someone clicks on your ad. This is also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid Search. Google is the primary provider of paid search advertising via Google AdWords. It also offers Search and Display advertising where search advertising means ads seen in the search results and display refers to the ads you see when you visit other websites on the Internet.
Prominence for your ads in search results: PPC campaigns helps to display your ads prominently on search results for specific keywords related to your business. Usually ads take up the first four slots on the search results page and the first three slots on a mobile device. Getting the first slot on search results depends on your quality score and bid amount. The quality score is based on three factors – the expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page.
Customize your target audience: PPC allows you to customize the audience of your ads. The audience can be targeted using location, language, device, time or day of the week, websites visited earlier etc.
Control your budget: Budget can be controlled because of the flexibility PPC offers. This form of advertising can be a low-cost option for your business if you have a high quality score.
Data and flexibility: PPC advertising helps you to create reports and find out which strategy or techniques are working and which are not. The techniques that are not performing or performing poorly can be turned off. You can also increase budgets on campaigns that are doing well. The information in these reports can be used to obtain additional information regarding user search behaviour, which can be used in organic search efforts.
2017 PPC and SEO Statistics from Webpage FX
SEO Statistics
93 percent of online experiences start with search engines
70 percent of clicked search results are organic
Google fields more than one trillion searches per year
89% of marketers say SEO is successful
6 percent of all SEO leads close (as opposed to 1.7 percent of outbound leads)
2017 PPC Stats
Search ads increase brand awareness by as much as 80 percent
32 percent of companies use PPC to sell products directly to customers
PPC visitors are 50 percent more likely to buy than organic visitors
65 percent of all high-intent searches result in an ad click
On average, businesses earn $3 for every $1.60 spent on AdWords
PPC and SEO are two tactics used for online marketing, but it is difficult to say which one is better. If you own a small medical practice or business with little competition, then sticking to SEO is the best option whereas if you own a large business or medical practice with strong competition then SEO alone may not be enough. A proper combination of both PPC and SEO is required for any business. This will enable the two strategies to work better by strengthening and supporting each other. These measures can help medical businesses enhance their value, improve online presence and increase revenue. A reliable healthcare digital marketing agency would stay abreast of the latest SEO trends, and ensure that their clients rank high in all leading search engines and improve traffic. They would develop the right internet marketing strategy for your healthcare website considering key factors such as business goals, target audience, and budget.
Image Source: https://www.trustyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Meininger-Rich-Snippet.png
Image Source: https://www.trustyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Meininger-Rich-Snippet.png
