Introduction
Legwork's SEO strategy is simple and proven: create a website tailored to your practice, make it easy to find information and book appointments– for visitors. But that will only take you part way. The rest is up to you. Read on to learn about our transparent approach to SEO.
Visitor-centric
Google and other search engines are also in the business of serving their searchers (users) with the best results possible. Shouldn't your website do the same? Instead of being stuffed with keywords, working with questionable vendors to garner ghost traffic and other "SEO strategies", our sites naturally weave in keywords and clearly present the necessary information site visitors and search engines are looking for. Both visitors and search engines want the same thing.
High organic ranking is nearly impossible for generic terms.
Unless you're Yelp, paying for ads or own a directory site, or you're truly the best choice practice for the searcher's keywords, location, browsing profile and numerous other 1:1 search results, consistently ranking high is impossible.
Is SEO Dead?
Yes and no. Yes, in the way that the days of meticulously building your page content to feature certain words in a specific spot on the page and in a specific order. Gone are the days of paying for forum comments and links to your website and other questionable practices to garner unqualified traffic.
No, in that your site should be clear, easy to use, secure and mobile device friendly.
But Reputation is now king, especially for dentists. And your website cannot control your own reputation. Reviews and referrals sending folks to your website (and then subsequently finding what they need quickly) is most important. If your site was nothing more than your address, phone number and a book appointment form, you can rank highly; Your reputation has to precede you.
The Oprah Effect
Think of it this way: If you were featured on Oprah's show (Dr. Phil) or you're her favorite thing, your reputation is validated (and you should probably get a show, too). Just because of that one massive referral, you're set up for life. But to get Oprah's attention, you likely have to be the best and have people (patients, colleagues, the press, journals, other highly-regarded folks) talking about you and visiting your website.
Google's Perspective
Why do you use Google? Think about it for a moment. When you're searching for "pizzeria", you want the best pizza restaurant for you– and there are a number of very personal reasons why you might enjoy one pizzeria more than another. If you knew that websites were able to simply claim they were the best pizzeria– would you trust Google? If you knew that a website could add code that would make their site number 1 pizzeria search result, would you continue to use Google? You wouldn't. You'd lose all trust in Google. The same goes for dentists.
Google doesn't care about you. Google cares about Google's users. So you have to be able to prove you're the best result for their users and the search terms they are using. And your website is not the sole source of whether or not you deserve that search result position.
Reputation is king. Build relationships, connect with Oprah.
On-page SEO Strategy
On-page SEO is all the items that we do for your website as we're building it. It's everything that can be done from a purely foundational standpoint to set your website up for ensuring your site is easily indexable and understood by search engines.
Custom Content Development
Each Legwork site has the most important content written specifically for your practice to ensure your practice's unique approach to dentistry is at the forefront. Our content is written with a focus on the visitor while still ensuring your practices' unique keywords are naturally included throughout the content.
On-Page SEO Best Practices
This includes items like page descriptions, image tagging, SEO-friendly URLs, and responsive design. Our team uses an extensive 30-point checklist to ensure your site has every on-page SEO practice covered.
Google Site Crawls and Indexing
Legwork produces each website page with clean HTML markup that is fully indexable by search engines. When your site is completed, we submit your new sitemap to Google to ensure your new pages are indexed.
URL Redirects
We set up 301 redirects for any relevant pages from your old website to redirect to your new website. This ensures that visitors won’t get lost if they find an old URL in search results (or old e-mails or bookmarks) and it also transfers 90-95% of page reputation to the new page.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization plays a large role in how Google ranks websites in their search rankings. Every website that Legwork designs is optimized for mobile devices.
SSL Encryption
Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is a technology that secures the connection between your browser and the website you’re visiting. Legwork enables SSL certification on your website to help your site to load faster and comply with Google's secure connection requirements for ranking well.
Off-page SEO Services
In addition to on-page SEO strategies, Legwork provides you with a variety of services and tools included in your package to help build your SEO and Online reputation.
Reviews
Gaining more reviews will help new patients want to choose your practice and it also helps SEO. The Legwork software requests reviews from your patients automatically after their appointment in order to get you, and the public, honest feedback. We highlight some of the more recent, high-quality reviews right on your home page. We encourage our clients to reach out and request they be updated regularly.
Internal Monthly Campaigns
Legwork provides a monthly email and blog that you can choose to send to your patients. Aside from having the benefit of providing good information about dental services to your patients, the email blasts also drive a lot of traffic to your website. The increased traffic on a regular basis helps search ranking. Also updating websites with monthly blog posts shows Google your website is active. Google tends to favor websites that see regular updates.
Facebook Posts
Websites that are linked to social media accounts and are actively posting on social media platforms such as Facebook tend to rank higher than those that do not. Legwork provides you with a monthly Facebook calendar with prewritten posts to help you stay active on social media.
The rest is up to you
Your reputation, both online and offline are all up to you. Combined with our software, we can help you cultivate your patient relationships and your online presence, but a website is not magic. It doesn't do the work– it's simply the online face of your practice. We'll make sure it looks great and is accessible to your site visitors to get them the information they need quickly and on the device of their choosing.
If you want fast results and leads
Contact us for Search Marketing services.
Should you have any other questions, please reach out to us directly!