We Are the Best Dental Practice – Why Are We Listed On Page 5 With A Google Search???
We hear statements like this quite often. Your dental practice is well-known to be number one. You’ve got the best dental experts, all of whom graduated from prestigious schools, and the dental media consistently names your practice the best in your city.
Why, then, does Google list your dental office on page 5 and bury it in its search results? Who and what is behind this ranking? Don’t these mysterious web search gurus read your dentists’ resumes or your office’s ranking in the dental magazines and newspapers?
The truth is that no person at Google ranks dental offices — or companies, restaurants, law firms or other subjects. Google’s rankings are totally automated—no humans intervene to sort out the rankings.
Instead, Google and other search engines use complicated algorithms to decide search order results. When a user initiates a search, the search engine compares millions and millions of web pages to determine their “relevancy” based on about 200 factors to the specific key words or search term(s) used.
These factors include page content and meta title and tag information, the number and “authority” of links to the page, and many other super-secret factors. The exact factors used, and, more importantly, the weight accorded to each of these factors, are proprietary trade secrets of the search engine companies Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — and they’re guarded more closely than Coca-Cola’s secret recipe. This explains why the same search in different search engines usually leads to a completely different list of results.
As a result, the website of a newly opened dental office who has yet to help a patient, may rank higher in the Google search results than that of a long-established, top-quality dental practice with a long list of happy patients and years of existence. When reading a dental practice’s short description on the Google search results page, potential patients likely won’t have any idea which dentist has more experience. In fact, a prospective patient may click on the link for the new dental office, like what he or she sees on the website, and set up an appointment.
It is more important that your dental office receive high search results rankings for search terms prospective clients use when searching for a dentist than to appear at the top of a search results page for a search done to find the “best dentist” in a particular city.
How can that be? Think about it this way. When potential patients search for a dentist, their search terms tend to be about the specific problem they have, such as “Milwaukee dental hygiene”, not “best dentist in Milwaukee.” Thus, the focus of your dental practice’s search engine optimization (“SEO”) program should be on the key search terms that your prospective patients actually use.
At Dentist-WebSolutions, our search engine optimization program for dental practices centers on identifying the key search terms patients are likely to use and creating optimized web pages focused on those terms.
Author: Gene Greiner, www.dentist-websolutions.com
Email questions to info@dentist-websolutions.com
Visit us at www.dentist-websolutions.com today!
www.dentist-websolutions.com
600 Davis Street
Evanston, IL 60201
Tel.: 847-864-4229
Read more →
Simplicity is the Key for Dental Web Design
