What Is SEO and Why Is It Important to Your Orthodontic Practice?

When learning more about marketing, you’ll hear a lot of new terms that might not make sense at first, but they’re necessary for the success of your business. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of those terms. It’s defined as the process of designing and equipping a website so it appears higher on the list of results of a search engine, like Google or Bing.

History of SEO

As search engines were developed throughout the 1990s, engineers and developers tried to find ways to get sites ranked higher based on filling their content with keywords (also known as keyword stuffing). It was all very primitive work that led to websites with useless content ranking higher than those with helpful information.

After Google started taking over the search engine world, SEO became much more refined. Google formed its search results by looking at the whole web, not just what text appears on certain website pages. This closer examination of content rather than just keywords helped drive Google’s success and made the top search results much more reliable and helpful.

In the late 2000s, Google developed Google Analytics to measure online traffic, AdWords, and keyword analysis, which allows site developers to see what keywords are being searched in their field and determine how they can incorporate those words into their own site to rank higher.

With the relatively recent development of smart phones and the mobile device takeover, Google actually started ranking sites higher on their results pages if they were optimized for mobile. This caters to the new age of mobile devices and makes sure the very best results appear first.

How to Improve Your SEO

An astonishing 75% of people never go to the second page of search results. So obviously, you want your practice to rank within the top 10 results on the first page when people search for orthodontists in your area. But how?

Content creation plays a huge role in optimization. You have to have something for people to click on and read about to learn about you. This could be blogs, social media posts, or videos on YouTube. You want to always be publishing new content online so you have a better chance of being noticed.

Keywords are still very important. Even though Google refined how it searches through content and keywords, it still needs them to know what to look for. Using marketing programs or teams that help define what keywords you need for your site is imperative.

Check out our blog about why you should outsource your marketing team.

Once you know the keywords people are searching for in your field, whether it be orthodontists’ names, procedures they need, or a location, you have to combine those keywords with your content. This is where a skilled content writer comes in. They have to make sure the keywords are put into your new content in a useful and organic way so search engines recognize that first, you’re talking about what people are looking for, and second, you actually know what you’re talking about.

Stay on Top

As technology continues to develop and improve, so will SEO. It’s come a long way from when it started, and as marketers, we stay in touch with the current trends to make sure your site will have the best chance to be seen.

At the end of the day, everyone wants to be on top, and with SEO, your business can be on top of the search results page and on top of your local orthodontic market.