Imagine that you have a clinic — and maybe you already do.
You paid good money to doll up your interior, filled the space with nice furniture and stocked it with the newest equipment. However, it has no signboard, no defining features and no windows. Some patients, after checking you out online, may even come in thinking you are a GP but realise you are actually a dentist!
Of course, everyone knows the importance of the shop front, but in 2020 and beyond, if your website is not optimised for search engines, it’s as good as running a shop with no signboard at the bottom of the digital sea.
As a consumer yourself, you should know that a brand with a unique identity, a well-placed signboard and a well-understood business is not only going to attract more attention but attract the right customers/patients.
So, what is search engine optimisation (SEO)?
SEO is about making it easy for search engines like Google to find, crawl and categorise your website. When your website is optimised for search engines, you can cut through all your competitors’ noise and get your patients to discover you.
If only Homer Simpson was educated enough to understand SEO. (Source: The Simpsons)
Effective SEO increases the quantity and quality of your web traffic by making your website more visible to search users. Doing so can improve your website’s organic traffic, or traffic not driven by paid ads. In short, it’s “free”!
SEO can be used to target different types of content, such as,
The process can be complicated and arduous, however. Generally, websites are optimised by:
If your clinic employs or is thinking of employing a coherent digital marketing strategy, SEO must not be neglected. Any sound digital marketing strategy involves the intent to convert online traffic into customers. Spending money to create a website simply to check the “Am I Online?” box is bad business sense in the 21st century.
What search engines are, in simple words
We all know what search engines are. You might have even used it to discover this blog post.
Search engines are run by sophisticated software. With a set of complex algorithms, search engines bring you your search results by:
Search engine algorithms are interested in your website’s components, calculating its quality score based on website elements such as:
We’ll go into greater detail on how these affect your SEO performance later.
Top 5 Benefits of Using SEO
SEO generates not only leads but GOOD leads
A sound SEO strategy helps search engines to understand what you are about and refer you to people it thinks you are most relevant to. If you are a luxury goods/services provider and Google knows it through your web content and analytics, you are more likely to be referred to leads whom Google knows belong to the higher income bracket.
SEO leads are more likely to convert to become customers
Organic users that discover your website from specific search queries are usually high on intent. A user searching for dermatologists in Singapore is very likely to want to get treatment. According to Search Engine Journal, 14.6% of leads from SEO successfully become customers while outbound leads (e.g. cold calling) convert a meagre 1.7% of them.
SEO can help you better manage your digital marketing costs
You should know by now that advertising is not a cheap affair. If your specialty is a highly competitive one, e.g. dentistry as compared to brain surgery, adwords associated with them are going to cost more. Since SEO targets unpaid search leads with high intent, not only will you not have to spend on cost-per-clicks, but these leads are more likely to convert!
SEO leads are more interested in what you have to offer
According to statistics by HubSpot, 70-80% of users focus on organic results. Besides, people looking for things online are more likely to look for it physically. 50% of mobile search users visit the business’ physical location stores within the day.
SEO builds brand awareness
This is straightforward. The more easily found you are, the more prominent you will be and the more well-known you will be. Hopefully for the right reasons, of course.
The role of SEO in digital marketing
The internet is like a giant Times Square — how will you cut through all the noise and emerge on top? (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Since digital marketing is about improving your website’s visibility, SEO can be employed as part of the strategy. Marketing in the digital world is not much different from that of the real world. If your marketing goal is to increase brand visibility, one of the best ways is to set up shop in a location in a mall with good traffic. You may even want to make sure your logo is prominent and eye-catching.
That is how SEO is in digital marketing. There are many subsets in digital marketing, and they include:
In short, digital marketing is about growing and sustaining the overall online presence of your brand while SEO is one way of getting there.
The SEO process
Search engines crawl website data using a software called crawlers, or popularly termed as spiders. Google calls them Googlebots, but here, we’ll refer to all of them as simply crawlers. As mentioned earlier, crawling allows search engines to acquire data about your website.
Take note: search engines do not dispatch crawlers every day to look for newly created pages or updates to existing pages. In fact, they may not visit your webpage for weeks.
Some things are “un-crawlable”, such as:
So, if your website has many of these elements, you should perform an SEO analysis to see if they are negatively affecting the crawlers’ abilities. Anything that cannot be crawled will not be indexed by search engines.
Using Google Search Console to request for their crawlers to index the page.
After your website is crawled, the information is stored, or indexed, in a database. This information is then retrieved when a user searches a particular keyword or keyphrase. For example, if you run a dental clinic in Singapore that offers dental surgeries and orthodontic treatment, and Google understands that from your crawled data, Google will retrieve your website and present it as a search result to someone searching for “dental Singapore”.
Of course, with nearly 1.8 billion websites in the world, this is not within a human ability. It is, however, just another day in the life of a search engine. Nonetheless, your website needs to be correctly optimised to your business objectives so search engines can understand your content.
The Google Search Console is a free tool by Google for website owners to track their website’s search performance and alert Google’s crawlers to check for new updates.
Search work
On Google search page 1: Google thinks our guide to seeing a dentist in Singapore is very relevant!
Whenever a user submits a search query, the search engine uses the search term (e.g. “dentists in Singapore) and contrasts it with the data it has collected from indexed pages (e.g. dentist, dental, teeth, gum, Singapore, SG). There are possibly millions of pages that share the same search phrases as yours, so the search engine compares your relevance score with other pages to determine where you should be displayed in the search results.
Search algorithms
When a search query comes through, search algorithms go through a database of stored keywords and URLs that they think are relevant to the searched keywords. They then predict possible answers the search user wants and retrieve the websites that feature the answers.
There are 3 types of algorithms, all part of a larger algorithm:
Each type works on different data components that make a webpage, including:
As each search engine designs these algorithms differently, they may generate different results with the same search query. Besides, search engines regularly update their algorithms; it is crucial that you stay up-to-date and adapt your website accordingly if you want to win the SEO game.
In conclusion, SEO is as dynamic as the business world
The business world is fast-moving, high-stakes and cutthroat. So is the internet where information can become obsolete in less than an hour and where your competitors number in the thousands to millions.
There is no formula in SEO that will always stay relevant; the only constant in SEO is that it is always changing and SEO work never ends. Search engines are always observing what users like and dislike, which sites they visit, how they respond to content, what other websites are doing and many more.
Here are 5 basic steps to optimise your website:
Yes, all this is a lot of work! However, if you can assemble the right people to boost your SEO game, whether they are your internal SEO experts, external partners and affiliates, you stand a good chance at winning the SEO game.