5 SEO Practices to Avoid
In the world of digital marketing, best practices are always evolving. Increasing your ranking in SERP’s is a constant concern for any dental practice, but certain outdated SEO practices can do more harm than good to your page rankings. Helping potential patients to find you using search engines is one of the best ways to generate leads, so staying up to date with how the most successful websites conduct their SEO is an important part of any online marketing strategy. Here are several SEO strategies to avoid going forward.
Content Overload
The advent of content marketing has led many brands to believe that more content is always better, but that is not always the case. Written content that exists solely to boost the amount of text and keywords on your site is not adding much value for readers, and therefore should be avoided. Instead, each blog article, webpage, email, and other piece of content should be conceived with a definite purpose in mind. For example, a blog about cosmetic dental procedures works as part of an overall content marketing strategy if your practice is trying to attract patients for these procedures.
Keyword Stuffing
Google penalizes sites with too much keyword-focused, repetitive content. Additionally, content with too many keywords at the expense of content quality deters users from engaging further. For these reasons, it is best to organically incorporate the keywords you are targeting into your site’s written content. Context is a major consideration when search engines rank sites that contain certain keywords, so make sure that your dentist practice website aims for a great user experience over keyword saturation.
Too Many Landing Pages
A landing page has a very specific purpose: gathering leads for your subscription list or otherwise encouraging visitors to take an action such as downloading an eBook. Often, websites create a landing page for every keyword they are trying to rank for in the hopes of showing up on search engine result pages. Rather than creating multiple pages, it is better for UX and SEO purposes to create a single landing page that incorporates all the desired keywords in a natural way. This creates a more user-friendly experience and ultimately is better for page rankings.
Poor Quality Guest Blogs
Guest blogging is an attractive strategy for a number of reasons. It removes the burden of content creation, provides a variety of voices for readers, and creates valuable backlinks to other high-quality websites. However, one problem with this strategy is that guest blogs are often spammy and unoriginal. Guest bloggers should be thoroughly vetted to make sure they are knowledgeable and reputable members of your field.
Link Spam
A major part of how your site ranks has to do with the sites that link to yours—links build credibility, which boosts your search rankings. These backlinks are a major factor when it comes to your SEO, so make sure that all the links included are relevant and high-quality. Be sure that the sites you contact in linkbuilding efforts are authoritative and have a high volume of traffic.