Australasian Dentist Issue 92

CATEGORY 140 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST WEB DESIGN O ne of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is also one of the most overlooked – and one you can update yourself! Something we love at Zen Dental Marketing (aside fromworking with our clients) is sharing DIY tips for dentists. Today, let’s talk about how to choose the URL for pages on your website, from the service and location pages to blog posts – your URLs are telling the world (and Google) more about your practice than you think. For those who aren’t sure, a URL is this: (No judgement here, I don’t know the names of every single one of your instruments!) Every page on your website has a URL or address, and every page is an opportunity to improve your SEO rankings. This address is critical to the website for your dental practice and its ability to generate new patient enquiries. We have selected three of our SEO best practice tips for choosing the URLs for pages on your website. 1. Don’t only write for Google – the more readable by human beings, the better It should come as no surprise that the easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. This is called accessibility and has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than today, when Google can leverage advanced data to determine what people are engaging with Vs not engaging with. Readability can be a subjective topic, but hopefully this illustration fromMoz can help: Even Google will smile at this DIY SEO hack Jason Schulz is the Director of Zen Dental Marketing, a digital agency, specialising in the dental industry. First, keywords in the URL help indicate to those who see your URL on social media, in an email, or as they hover on a link to click that they’re getting what they want and expect – above all, it’s a free trust and credibility builder. Second, URLs get copied and pasted regularly, and when there’s no anchor text used in a link, the URL itself serves as that anchor text (which is still a powerful input for rankings). Note: Anchor text is text on a page with a clickable hyperlink attached to it. It is important for your ranking on Google. Third, and finally, keywords in the URL show up in Google search results, and research has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers consider when selecting which site to click. 3. Size matters … (and smaller is better) Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don’t need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don’t worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there’s probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. Google has shown time and again, all things being equal it prefers shorter URLs to longer ones. Keeping in mind the above three points, if you have a page on your website that is about cosmetic dentistry in your practices local service area of Chatswood your URL could look like: www.practice.com.au/cosmetic-dentist-chatswood/ Take a look at all the pages on your website and see if you can’t clean up and simplify some of those links. The Zen Dental Marketing team is an expert group of digital marketing strategists dedicated to providing customised services to the dental industry. With proven success, our promise is to look after growing your practice so you can focus on running it! Zen Dental Marketing is marketing made easy (for you). We work with you to gain an understanding of where you are and where you want to be, and act as your drivers of growth and success. With packages and customised services to suit all needs and budgets, Zen Dental Marketing is your industry-specific marketing solution. u [Source: Moz.com, 2015] The requirement isn’t that every aspect of the URL must be absolutely clean and perfect, but that at least it can be easily understood and, hopefully, compelling to your prospective patients. 2. Keywords in URLs: still a good thing It’s still the case that using the keywords you’re targeting for rankings in your URLs is a solid idea. This is true for several reasons.