1. Perform Competitive Research & Find Relevant Keywords

Look at your competition to see what their successes and mistakes are. See if any successful design elements or body copy tone that can be tailored to your unique company brand. By researching their negative reviews, you can avoid any obvious mistakes that have already been done by other companies your similar industry. Also use Google’s Keyword Planner to discover search engine friendly keywords you can use in your website’s headings and body copy. Incorporating relevant keywords will not only separate you from the competition but increase your value to Search Engines like Google and your potential clients searching from products or services like yours. 

2. Optimize Your Website’s Content for Mobile

Most searches come from users on their phone. Google also uses mobile-first indexing that prioritizing mobile-friendly design. If you want rank higher on SERPs, your website must be responsive and load fast. While most web templates come already responsive, it is still wise to check on your phone to see if any content or photos gets cut off or if your website loads slow. You may need help from a digital marketing agency if you can’t fix any cut off content on your own or if the template you chose is buggy and loads slowly. 

3. Set up Google Search Console

 Google Search Console is a tool that allows you to submit your website to be indexed, as well as view data about your website’s traffic and performance. This is useful for successful long-term SEO plans, digital marketing, and performance of your website. It allows you to view items such as user click-through rate and other performance elements. You can also keep track of any site errors that will help keep your website functioning optimally and prevent unsafe web practices. The data you gather will help you create comprehensive plans that don’t waste your money and maximize you ROI. 

4. Create a Sitemap and Submit It 

A sitemap contains a list of all the pages on your website in a single file. If you have a sitemap, this helps search engines index your website quicker and easier. Google has a tool that can help you create one or you can ask a digital marketing firm to help. It is also wise to include a link to your sitemap in your website’s footer. Once you submit your sitemap using web master tools, search engine crawlers will find your website and index for SERPs. The quicker this can be done more likely you will increase the rank of your website, thus gain more users and clients.

5. Add Structured Data Markup 

Structured data markup is a code that you can add to your website’s HTML code. It is used to help search engines understand the information on your website. This helps when trying to attract organic traffic. Structured data is a standardized format for classifying page content. For example, on a recipe page: what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, etc. This will help your website become more engaging to your users leading to rich results. The more interaction users have with our website, the more value search engines register it as and keep it high on SERPs. 

Let us include a SEO plan with your new website. Call 248.528.3600

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1. Use Appropriate Medical Keywords 

Make sure you target the correct keywords for your industry. Start with the medical product or services you offer, then use Google’s Keyword Planner to help find the best keywords to incorporate into your content. Compare your results to what is and isn’t being search by users. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs! This is a spammy tactic that will penalize your website. Instead, be specific. Use short-tail keyword in titles and long-form keywords into your body copy. Make sure your body copy is relevant, readable, and simple enough to understand. A lot of medical medicines or ingredients like to use long Latin words, don’t be afraid to mention their common names in your content as reference. 

2. Add A Lot of Content Pages

Other industries usually have to cut back on the amount of content they include, but for medical websites it is the opposite. Include high-quality information that goes into detail on how your product or service will help make your target audiences lives’ better or easier. The more long-form content you include, the more likely Google will recognize you as an authority and thus increase your ranking. Ideas on how to increase your content length are:

• Add a blog page
• Side effects section
• How-to-use section 
• When-to-use section
• Symptoms section
• Ingredient section
• When-not-to-use section
• How it will improve your life description 
• Meet the doctors page 
• About the manufactures page 
• FAQ section or page 
• What to ask your doctor section 

3. Optimize Visual Elements 

Include photos and graphic elements to make your pages more interesting to look at. If you can include a video, even better! Infographics are also an underrated visual medium that could display useful information for your users. This will increase organic traffic and encourage visitors to stay longer on your website. Increased view time tells search engines that your web pages have valuable content that is useful to users. For images, make sure you don’t forget to include accurate alt text and meta descriptions for Google crawlers and e-readers.

4. Optimize Website Speed, Security & Mobile Friendliness 

Website speed, security, and mobile friendliness are all ranking factors. First, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your current site speed. Since you have a lot of content, your page might load slower than others, however, you still want in to be quick enough for users to know that your website is active. A few ways to increase speed is to:

• Have a performance-optimized hosting provider
• Compress images
• Reduce URL redirects 
• Cache your web pages
• Enable browser caching 
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Eliminate unnecessary plugins
• Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files

Second, check the security of your website. Use an SSL certificate to encrypt your website and ensure visitor data is protected from hackers. Also check for spam links in existing or old content. Always keep your website software, apps, and plugins updated (read more on keeping your website secure here). Lastly, ensure your website is mobile friendly and responsive. Check on phones, iPads, and desktops to see if your website is functional. Most CMS, like WordPress, have templates already optimize for responsive design, but if your site is still running on PHP you may want to hire a digital marketing firm to update the your web design. 

5. Offsite Factors 

Check your social media accounts, especially if you have a plugin linked to your website. Make sure the passwords are strong. Clean up comments that contain spammy links. Block suspicious accounts that want to follow you. Use social media platforms as a link-building tool that leads to longer form content on a landing page. You can also use social media to interact with clients by asking important questions. Then, you can incorporate their questions into your content. Not only does this make it so your audience feels heard, but Google will also see you as a direct authority.  

6. Local SEO

Have a Google My Business profile. This can by created through Google Maps. It is important to build local traffic, especially if your business relies on in-person experiences. You want your website to pop up in the top 10 results when they ask “(medical practice, drug store, med supplies, etc.)  near me”. Fill out the following information: 

• The business categories
• Your primary phone number
• The business description
• Your hours of operation (and any seasonal hours)
• Your address or service area.
• Google reviews of your business
• Photos of your business and products or services

Let us help with your medical business’ SEO. Call 248.528.3600.

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Top: Drive Traffic & Awareness

The top goal of your content should be to drive traffic and awareness to your company’s website, social media, or local storefront. Make your ideal customer aware of the problem your product or service solves. This can be done with online advertising, direct email marketing, instructional video marketing, and SEO. 

Middle: Generate Leads 

Turn awareness and engagement of the user into qualified leads to pass to your sales team. Use content that can only be accessed by a user if they provide personal information such as name, email, phone #, etc. This can come in the form of a contact forms or email subscriptions boxes. Unlike the top, this content coverts traffic already gained into leads that your salesperson or team can follow up on and start a conversation. 

Bottom: Convert Leads to Sales 

The audience is engaged, you provided valuable content, collected emails, and given your sales team something to take action with. So, what now? You create supplementary content that team can use and that makes potential customers feel confident in their purchase. This content is usually case studies, specific use-cases of your product, free trials, or statics showing the benefits of your product. This type of content helps potential clients feel that your business is reputable and that their purchase will not be wasted. 

 Keys of Content Marketing Success

 Understand the Buyer’s Journey

• Awareness
  • Identify the problem
  • Conduct online research 

• Consideration
  • Explore solutions
  • Research Vendors 
  • Determine relevant strategies 

• Decision 
  • Create a shortlist of solutions 
  • Assess the ROI of each
  • Make purchase decision 

 Tailor Your Funnel the Buyer’s Journey

• Create Content for Each Stage:
  • Top: SEO, Blog Content, Videos, YouTube channel, How-To Content, Webinar Snippets, Social Media ads, Targeted Web ads, Direct Email, Cold Email/Outreach.
  • Middle: Case Studies, Templates, Drip Campaigns, Newsletters, Webinars/Events, White Papers, GooglemyBusiness Profile
  • Bottom: Customer Stories/Testimonials, Competitor comparisons/spec sheets, Trials, Demos, Sales Deck. 

 Customer Retention 

This phase is often forgot, but very important for your business to stay relevant and successful. Your sales, customer service, support team, and marketing team all need to be working to maintain the customers attention. Share insights and resources into your product or services that will help customers succeed and create behind-the-scenes content from your company to keep the client engaged and part of your business. This strengthens the relationship and creates community around your product or service. 

Create a content funnel with us today! Call 248.528.360 

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Keyword Research

Google Autocomplete can be a useful keyword research tool. Type in a keyword that is relevant to your niche or target market and look at the predictions. You will discover valuable long-tail keywords. Then, use an SEO tool like Ahrefs, or Moz Pro to analyze those keywords and identify ones that are worth going after. If you don’t like any of the predictions that you got, type in your keyword, then just go through every letter of the alphabet to see what predictions come up. If you are having a hard time using these SEO tools, hire an agency to assign you a consultant to help you understand your findings and obtain the correct keyword you need. 

Google Can Fill in the Blanks

Tom Dupuis from Online Media Masters suggests using the underscore character “_” in a phrase so that Google would complete it. “Instead of having Google complete only the last part, this can show you a better selection of keywords depending on what type of phrase it is,” explains Tom.

For example, type the keyword “web design _ agency” and these first 3 suggestions pop up: “website design agency near me”, “web design and marketing agency”, and “web design and digital marketing agency near me”. Experiment with the underscore’s position to see what new Google Autocomplete predictions show up. You could also try both the singular and plural forms of the same keyword to see if it leads to different Google Autocomplete predictions.

Online Reputation Management

A useful tool for researching results about your branded terms, such as company, executive, or product names. Google Autocomplete can present a serious threat to your public image of your company and brand if an unflattering search term appears in the predictions using your brand terms. You have several options to try to prevent this from happening:

• Address the Problem

If the negative prediction refers to something true, fix the problem. Don’t try to hide mistakes, this can hurt trust amongst your customers. The resolution won’t make the autocomplete issue go away immediately, but if the problem is solved, people will eventually forget about it and stop searching for it, feeling that you handled the issue responsibly. As the volume for that search term goes down, it ultimately will drop off the prediction list.

• Work on Your Brand Image

If the prediction is about an incident, you can help people forget whatever happened faster by giving them something positive to focus on. First, make sure to reassure existing loyal customers that this incident was a one-time thing, and you are working on preventative plans for the future. Then, you can feature these loyal customers on your website, do a giveaway, or organize an event as a “thank you” for sticking buy your company during tough times. Directly engaging with your customers on various social media platforms can go a long way towards creating a positive brand image as well. It reassures the public that you are not running away from your problem and are still willing to interact with them. 

Other Ways to Use Google Autocorrect Research:

• Uncover Key Words for Local SEO
• Create a User-Friendly E-commerce Website
  • Shows which categories are most popular
  • Uncover popular brands
  • Get ideas for your FAQ page
• Content Inspiration:
  • Key term for who, what, where, how, why of your business
  • Use action verbs
  • “Key Term and…”

Use Google Autocomplete in your SEO marketing strategy today. Call 248.528.3600

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1. Total Clicks.
2. Total Impressions.
3. Average CTR (click-through rate).
4. Average position.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times a website appeared in the search results. If a user doesn’t have to click a link to see the URL, it counts as an impression. In addition, if a URL is ranked at the bottom of the page and the user doesn’t scroll to that section of the search results, it still counts as an impression. High impressions are great because it means that Google is showing the site in the search results. 

Clicks

The clicks metric shows how often users clicked from the search results to the website. A high number of clicks in addition to a high number of impressions is good. A low number of clicks and a high number of impressions is less good but not bad. It means that the site may need improvements to gain more traffic.

Average CTR

The average CTR is a percentage representing how often users clicked from the search results to the website. A low CTR means that something needs improvement to increase visits from the search results and a higher CTR means the site is performing well. 

Average Position

Average Position shows the average position in search results the website tends to appear in. An average in positions 1 to 10 is great. While an average position in the twenties (20 – 29) means that the site is appearing on page 2 or 3 of the search results. This isn’t too bad. It simply means that the site needs additional work to give it that extra boost into the top 10. Average positions lower than 30 could (in general) mean that the site may benefit from significant improvements. It could be that the site ranks for many keyword phrases that rank low and a few very good keywords that rank exceptionally high. It may be an indication of a content gap on the website, where the content that ranks for certain keywords isn’t strong enough and may need a dedicated page devoted to that keyword phrase to rank better.

Performance Report Dimensions

Scrolling down to the second part of the Performance page reveals several of what’s called Dimensions of a website’s performance data. There are 6 dimensions:

1. Queries

Shows the top search queries and the number of clicks and impressions associated with each keyword phrase.

2. Pages

Shows the top-performing web pages (plus clicks and impressions).

3. Countries

Top countries (plus clicks and impressions).

4. Devices

Shows the top devices, segmented into mobile, desktop, and tablet.

5. Search Appearance

This shows the different kinds of rich results that the site was displayed in. It also tells if Google displayed the site using Web Light results and video results, plus the associated clicks and impressions data. Web Light results are results that are optimized for very slow devices.

6. Dates

The dates tab organizes the clicks and impressions by date. The clicks and impressions can be sorted in descending or ascending order.

Keywords

The keywords are displayed in the Queries as one of the dimensions of the Performance Report. The queries report shows the top 1,000 search queries that resulted in traffic. Some of those queries display low quantities of traffic because they are rare, what is known as long-tail traffic. Others are search queries that result from webpages that could need improvement, perhaps it could need more internal links, or it could be a sign that the keyword phrase deserves its own webpage. It is always a good idea to review the low-performing keywords because some of them may be quick wins that, when the issue is addressed, can result in significantly increased traffic.

Links

Search Console offers a list of all links pointing to the website. However, it’s important to point out that the links report does not represent links that are helping the site rank. It simply reports all links pointing to the website. This means that the list includes links that are not helping the site rank. That explains why the report may show links that have a no follow link attribute on them. The Links report is accessible from the bottom of the left-hand menu. The Links report has two columns: External Links and Internal Links. External Links are the links from outside the website that points to the website and Internal Links are links that originate within the website and link to somewhere else within the website. The External links column has three reports:

1. Top linked pages.
2. Top linking sites.
3. Top linking text.

The Internal Links report lists the Top Linked Pages. Each report (top linked pages, top linking sites, etc.) has a link to more results that can be clicked to view and expand the report for each type. Clicking a URL will change the report to display all the external domains that link to that one page. The report shows the domain of the external site but not the exact page that links to the site.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is generally an XML file that is a list of URLs that helps search engines discover the webpages and other forms of content on a website. Sitemaps are especially helpful for large sites, sites that are difficult to crawl if the site has new content added on a frequent basis. Crawling and indexing are not guaranteed. Aspects like page quality, overall site quality, and links can have an impact on whether a site is crawled, and pages indexed. Sitemaps simply make it easy for search engines to discover those pages and that’s all. Creating a sitemap is easy because more are automatically generated by the CMS, plugins, or the website platform where the site is hosted. Some hosted website platforms generate a sitemap for every site hosted on its service and automatically update the sitemap when the website changes. Search Console offers a sitemap report and provides a way for publishers to upload a sitemap. To access this function, click on the link located on the left-side menu.

Search Console Page Experience Report

The page experience report offers data related to the user experience on the website relative to site speed. Search Console displays information on Core Web Vitals and Mobile Usability. This is a good starting place for getting an overall summary of site speed performance.

Rich Result Status Reports

Search Console offers feedback on rich results through the Performance Report. It’s one of the six dimensions listed below the graph that’s displayed at the top of the page, listed as Search Appearance. Selecting the Search Appearance tabs reveals clicks and impressions data for the different kinds of rich results shown in the search results. This report communicates how important rich results traffic is to the website and can help pinpoint the reason for specific website traffic trends. The Search Appearance report can help diagnose issues related to structured data. For example, a downturn in rich results traffic could be a signal that Google changed structured data requirements and that the structured data needs to be updated. It is a starting point for diagnosing a change in rich results traffic patterns.

We can help you use Google Search Console. Call 248.528.3600

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1. Name Your Images Properly 

Give descriptive names to any images before uploading them to your site. Google recommends using hyphens rather than underscores to separate words.

2. Resize Images to the Display Dimensions

User experience is positive when the page speed is fast. One way to improve this is to adjust your images for exact size. Most smartphones take photos that are at least 4032 pixels by 3024 pixels, which is important for a mobile-friendly website design. 

3. Compress Images 

Reduce image file sizes is another good way to decrease web page load times. Minimize the file size without compromising the quality to an unacceptable degree. This will remove any redundancy in the image data in favor of efficiency and faster loading speeds when you use the image.

4. Choose the Right Format

• JPEG
  • Online photos or artwork
  • Useful for emailing preview images
  • Can be compressed to very small sizes
• PNG
  • Use if there is transparency in the image background
• WebP
  • Higher compression than a JPEG or PNG
  • Supports images and animated images without sacrificing color depth, animated frames, etc.
  • Doesn’t work with older browsers.
• SVG
  • For icons or logos

5. Create an Image Sitemap

An image sitemap is a lot like a regular XML sitemap, except that an image sitemap only includes the URLs to images.The URLs of all the images on your site can help Google discover those images and include them in image search results.

6. Use a Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers located at different locations around the world and allows for quicker distribution of content to separate locations. This makes images and other content load more quickly creating a better user experience globally. 

7. Implement Lazy Loading

Use “lazy loading” to tell web browsers to wait to load an image until it is needed. The page loads much more quickly when the user first lands on it and it’s not just used for images; assets like JavaScript can be loaded this way. According to Google, you should avoid lazy loading above-the-fold images. This would create a poor user experience. Use it for images further down your website or for images of non-vital importance. 

8. Leverage Browser Caching

Browser caching is when files are stored by a visitor’s browser and assets load faster when they next visit the page. Browser caching is noticeably impactful on sites where users frequently revisit the same pages. This is important if your website requires repeat visitors such as an ecommerce business website.

9. Add Image Structured Data

Structured data is a data vocabulary that helps search engines understand your site’s information more clearly and using it also increases the chances of your images showing up as “rich results.” This enhances your image search listing and if you plan to use structured data to support an image, make sure that the image is relevant to the page it appears on. Keep in mind all image URLs must be crawlable and indexable. Otherwise, Google won’t be able to find them and show them on results pages. Currently, Google Images supports the following types of structured data currently:

• Product
• Video
• Recipe

10. Optimize for Open Graph & Twitter Cards

Open Graph tags allow you to choose how a social media post preview appears. This is an off-page SEO technique that means you can choose the preview title, image, and more for social posts appearances. An example of this would be to ensure your image of choice shows up when you share a page, include this image tag in the <head> section of your page’s HTML

Conduct a site audit with us to check if your images have alt descriptions. Call 248.528.3600

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1. Changes to responsive search ads as Google focuses on automation

In August 2021, Google announced that automation should be a key focus for businesses. From June 30, 2022, responsive search ads (RSAs) will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited within standard search campaigns. Expanded text ads (ETAs) will no longer be an option. RSAs allow multiple headlines and descriptions for ads. Google uses machine learning (ML) to automatically test different combinations to find the highest-performing ad.

There are a few clear benefits for advertisements using RSAs v ETAs:

• Increased engagement from customers due to improved click-through rates
• Lower costs due to improved ad copy
• Testing in limited volumes: higher click-through rates and lower cost-per-click

Prepare your business by ensuring RSAs are in every ad group, and review performance of these ads to ensure they’re of the highest quality in line with Google’s scoring.

2. The start of keyword-less world: Performance Max

Google announced that Performance Max will replace Smart Shopping and local campaigns by the end of Q3 2022. Rather than the usual keyword-based search campaign, Performance Max uses:

• Your creative assets alongside business goals and automated bidding
• User signals and data-driven attribution to tailor ads to potential customers across the Google ecosystem (search, display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery)

This goal-based format helps target customers at the right stage of their purchase journey, depending on the goal of the campaign. Performance Max campaigns will be built from any existing smart shopping and local campaigns. Existing settings will remain, but they will be automatically upgraded from July onward. Create new campaigns and pause any relevant activity (such as Smart Shopping), then start working through the new additional creative assets. Have clear units of measures of success with GA4 that provides the most detail on performance. 

3. The re-introduction of broad match

Google has been changing keyword match rules since 2014. This always brings unpredictability around budget and performance. Previously, broad match meant that if the search query was contextually like the keyword being targeted, your ad could show. Modern search is an evolution of broad match and focuses on the meaning of your keyword and the intent behind it. This can include searches that don’t contain the original keyword terms.

Google’s BERT algorithm technology helps interpret queries, language, and search intent. It also makes keyword matching behavior more closely aligned Broad matches more relevant. There have been great results from testing, with important to web traffic and revenue. Ensure you’re live with automated bidding, as the new broad match needs this to work effectively. Start by testing any previous broad match modifier keywords. Choose campaigns to switch to broad match and run a test. Test this on stable campaigns, using robust testing methodologies such as Google’s built-in testing functions.

4. The removal of third-party cookies and the influence of audience

Brands have used cookies to help them target ads to the right audiences. With the removal of third-party cookies, Google is now focusing on the intent of people’s searches rather than audiences. This will capture people on the likelihood that they will meet a campaign’s objectives.

Measurement and optimization will be impacted. Review your platform’s initiatives to mitigate and understand whether they align with business goals and objectives.

Google recently announced that it will be sunsetting Universal Analytics from July 1, 2023. Think about the way you’re tracking to be able to capture and measure effectively moving forward. Find out what the platform you use is doing to enable continued measurement and reporting. 

First-party data also becomes important in targeting an engaged audience. Contextual targeting will again rise to the frontier for display/programmatic activity. Make sure you’re working closely with your provider and review targeting options for future activity and how to capture your target audience. Loss of third-party cookies and how to combat this should be a key talking point across all brands to make sure you’re not left behind when the change is made.

Update your paid search strategy now. Call 248.528.360.

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Now, let’s throw in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) in addition to SEO and SEM. PPC is another term for SEM or part of SEM. Pay-per-click and search engine marketing means paid digital marketing advertisements on search platforms. Pay-per-click can also be referred to CPC (cost-per-click), paid search, or search ads. This is used in paid search marketing, typically through search engines like Google and Bing. Marketers optimize content and websites for search engines (and humans), so they can better understand, access, and direct searchers to your website. PPC marketing and SEM overlap because:

• Both are paid initiatives.
• Both need a budget.
• Both make search engines like Google and other advertising platforms a lot of money.

SEO is not a component of SEM. PPC is typically the largest and most demanding component of SEM. Both PPC and SEM are paid initiatives that offer real-time data, ROI, and protected data that can only be accessed by advertisers on certain platforms. SEM includes PPC ads on not only search engines but also on third-party platforms like Amazon and YouTube, as well as industry-focused platforms like Houzz, Thumbtack, or Yelp. It also includes display ads and remarketing efforts.

Should you use SEO or SEM? Ideally, you would want to utilize both, but if you only have the compacity to use one here are some questions to help guide a decision:

• What are your goals?
  • SEM: drive web traffic quickly, promote a sale, more website exposer.
  • SEO: long-term growth, future results, and compounding value.
• What is your budget? 
• How is your site currently performing? 
• How much visitor data do you have or need?
• How is you online reputation? 

We provide both SEO and SEM service! Call 248.528.360. to get started. 

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1. Use a Brand Manual/Guide 
2. Post Consistently Across Platforms
3. Exercise Quality Control with Every Post
4. Monitor Analytics & Tailor Content Accordingly 
5. Host Influencer Campaigns 
6. Engage with Target Market 

Need help growing organically? Call 248.528.3600.

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