Our last few Optometry website SEO blogs focused on how to determine the best keywords for your eye care practice website. Now that you have the specific words you think potential customers will use to find you, it’s time to consider how you use them on your site.
A study of how people searched the web in 2010 showed that 67% of queries involved one- to three-word search terms. The greatest percentage of searches, 24%, were two-word queries, with one-word queries close behind at 23%. 20% of searches used three words. This shows that your goal should be to keep key terms short, relevant and succinct.
Another factor that needs to be considered is competition. Any eye doctor in Austin with a website will be using “Austin Optometrist” as a key term and therefore you should also seek terms that can stand out from your competitors, such as a specialties and services that you offer (i.e. LASIK co-management, dry eyes treatment etc.). Take a few moments to think about your practice’s niche in the field of eye care and how you can highlight that in your site content. When used along with your more standard broad keywords, these terms might distinguish your site from the others and draw additional traffic.
Lastly, Google recently shared the findings that 20% of the queries made each day are new; meaning that those key terms had not been searched before. This demonstrates that keyword search is dynamic and constantly in flux and that your website content should be also. While it’s important to maintain the essential keywords that show the search engines who you are, you have the freedom to play around with keywords, add new ones and change them periodically. Just beware, starting off with too many keywords can confuse Google and hurt your rankings so add keywords slowly and gradually.
Remember, keywords don’t have to be a guessing game. You can gauge your keyword success through a number of online tools, such as Google analytics, which will show you statistics of traffic brought to your eye care site by each of your keywords. This makes it easy to check in on your traffic and see what they are looking for!
