To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, the only constant in this world is change. Everything changes, including the internet. It’s a good time to look at your website as well and make a decision as to how your practice will promote itself online this year. While there are hundreds of trends and checklist items a good webmaster will look at when building your website, here are a five things we would suggest you work on in 2015.
MOBILE
Mobile searches are quickly overtaking desktop searches and are expected to be the predominate search platform in 2015. Is your website mobile friendly? What does your website look like on your smartphone? Many of our client’s websites are seeing upwards of 40% of their visits coming from smartphones in 2014. With the mobile trend accelerating, most of these practices will be well positioned to reap the rewards of being mobile responsive. Mobile is so important, that Google is starting to penalize websites that are not mobile friendly. It’s hard enough to win new customers and patients these days, do you really want to Google to make it even harder for people to find you?
IMPLIED LINKS
No one likes a thief. Stealing photos, graphics or articles from another website to claim as your own content without attribution is not only wrong, but could land you in lots of legal hot water. For years Google has placed emphasis on express links that lead back to the source (www.google.com) versus an implied link where the site and page is mentioned. This has been a subject of debate within the eye care community for years, where many practices want to link back to their frame and lens suppliers risking the potential of losing the patient/customer to another practice a block closer. Google is now giving credence to mentioning your brands in rankings they only once gave to direct links. This is great for webmasters now, that you can still offer proper attribution without bleeding page rank from too many outbound links.
SEMANTIC SEARCH
Meta-tag keywords are dead. Context is what counts. If you built your website by keyword stuffing, you have not only fallen behind, but will find your website possibly penalized by Google and probably left behind by websites who take local semantic search seriously. Semantic search is data search and websites that include basic semantic information are those who are today seeing more and more traffic.
SOCIAL
People spend a tremendous amount of time on social media networks. The average American spends roughly 40 minutes each day checking their Facebook feed. While that pales in comparison to the 5 hours spent watching TV each day, there is little doubt social media counts in 2014. Add to the time we spend on Facebook with the time spent on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and the hundreds of other social networks out there, and you can see why integrating your web presence with a good social media strategy is so important. Google thinks so too, and is relying more and more on social signals that point to your website as part of their rankings.
XML SITE MAP
Search engines do a pretty good job of finding and listing your content. However, why not make things easy for them, by including an XML site map of your website for them to index. An XML Site map gives Google and other search engines an easy to follow map of every page and every blog post.
While it would be easy to add another dozen or two items to this list, there is little doubt that should you spend a few hours every month paying attention to these five items, you will see more traffic to your website and more than likely more traffic to your practice too.
