Everything Optometrists Need to Know About SEO in 10 Minutes
Today I’m going to tell you everything you need to know as an optometrist about SEO in 10 minutes, and that’s a tall order, but here’s what I’m assuming. I’m assuming that if you own a practice or are involved in a practice that you have at least some small marketing budget that you’ve probably hired or outsourced some of your SEO needs. So I’m not gonna get super, super technical. But what I’m gonna do is I’m going to try and equip you in the next 10 minutes with everything that you need to know about SEO, to know if it’s working for you. We talk about how to measure it. We’re gonna talk about what it is. And we’re ultimately gonna talk about what you need to know, to know if your agency or whoever you’ve hired, whether it’s an independent or you’re doing it yourself is doing well.
What is SEO?
So it’s a tall order I got about nine minutes left. What is SEO? Well, SEO is when your website your, you know, local optometry practice.com or, Acme, optometry shows up at the top of Google. So when someone searches for optometrist in your city or eye doctor in your city, obviously if you’re in even a medium size city, there might be dozens. You want to be on the first page. Ideally you want to be at the top of the first page. So why is that important? It’s important. The people who search for optometrist in your city are super high intent users. They have a need that they are looking to fill right now. There are people who are ready to buy, they’re ready to pick up the phone, make an appointment, show up to your office. So in that way, once you rank for these keywords, it can become extremely powerful.
How does SEO work?
You’ve probably heard a lot of different things, but what’s kind of the background in it. Well, there’s really four parts to SEO and I’m gonna do a very condensed version of these.
Performing Keyword Research That Makes A Difference for SEO
So the first part that we always do, and we’ve done this for optometry a bunch, because a lot of it is the same is keyword research. You want to determine what people are actually searching for. So I’ve already alluded to that a little bit, you know, optometrist in your city, eye doctor in your city, get glasses near me, get glasses today, keywords like that. Those are words that people are searching for that show very high intent and likely have some volume behind them as well. When we do keyword research, we’re looking at three things,
- We’re looking at search volume. Are there actually people searching for that keyword. Because you could pick some random keyword. There’s a good chance that no one would be searching for that.
- The second thing we’re looking at is difficulty. So who are your competitors on keyword? Is there a chance to get on the first page? You know, unless you’re in a major, major city, but even then with a good SEO, you can probably end up on the first page. So search volume difficulty.
- Then of course intent, right? So people who are searching for different styles of glasses, different types of glasses, that’s a little bit more low intent, right? Or they look for, or what is glaucoma a little bit lower intent, not necessarily someone who’s looking directly for, to come into your office right then. So maybe it makes sense once you’ve won on the other keywords.
At the end of the day, you really wanna focus on keywords that are gonna make a difference for your business.
So the first thing we always do is clearly define the keywords that we wanna go after. And let me tell you, if you, you don’t get those keywords, right? No matter what you do, you’re gonna have issues, right? You could be ranking on a bunch of different keywords, but if they’re not the right keywords, they’re not high volume, high intent and ones that you can actually win on. You’re going to struggle. So this is one of the most important parts.
Here’s the deal. We’ve already done a bunch of keyword research. We’ve done this for various optometry practices and optometrists all around the country, right? So we already have a list that we know tends to convert really well. That tends to drive traffic, to drive engagement and actually drive phone calls and leads for your business. If you want that, I’ll give it to you for free. Ask for those keywords, happy to send them over.
Technical SEO Strategy
So once you’ve defined the keyword research, you’ve kind of mapped the target that you wanna go after, then you look at on page SEO and this is what people talk about more technical SEO, right? So it’s things like the page title, the heading on the page, you know, does your page load fast? Is it crawl-able by Google? This is a technical stuff that if you hired an SEO agency, they’ve hopefully taken care of for you. So this isn’t stuff that’s gonna rank you instantly on the first page, but it’s stuff that you have to be aware of. And it has to be taken care of. Otherwise you’re gonna be in trouble. So in some ways it’s sort of a ticket to entry. It’s not the thing that’s gonna bounce you all the way to the top, but you have to get it taken care of. So definitely you wanna do a site audit or have an agency do a site audit, make sure the technical things are taken to care of.
SEO Copywriting and Content Generation
So keyword research is one on page. SEO is number two. The third is copywriting and content generation at the end of the day. It’s what is on the page. The words on the page specifically, not just images and graphics.But it’s the words on the page are going to drive engagement. And that’s what Google’s crawling. They are, AI, they’re computers, looking at that content, the headings, the text, and determining whether or not your site deserves to rank on the first page.
So copywriting and content generation are super important. This is especially relevant. If you’re going after more specific keywords like Medicare, Medicaid, you know, if your practice takes those or other specific types of insurance, copywriting and content generation, making sure you have a page that addresses those is super, super important. So that’s the third one. So keyword research on page SEO or a technical SEO, copywriting and content 10 generation. The actual words on the page.
Backlinks and How They Impact SEO
And then the final one is backlinks. So let me explain this. So back in the day, Alta Vista or some of the original search engines, what you could do when you would do SEO is you could basically stuff keywords and put a ton of keywords on the page and sort of force yourself to rank at the top of the page. So Google came along at the time, Google little tiny startup. And they said, Hey, how do we prevent that? How do we actually give users the best result for the query? And one of the things that they came up with that was a huge factor for them was they actually went through and index the entire web and said, what websites are linking? So links are the things that you click and it takes you to another place are linking to each other. And they basically started ranking websites by who has the most links, links were sort of like a vote of confidence.
So that is still a major factor, right? Back links to your website from the chamber of commerce, from other review sites, from your Yelp page, you know, from local listings or either local college who maybe you sponsor. Those kind of things do matter. And they can certainly help you rank better link building.
How you go about getting those links is a discussion that’s too big for this podcast, but there are ways to do that with optometry that are really valuable. So those are basically the four parts. If you get those four parts, right. You’re in good shape.
Recap of Everything Optometrists Need to Know About SEO
There’s the keyword research, make sure you’re going after the right keywords. There’s the on page SEO or the technical SEO. Is your site crawl-able? Is it age-able, there’s a copywriting and content generation, the words on the page. Do they matter? And then number four is backlinks. Okay, so for you guys crash course. So if you have an agency or a partner or an individual, or even a marketing manager internally doing this for you right now, what do you need to look at?
Focus on keywords that make a difference.
One of the things I see all the time is that agencies will come up with a random set of keywords. And they’ll wanna target, you know, very niche diseases, things that just don’t have a lot of volume behind them. So unless you’re a specialist and you specialize in that rare disease, the chances that someone is really going to find you or travel across the country to come to see you is very low. If you are a specialist in specific diseases, this may not make sense to you or for you. But if you’re more of a general optometrist, then you wanna go after, the keywords that have a lot of volumes. So the big ones, optometrist in your city, eye doctors, you know, get glasses, glasses, optical contacts, getting contacts, etc. There’s a handful of ’em that are gonna be super important.
I have a list, email me if you would like that. I’m happy to provide it. So here’s the deal until you’re winning on those popular keywords, don’t spend your time going after the rarer or what we call in the industry, long tail keywords, you won’t see a great return on your investment there. Unless it’s a popular keyword. The three metrics that you wanna track, everyone likes to talk about metrics. So with SEO, you wanna track your rankings. So where do you show up in, on the search results page? You know, are you number one, are you number three? You wanna then track organic traffic to your website. You do this through a tool like Google analytics. You wanna make sure your traffic is steady or going up. And then of course you wanna track leads, phone calls, book deployments, from organic, as much as possible. You know, how you track exactly organic versus other channels can be, can be difficult.
What to Avoid When Doing SEO (and making sure whoever you hired does it well)
Let us know if you’d like help with that. And we can help set up some tracking systems for you. All right. I got about a minute left. So what should you avoid? If your agency is doing these things, you may wanna have a conversation with them about why they’re doing it. So generally you wanna avoid pointless blogs There’s kind of this thing in SEO, we just produce more content, just post blogs that has very little vol, value. There is some value there, but if your agency is just producing random blogs every month, you know, 300 words, they are attracting traffic or links, then that’s really not driving a lot of value.
As I mentioned, you wanna avoid targeting low volume keywords, right? So specific diseases or teeny tiny geographies that maybe you don’t serve as much. You also wanna avoid low intent keywords. So like, most popular glasses designs, things like that. It makes sense for you, but generally there’s gonna be lower intent keywords, and measuring only one of the above metrics. So if you’re just tracking rankings, traffic leads or phone calls, that’s an issue you need to track all three of them. You need to make sure that people are finding you and that they’re converting. Otherwise it’s not gonna matter for your bottom line, or too much focus on one particular keyword. You want to rank for optometrist, but you also wanna rank for eye doctor and a lot of these other similar keywords. Okay. So there you go. Everything you need to know about SEO in 10 minutes, if you’d like a free audit of your SEO on your website, reach out to me or visit us at optometrymarketing.com. Curious about technical SEO? Check out our Ultimate Guide!
One of the thing we didn’t discuss in this episode is your Google local optimization. Where people do reviews. We’ve talked about that a little bit on the podcast in the past, but I’ll probably dig into it here in the next couple of episodes because it’s hugely important. But I, I separate that out from traditional SEO. This traditional SEO is your website. Not your local listing. If you need help with this, schedule a Free 45 minute call! Go change the world, stay safe out there and help your patients see better and have a brighter future. We’ll talk to you soon!