Do you have a website for your practice? If so, why? And if not, why might you need one? While it is true that a website can provide helpful information and resources to your existing patients and allows you to share information about your team and your practice philosophy, one of the greatest functions of your website is to attract new patients.
New patients are essential to growing your practice, and a website is an integral component of a strong marketing plan to gain new patients. So, is it enough to simply have a website with information about your audiologist, services, location, hours, and contact information? No!
If you want to attract new patients with your website, people who are searching for services you offer (AKA potential patients) need to be able to find your website. Their likelihood of finding your practice’s website, clicking on it, and learning more about your office are all dependent on SEO, or search engine optimization.
SEO includes various aspects of how your website functions and how it is evaluated, ranked, and displayed by search engines. This article focuses on a few of the technical aspects of SEO that may seem basic (and maybe even boring) but are important parts of the technical SEO hierarchy.
This hierarchy maps out the five levels of technical SEO requirements your site needs to fulfill in order to perform well in online searches. The bottom levels must be fulfilled first in order to more easily achieve success in the top levels. We will start with the lowest, most basic level of the technical SEO hierarchy and work upwards.
- Crawlability
The foundation of the technical SEO hierarchy is crawlability. If a URL (your website address) is crawlable, it means that search engine bots can discover it (and therefore display it in search results). If you are worried that your URL might not be crawlable, check with our team here at AudiologyPlus to make sure your URL is not forbidden to search engine bots.
- Indexability
Right above crawlability in the SEO hierarchy is indexability. Search engines create a catalog, or index, of website pages that can be displayed in results to an online search. To make sure that your webpages are indexable, be sure you are using unique content (since duplicate content is blocked for indexing by Google) and that your website does not use meta robots or robots.txt directives to prevent indexing. (Again, ask our team at AudiologyPlus if you need help checking any of these technical aspects.)
- Accessibility and website performance
The next level is accessibility and performance. If your URL is accessible, it is easy to display. Accessibility may be blocked by factors like server performance, HTTP status, JavaScript rendering, the time it takes to load a page, and more. These tend to be technical aspects that can be handled by your website service, AudiologyPlus.
- Rankability
Sometimes your site needs a little extra help to ensure it ranks well. One feature that can boost your site’s rankability is linking. Use your webpages to link to other pages on your website, which boosts traffic to these other pages. You can also create page groups, known as content silos, that are on similar topics and link to each other. This helps increase your site’s rankability.
- Clickability
The top level of the SEO hierarchy is clickability. This is how likely a user is to click on your website when it appears in search engine results. You can increase your clickability by having a clear content structure (which allows search engines to better understand your content), star rankings, links to important pages on your website, and more. Featuring content that is relevant to search terms your target audience is likely to search for also boosts clickability.
With these five levels in place, your website’s technical SEO hierarchy of needs will be fulfilled. To discover how your website is doing in these key areas and to learn more about how to improve your site’s performance, please contact us today at AudiologyPlus.
