Dental Websites, Google Rankings & Fresh Content
Dentists tell me they hear how updated content is needed to keep their websites ranked well in the search engines. They ask if I will be the one who will write the content to update their sites with fresh material daily, weekly, or monthly.
Every time I hear this I think, oh boy, here we go again. Apparently this myth of ‘necessity’ was started on the Internet in some forum or blog long ago by a now forgotten armchair webmaster. It’s now repeated like an old mantra of faith-based SEO.
To be sure, the efficacy of search engine optimization for a dentist website is partially dependent upon well-written textual content. So yes — don’t misunderstand — text and content are important.
What About Positions?
If you update page content regularly, will this help ensure your dental website stays at, or near the top of the search results? In a word, no. For the majority of websites and the varied industries they target, fresh daily content isn’t going to improve a static page’s ranking anymore than the old search engine submission scam. Dental websites are no different.
Shouldn’t You Just Do Something?
The premise of constantly updating text and content in order to competitively rank on Google is overrated, incorrectly applied and the claim is often used only to bedazzle or lure business owners who are naive about SEO into a recurring payment model. Without firsthand knowledge of SEO, without keyword research and without a positioning strategy, simply shifting words around, or adding more of them to a page is at best only a miscalculated, haphazard method to improve positions.
Are You In A Hurry?
Will freshly written content on a dental website cause it to jump to the top of the SERPS? That depends; if you already have a well-positioned site and you also have a properly configured Wordpress blog attached, you might be able to rank a dentistry oriented post on Google’s first page in 10 minutes or less. Then, same as with any other file, its ranking will re-adjust to conform with the same algorithm that all other sites and pages on the Web must satisfy.
Is This Stuff Magic?
Does tweaking content, or spicing pages correctly with SEO help ranking? Of course; though as you may know, SEO is much more than just on-page text, titles, metas, alt text and heading tags. In addition to these attributes, every page on every website is rewarded search engine positions according to the site’s navigation, inbound links, online tenure, industry association, page load speeds, popularity, visitor bounce rates and a host of other factors.
What The Heck’s It Good For Then?
What sort of website benefits from fresh, updated content? NEWS SITES!!! Nothing stinks like old news; thus the need for fresh new stories, e.g. frequently updated content. Search engine spiders such as Google’s are always on the prowl for the freshest material; especially those websites which command either wide public appeal, or a popular niche theme, so long as it meets specific criteria. New content updated often is crawled more frequently.
But My Site’s Special, Isn’t It?
Regardless of how great a dental website is ranked, or how competitive its target market, dental sites will rarely get more than 50 visitors per day and certainly NEVER the thousands of daily visits a news site receives. Unless you’re building a website, editing pages, or conducting an SEO campaign, updating your dental site’s content often is pretty much useless. In fact, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can hurt you.
To Conclude…
For the dentist who is interested, I can show them any number of dental websites positioned on page one of Google for years in populations exceeding millions; and we’ve never updated page content.
As for the mythological axiom of constantly-updated content needed to affect dentistry website rankings in the search engines, let’s hope this tired old mantra of misinformation quickly finds its way to the trashbin of obscurity — where it belongs.
Other SEO’s thoughts:
- Does fresh content increase Google rankings?
- Does Google Prefer Fresh Content?
For The Visible Dentist, I’m John Barremore
August 8th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Believe it or not there’s actually a company called Faith Based SEO Services. http://www.faithbasedseoservices.com/ I wonder if their method includes praying for rankings.
August 9th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
I have been Hearing many things about SEO, but You cleard alot up, Thank you.
August 17th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Good insight. The internet can be a confusing jungle.
September 10th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
What a great posts to help those in the dental profession to better understand the ins & outs of SEO. For those simply trying to increase their patient base, finding the best way to do so through their website and other internet marketing tools can be a daunting task!
November 11th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
I’ve enjoyed keeping up with your blog. I’ve added you to the blogroll over at our dental blog.
November 15th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Thanks a lot for sharing such a great deal of articles. A very nice perspective and article. Perhaps the answer to the gap is that professionals be a bit more human, and the bloggers be more professional. I am just new to your website and blog so i found this extremely helpful and will definitely help me know exactly where to start off.
November 20th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Great article. I have been making sure that I do quite a bit of blogging as part of my overall SEO strategy. Nothing beats fresh content, at least that is what my own results have shown me. Great post. Thanks for the information.
January 7th, 2011 at 6:52 am
Thanks for the great information….
January 17th, 2011 at 8:17 pm
Wow good article for dental sites. Thanks sir ^_^
June 23rd, 2011 at 2:45 am
You have a great blog, and very educational for someone like me (I’m not a dentist, but I do love everything dental care) that isn’t as knowledgeable about the technical side of dentistry. The fact is, your blog could have probably trumped a few that were on my list. I’ll probably tweet this post soon…so stay tuned for that…hint hint…
September 30th, 2011 at 3:08 pm
Great post on SEO dentist information. A lot of dentists don’t take the time to blog or even use social media to help their ranking.
January 19th, 2012 at 11:59 pm
To add to John’s excellent post, now Google’s algorithm has gotten the “Google Fresh” update, about which
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html
This update tends to rank fresher content more highly, provided the subject is time-sensitive - such as news, as John points out, as well as “hot topics”, “regularly recurring events” and more.
Concerning dental websites, then, if you have a page devoted to reviews/testimonials with RECENT content/dates, it seems it would benefit from a boost by “Google Fresh” as compared to another local dental website’s with stale reviews/testimonials.
Likewise, it would affect a dental blog with recent content - but is it worthwhile to start a blog and commit to it while keeping it relevant to the local audience, just for the sake of this “Google Fresh” update?
Other than reviews and a dental news blog, I cannot see where fresh content in dentist’s website would even have reason to exist.
In sum, as I see it, John’s advice here is current even with the new Google update, which only gives dentists another reason to post patients’ dated reviews on their websites and update them regularly (as they should, regardless of Google Fresh).
January 20th, 2012 at 12:39 am
Hey Red Rock,
Thanks for your excellent comments!
As you noted, the ‘freshness’ of content still applies to information and news topics about products, services and events which are likely to change details frequently.
As for reviews - Google is the new review site! …that is, unless you optimize and publish a dedicated page for your patients’ comments …to compete with Google itself.
…like this page I did for client Dr. Howden:
dentist patient reviews prescott valley
Patient reviews are definitely part of the decision making process for people looking for a dental practice - and dentists are well advised to collect and make them available to prospective patients via their website.
If the dentist or dental webmaster is still concerned about freshness, they could either build out the site in Wordpress, and/or add a simple include date code to their static pages - such as the following PHP one I use now (see current date above).
< ?php echo date('l, F jS, Y'); ?>
All in all though, unless you’re changing your office location, your phone number, or inventing new dental treatments every other day, a well optimized, static dental website with relevant content and a low bounce rate is sufficient to successfully represent any dental practice.
Thanks for stopping by!
John