Given that the majority of visitors to your site will likely find you after conducting a search in the search engines, search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of your plastic surgery marketing plan. However, in the midst of all your SEO efforts, it’s easy to forget who your real target audience is.
Too often, websites that are solely optimized for the search engine robots and spiders become unappealing for the human visitor. A good example of this involves keywords. Content that is rich in targeted keywords can produce excellent results in the search engines. However, that content can include so many keywords, too many in fact, that it becomes unreadable and of no value to your visitors. As such, your site may perform well in the search engines and gain lots of traffic, but it cannot be a success unless those visitors are finding a reason to stay on your site and ultimately become your patient.
While it is essential to optimize your pages for the search engines, it’s even more important that you keep your visitor and potential patients in mind. Many SEO techniques can compromise the usability of your site and the level of satisfaction that visitors have while on your site. There is a fine line between optimizing your site and over optimizing your site, but a balance can be achieved in order to please both the robots and your visitors. Make sure that your visitors are just as satisfied as the robots by keeping the following in mind:
Content Make sure that the content on your site is valuable and provides visitors with what they want and need. While you do want to use your targeted keywords, do so wisely. Keyword stuffing, or the overuse of keywords, not only makes a document unreadable to your visitor but can also get you banned from the search engines.
Navigation Your site must be able to be easily navigated by your visitors. Your navigation menus should be clear and easy to understand and use. Because it’s important that your visitors be able to quickly find what they’re looking for, you should be sure to include a site map and even a search feature.
Download Times Slow-loading pages are a surefire way to send your visitors packing. Make sure that your pages are quick to load regardless of your visitors’ connection speeds. Images and graphics are one of the main culprits of slow load times so be sure to use them carefully.
Headers Every page of your website should have a relevant and descriptive header. This will allow your visitors to instantly recognize what they can find on the page.