Be specific, but not too specific. Though it’s important to keep your keywords and keyword phrases specific, it’s also important that you refrain from making them too specific. For instance, it’s clear that ‘Plastic Surgery’ is better than just ‘Surgery’. Further, ‘Plastic Surgery Chicago’ is even better if your practice is located in Chicago. However, ‘ Plastic Surgery Chicago Main Street’ is simply too specific. When determining your keywords, it’s important that you find a good middle ground between a very broad search term and an overly specific one.
Keep your keywords relevant. Your website should be optimized for what it’s really all about. There may be a great keyword search term that you’ve come across that offers little competition, but that shouldn’t be a reason for you to use it. For instance, maybe there isn’t a lot of competition for the keyword phrase ‘otoplasty Idaho’. But if you don’t perform otoplasty or aren’t located in Idaho and can’t offer a searcher any relevant content, you’re probably better off not using that keyword phrase. Remember that visitors are only going to remain on your site and become potential patients provided that they find what they’re looking for.
Keep location in mind. Sites offering products or services locally as well as nationally or internationally must optimize their site for all of them. When it comes to plastic surgery, this can be tricky. Certainly, some degree of patients may be likely to travel out of their area for the right surgeon. For instance, it’s clear when visiting forums on hair transplantation that traveling for a hair transplant is highly commonplace. However, traveling may be less likely for other procedures. This must be taken into consideration when optimizing your site. You might consider your past patients and what percentage have been from your area vs. those that have traveled from other areas. If there are particular areas that you want to target, you should focus more on those when optimizing your site. Perhaps you’re located in New York and have been finding that more and more patients have been traveling for procedures from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. These, then, may be areas that you want to include when optimizing your site. Certainly you want to optimize your site locally, but not at the expense of eliminating other potential target audiences.