How to evaluate your practice SEO
You need to know who in your market is cataloging well, what your competitors are doing, and how to compete effectively. You need to know whats going on. Lets discuss how to do that properly.
1. Turn off Googles personalized search
If you have any kind of account with Google (Adwords, Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs) then Google is serving up a personalized search result for you. Typically that personalized search paints a rosier picture of your search placement than you should expect if you werent logged in into your Google account. Websites you visit a lot (like your own website) are raised up in your personal search results. Most other searchers do NOT see these sites as prominently. Be sure to turn off Googles personalized search because it biases your search result to sites YOU visit more.
2. Search your competitors and search your local keywords.
On most websites, the number one source of traffic is the doctors name and the practice name. By searching your competitors names and money keywords, you start to get a picture of whats going on in the market. You will see what and who is cataloging well. Is Yelp a powerful review site in your market? Is there a competitor in your market that is doing something that make them come up a lot more often? In that matrix of local searches you are going to see patterns forming, and those patterns are going to tell you where to target your energy, as you move forward with search engine optimization. If you see a review site thats really powerful, thats clearly getting some traction, thats a great thing to target, if you see a style of website or directories that come up prominently you get a real good idea of what you should probably be doing.
3 Set up Google Alerts
Visit http://alerts.google.com and start tracking your name, your competitors names, and your money keywords. When something changes in your market, when someone rolls out a new website, when there is important news, youll be instantly alerted. Google Alerts keeps you abreast of big changes in your market so you wont get caught flat footed when competitors make changes. Its hard to search everyday, but its easy to track changes everyday.
4. Get an Einstein SEO audit
In terms of bang for your buck, our SEO Audit is one of our best products. its an 80 - 90 page document that really focuses on the SEO of your site and your competition. Its an extremely deep dive into your market and quickly exposes the mathematics of SEO to the layman. Its fascinating to see how you bench mark statistically against your competitors and on the high traffic keywords in your market. An SEO audit is a really nice departure point for your SEO campaign.
