Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Why it’s Critical to Website Success?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Why it’s Critical to Website Success?

As healing practitioners, institutes and organizations your goal is to support individuals in their healing journey by providing health education, resources, products and treatments. For many of you your website is your storefront. But how does your storefront get found on the internet? It is not found because you put up your website; it is found because your website (storefront) is optimized with technical elements which make it easy for people researching and looking for your services to find you. Our purpose at Whole Life Marketing is to support health and wellness companies and organizations to reach people looking for their healing education, modality, service, and products.

What is the definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – According to Wikipedia – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.  In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

“Perfectly Optimized” webpages must incorporate:

1. HTML Head Tags (Title) – relevant and unique content and keyword term/phrase optimization in the Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Meta Robots, and other Meta Tags.
2. URL – considerations of shorter URL lengths, keyword locations, proper word separators and decisions made between subdomains vs. pages.
3. Body Tags – must be structured properly taking into consideration keyword repetition within content, keyword density, keyword usage variation, headline tags, proper image file name tagging, proper usage of bold and italicized content.
4. Internal Links & location in Site Architecture – key terms/phrase click through depth, number of internal links per page, and link location.
5. Page Architecture – keyword location and content structure are integral to successful page SEO.
6. Website Submission – properly submitting your websites to the search engines.

As you can see SEO is a very technical aspect of website development and getting visitors to your website. The reason why it’s important to make sure your website is optimized is because 51% of products and services purchased on the internet came from people performing searches through google.com, yahoo.com and other search engines to find what they are looking for. So if your website (storefront) can’t be found because it is not search engine optimized then you are losing business and opportunities to support people in their healing journey.

Many website designers are not trained in search engine optimization nor are they website developers (programmers). This means your website designer may not have incorporated these SEO elements into your website. If you ask your website designer about the above topics and they cannot speak as an authority on these topics, then there is a good chance your website is not optimized with these critical elements to make it easy for individuals looking for health information to find you.

Here are some SEO Best Practices Whole Life Marketing employs to help your website Rank on page #1 of search engines:

1. Accessibility – content engines can’t see or access your website to be indexed; thus crawl-ability is foremost on this list.
2. Content – you need to have compelling, high quality material that not only attracts interest, but compels visitors to share the information. Virality of content is possibly the most important/valuable factor in the ranking equation because it will produce the highest link conversion rate (the ratio of those who visit to those who link after viewing).
3. Basic On-Page Elements – getting the keyword targeting right in the most important elements (titles, URLs, internal links) provides a big boost in the potential ability of a page to perform well.
4. User Experience – the usability, user interface and overall experience provided by a website strongly influences the links and citations it earns as well as the conversion rate and browse rate of the traffic that visits.
5. Marketing – I like to say that “great content is no substitute for great marketing.” A terrific marketing machine or powerful campaign has the power to attract far more links than content may “deserve,” and though this might seem unfair, it’s a principle on which all of capitalism has functioned for the last few hundred years. Spreading the word is often just as important (or more so) than being right, being honest or being valuable (just look at the political spectrum).
6. Advanced/Thorough On-Page Optimization – applying all of the above with careful attention to detail.
7. Content Freshness – frequently updating your website with new relevant content.

At Whole Life Marketing we understand if all this information is a soup of technical words and terms. We know your expertise is as a healing practitioner, institute or organization not a website SEO and development expert. Whole Life Marketing has been supporting practices like yours for years enabling people to find healing modalities, education, resources and products which support their healing journey. Call us at 310-418-3855 or email us jd@wholeli1.nextmp.net today to receive a FREE 1-hour marketing and SEO consultation.We are here to support you in your vision and mission and hope you’ll consider us part of your Wholistic Growth Team.

To your health and wellness,

Jennifer Dickens
Whole Life Marketing
310-418-3855
www.wholelifemarketing.com
jd@wholeli1.nextmp.net