DPMWire

What You Can Expect From Your New Website

Now that you have made the commitment to build a website for your practice the next step is to set a realistic expectation about what you want your website to achieve for your business. In these newsletters I will discuss some different things to take into consideration while you are building your site and touch on some of the different things that search engines, like Google and Yahoo take into account when they return search results. Hopefully this will help you put together a website that functions the way you want and results in new patients for your practice.

Let’s get started by pointing out that the most commonly searched terms that a patient will enter into a search engine when they are looking for a podiatrist are as follows:

1) podiatrists

2) podiatrist

If they do not find a relevant site to help them find what they are looking for then they will narrow their search and be more specific. Most of the time they will do this by adding 3 or 4 more words to the search, such as adding a geographic location. The goal for your website should be to rank highly for those specific searches. It would be unrealistic for you to expect your site to show up for a broad term like “podiatrists” and I’ll explain why.

There are millions and millions of web sites out there and many more web pages. So every time someone does a search, your site is competing with billions of other pages. I just did a search for “podiatrist” and Google returned about 2,070,000 results (Podiatrists.com was #7).

Now, if I narrow my search down to the phrase “podiatrist Indianapolis” Google returned about 118,000 results (Podiatrists.com Member Patrick DeHeer: Indianapolis.Podiatrists.com was #3). That is still a very high number of search results, but I’ve cut out about 94.3% of the competition from the original search. Changing to “podiatrist Indianapolis Indiana” brings the results down to about 51,200. Now I’ve cut out an additional 56.6% of the competition (Dr. DeHeer’s site was #2). Finally, narrowing the search to “podiatrist Indianapolis Indiana 46032” brought the number of results down to about 1,320 (Dr. DeHeer’s site was #1 & #2) and cut out an additional 97.4% of the competition. So, by making the search more specific I have eliminated over 99.9% of the competition for the keyword “podiatrist.”

The point of this example is that if a patient is looking for a podiatrist in any city (I’ll keep using Indianapolis) they wouldn’t search the word “foot” and expect to find a doctor’s website. There is a very good chance that they will search a term like “podiatrist” in which case they can find Podiatrists.com and find your listing by searching a zip code within 25 miles of your office. They also may be specific with their search and type in “podiatrist Indianapolis Indiana” and hope to see a doctor’s site pop up in search results.

So, what is reasonable to expect for your website? Well, if your site is well constructed (we will go over site construction in the next newsletter) then you can expect to rank highly in search results for specific phrases that relate to your site/services, such as “podiatrist Your City, Your State.”