You can have the most stunning, top-of-the-line medical website design in Phoenix, but if no one can find it, it doesn’t do a whole lot of good. One of the easiest ways to judge how your search engine optimization is performing is by checking your organic google ranking. Now this may seem like an easy task at first, but there are three important things to consider before you start googling.
1. Are you signed into Google?
You may not be aware of it, but (like the NSA) Google remembers what you search for. You can easily convince yourself that you’re the king of the internet if all you do is google your own site and are constantly visiting it. Google will artificially move your listing and any other websites you frequent up higher in search, giving you the false impression that you are ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When searching for where your practice lands organically on google, bing, or yahoo, be sure that you are logged out of your Gmail, Yahoo or Microsoft accounts.
2. Are your browsing privately or in “incognito” mode?
Even if you are logged out of each search engine, there is still a the matter of your browser remembering your history. This can have the same effect as being logged in to your gmail account, by prioritizing sites you’ve visited recently in search. Unless you have all browsing history and cookies disabled on your browser (which virtually nobody does) then it is probably best to enter into private browsing or “incognito” mode when checking your google rankings. Google’s Chrome browser offers an incognito searching option and the Firefox browser offers both a private browsing option and another handy shortcut that we’ll discuss in the bonus section below.
3. What keywords are you using?
So you’re in private browsing or incognito mode, you’re logged out of all search engines you will be testing, now what? The obvious keywords you’ll want to be found for are the name of your business/practice and perhaps the names of the doctors who practice in your office. Those are great things to type in and see where you land. If you aren’t popping up for your own business name something may be seriously wrong with your marketing strategy and you’ll want to enlist some help. A good rule of thumb to check how you’re doing without doing any serious keyword research, is to pick a general term or service you specialize in and add “in {your city}”. For example, if you’re a dentist in mesa, simply enter “dentist in mesa” and see if you’re showing up in the first couple pages. If not, you may need to rethink your SEO strategy.
Bonus: Helpful tools to skip these steps
Of course, you can always hire a qualified marketing and design firm like New Wine Web Design to handle your internet marketing and medical website design in Phoenix. We provide you with these rankings in your monthly report, but there is also another great shortcut from seobook.com. In the beginning stages of launching a new website, or just reworking a website that has been severely neglected, it can be difficult to find out if you are making progress especially if your website is only moving from page 15 to page 13 at first. Clicking through all those pages can be a major time zap. The Rank Checker from seobook is an awesome Firefox plugin that will do the searching for you, all you have to do is enter your url and the keywords you want search for and hit start!
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (11/4/2015) Anthony Ryan (Flickr)