The so-called “Medic Update” was really a heightened application of concepts of “Your Money Your Life” (YMYL) detailed in google’s Quality Raters Guidelines training manual. This applied to web pages that “could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”

Examples of YMYL web pages are News and current events, Civics, government, and law, Finance, Shopping, Groups of people and Health and safety.

The algorithm update was dubbed the Medic Update because it seemed to have the most impact on medical website’s ranking; 42 percent of the sites affected were in the medical, health, fitness, or healthy lifestyle space These concepts apply to all websites in the google index but they are more important to the YMYL websites because of their potential effect on user’s well being.

What Google Medic update factors affect search rankings?

The factors that affect the search rankings for YMYL websites really apply to Search Engine Optimization for all websites. Google calls these factors Website Quality (WQ). Google’s WQ uses Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EAT) as an indicator. Let’s have a look at each as it pertains to a medical website.

Expertise: Medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation.
Authority: There should be evidence of medical expertise/authority as the website’s main content (MC) and on 3rd party websites.
Trustworthiness: Google specifies this as “adequate Information about the Website or Creator of the MC for the Purpose of the Page”.

This may seem daunting but it’s really much of what we already do to optimize all websites. But it does emphasize how important this part of SEO really is.

How to Optimize for E-A-T

Here are some of the important general measures to take to optimize your website’s for EAT.

1. Bolster your company’s about page and individual authors’ bio pages to include details on credentials and expertise.
2. Client reviews and testimonials for your services. Foster user reviews across the web.
3. Building up your company’s authority on other platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other authoritative websites.
4. Add contact information on every page, or at the very least have a robust Contact Us page with phone, email, physical address, etc.
5. Get favorable press coverage in reputable outlets, and getting authors bylined in other high-authority publications.

Query Intent Theory

Mirroring your website’s content to searchers’ intent is important to any SEO campaign. What this means for us is that even if your website has great EAT, if the content doesn’t mirror your clients search intent, you can still struggle to rank and thus lose site visits.

The solution is to try your best to match your top funnel page content to how a user would actually ask/expect the question to be answered.

Content Theory

The longer and better organized the page’s content is (relative to your competitors’ similar page) the better results you may have in rankings. The idea is to thoroughly answer the questions and or provide information about the medical services you provide. As part of any SEO campaign competitive research this content theory should be applied.

NetLocal SEO
Address: 226 W Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103
Phone: (215) 874-0744

John DiBella

John DiBella is the founder and CEO of NetLocal, a local SEO agency specializing in SEO for consumer medical practices and author of the ebook SEO for the Small Business Owner.  email: john@netlocalseo.com

www.netlocalseo.com/

A website’s ranking in the search results is an important indicator of its overall health. A high rank can increase visibility, drive traffic, and potentially improve conversion rates. A low rank may signal that something is wrong with the site or content, or it may indicate a problem with Google’s indexing algorithms. Either way, this typically indicates a need for some sort of corrective action to be taken by the webmaster.

Want to learn more about how NetLocal can help you measure your SEO success? Read on!

What is SEO and Why Does it Matter?

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It is the activity that increases visibility of your website on internet search engines. Whether it’s organic SEO, which refers to natural rankings on search engines, or paid SEO, which refers to paying to place your website on the first page on a search engine (usually for a limited time), you need to know what you’re doing or else your site will not get found by the right people.

The Importance of Keyword Research

Keyword research is important for SEO, because it helps you to figure out what kind of topic you want to write about. It also gives you an idea of the people who are conducting keyword searches on topics related to your business. And finally, it helps you choose keywords that bring in more traffic.

It’s important to note that SEO is a complicated process, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer to optimization. However, following the basic principles of SEO will help you to improve your website’s visibility and ranking.

How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

A great way to make your website more search engine friendly is by using keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that a user might type into a search engine, such as “chocolate chip cookies”. This is important because the keywords you choose will determine what kind of traffic your site gets from various search engines. Some tips for finding good keywords include:

• using Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to find popular keyword ideas
• looking for keywords where your site already ranks high on the first page of Google results
• using a word cloud generator to visually brainstorm ideas
• reading articles about keyword research and picking out ones that have been successful

Ways to Measure Your SEO Success

In order to measure your SEO success, you need to track your website’s visibility and ranking in SERPs over time. There are a number of tools and services that can help you do this, including NetLocal.

Your SEO success can also be measured by tracking keywords and organic search traffic over time on your website. You should track the number of visitors that come to your site from search engines and your market trends over time (Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use). By assessing the number of visitors that come to your site from search engines, you can determine whether or not your SEO efforts are successful.

You should also track organic visits over time to determine if the changes in SEO visibility and rankings are due to your efforts. If you continue to make progress over time, then this could be a sign that your SEO efforts are working.

SEO is an ongoing process and things like social media, content marketing, and online reviews influence how visible you are in SERPs. You should also track these metrics so you can understand what factors affect your search engine visibility. This will help you determine which changes to make when optimizing your website, especially if your website is new.

You should also track conversions and sales or other metrics that are important to your business over time. Tracking the impact of SEO on your bottom line (and not just how visible you are in SERPs) will help you understand whether or not it’s working for you, especially if there aren’t obvious changes in your website’s rankings.

When you track your SEO success, it will help you understand what works for your business and it can also give you an indication of which areas need improvement. Measuring is the only way to know whether or not your efforts are paying off so you should measure frequently and consistently in order to see real results.

How NetLocal Can Help

NetLocal is a leading provider of SEO and online marketing services. We offer a variety of tools and services to help our clients track their SEO progress and measure their success. To learn more about our services, check out the rest of our website.

Conclusion

SEO is an ongoing process. It can be difficult to measure success, but by using the principles of SEO and tracking your progress over time you’ll be able to see how it’s helping or hindering your business. You should measure frequently and consistently so that you know what works for your business!

NetLocal offers a wide range of services including website design, development, social media marketing, and online reputation management.

NetLocal SEO
107 W Pine St Suite A
Lakeland, FL 33815
phone: (863) 943-2425

John DiBella

John DiBella is the founder and CEO of NetLocal, a local SEO agency specializing in SEO for consumer medical practices and author of the ebook SEO for the Small Business Owner.  email: john@netlocalseo.com

www.netlocalseo.com/

NetLocal Local SEO Services for Small Business

Did you know that the google search algorithm factors in the geographic location of the searcher?
When someone searches “hair stylist” or “laser hair removal” on google, the algorithm assumes they are looking for a hair stylist or laser hair removal service geographically near them and offers local businesses in the results.

NetLocal specializes in Local SEO that leverages this algorithm factor to optimize your website and google listing to rank higher for searches by potential customers in your area who are actively looking for your services.

How do we do that?

We use a range of SEO techniques that magnify your geographic address and/or service area while building trust and authority for your website.
By doing this your website and google listing can rank higher for searchers in a wider geographic area.
We only work with local businesses. It’s our specialty. Our track record speaks for itself.
Get started now. Submit a free analysis form to get a personalized video analysis of your business’s local SEO.
We’ll provide an analysis along with recommendations for improvement.

Offices in:

NetLocal Philadelphia 226 West Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103 phone: (215) 874-0744
NetLocal Chester Springs.122 Pottstown Pike, Chester Springs, PA 19425 phone: (484) 291-4916
NetLocal Lancaster 565 Greenfield Rd, Lancaster, PA 17601 phone: (717) 406-1763
NetLocal Allentown 1908 W Allen St Suite 104, Allentown, PA 18104 phone: (610) 492-7070
NetLocal Altoona 1407 Blair St Suite 2, Altoona, PA 16648 phone: (814) 499-1601
NetLocal Harrisburg 5002 Lenker St suite 203, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050 phone: (814) 499-1601
NetLocal Bentonville 609 SW 8th Street 6th Floor, Bentonville, AR 72712 phone: (479) 202-9092
NetLocal Hartford 100 Pearl Street 14th Floor, Hartford, CT 06103 phone: (959) 245-1715
NetLocal Little Rock 400 West Capitol Avenue Suite 1700, Little Rock, AR 72201 phone: (501) 391-1238
NetLocal Wilkes-Barre 45 E Northampton Street, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18701 phone: (570) 281-8357

John DiBella

John DiBella is the founder and CEO of NetLocal, a local SEO agency specializing in SEO for consumer medical practices and author of the ebook SEO for the Small Business Owner.  email: john@netlocalseo.com

www.netlocalseo.com/

Real-Time Analytics

Multi-Channel Funnels

Mobile Reporting

Flow Visualization
Flow Visualization is a tool for showing how people navigate through out your website. Google has completely redesigned the navigation tools available in the old version of Google Analytics.

Video demo & Usage guides for Visitor Flow, Goal Flow

Over the next few weeks as they make Google Analytics v5 the default for all users, they are simultaneously rolling out the report email scheduler and PDF export.

Need to check something in the old version?
Google is extremely confident in their new version but if you need to refer to the old version, there is a safety latch.  Look in the top right corner of Google Analytics and you’ll see a link for Old Version. Switch back and forth as much as you need, but keep in mind, that the old version will only be available until early next year.

Want help adjusting to the new version?
The Google Analytics Help Center is up to date on all the step by step of how to navigate Analytics using the new version. Google has also been running a series on the Google Analytics blog that explores many of the changes and new features. And, there is a section of the Google Analytics Help Forum where you can ask questions and discuss the new version.

To stay up to date on new features, make sure you opt-in to receive Newsletters in your Google Analytics account settings.

John DiBella

John DiBella is the founder and CEO of NetLocal, a local SEO agency specializing in SEO for consumer medical practices and author of the ebook SEO for the Small Business Owner.  email: john@netlocalseo.com

www.netlocalseo.com/

Authority  – (trust, link juice, Google juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.

Blog – A personal journal published on the web consisting of entries or posts displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent posts appear first.

Content – (text, copy) The part of a web page has the highest value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.

Conversion – (goal) Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Sales, ad clicks, and sign-ups are examples of conversions.

Conversion Rate – Percentage of users who convert – see conversion.

Crawler – (bot, spider) A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.

Directory – A site devoted to directory pages. One example of this is the Yahoo! directory.

Duplicate Content – Content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for having duplicate content but it will receive little, if any, trust from the search engines compared to the content that the search engine considers being the original.

Google Bomb – A combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for amusing effect. The “miserable failure” – George Bush, and “greatest living American” – Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples.

Google Juice – (Trust, Authority, PageRank) Trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.

Googlebot – Google’s spider program

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) – directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

Impression – (page view) When a user visits a webpage.

Inbound Link – (in-link, incoming link) Incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.

Index (Noun) – a database of web pages and their content used by the search engines.

Index (Verb) – to add a web page to a search engine index.

Indexed Pages – The pages on a site which have been indexed.

Inline Text Links – Hyper-links within the copy of a web page as part of a sentence.

Keyword – (Key Phrase) The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.

Keyword Density – The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.

Keyword Research – The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

Keyword Spam – (keyword stuffing) Inappropriately high keyword density.

Keyword Stuffing – (keyword spam) Inappropriately high keyword density.

Landing Page – the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a search engine results page (SERP).

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”. Go figure.

Link – An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.

 Link Building – actively cultivating incoming links to a site.

Link Exchange – a reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.

Link Juice – Google’s “currency”.  In other words, it’s the “secret sauce” that enables you to beat your competition for ranks on Google.

Link Popularity – a measure of the value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it.

Link Spam (Comment Spam) – Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments.

Link Text (Anchor text) – The user visibility text of a link. Search engines use anchor texts to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

Long Tail – Longer, more specific search queries that are less targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “trucks” might be very broad while “2006 red Dodge Ram” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are normally long tail.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) – This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”

META tags – Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

Natural Search Results – The search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.

Pagerank (PR) – a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors.

Search Engine (SE) – A program which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a user’s keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.

Search Engine Algorithm  – A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.

SEO – Acronym for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine.

SERP – This is an acronym for Search Engine Results Page.

Social Bookmark – A form of Social Media where user’s bookmarks are aggregated for public access.

Social Media – Various online technologies used by people to share information and ideas. Blogs, forums, wikis, social bookmarking, user reviews, and rating sites (Digg, Reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Website or brand promotion through social media

Spider (bot, crawler) – A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

Text Link – A plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator – AKA Web Address

John DiBella

John DiBella is the founder and CEO of NetLocal, a local SEO agency specializing in SEO for consumer medical practices and author of the ebook SEO for the Small Business Owner.  email: john@netlocalseo.com

www.netlocalseo.com/

I will ponder some of the questions around topic this in this post.

As a small business owner;  ”has my phone been ringing?” is really the bottom line, yes? But it hard to be sure what marketing effort, or combination of efforts, generated the calls. So what metrics should the small business owner use to measure SEO ROI?

What Information Should Your SEO Provider be Sending You

But to answer that we need to answer the question of where the SEO company’s responsibilities begin and end first. The SEO may be getting rankings for the right keywords but the website may not be designed to convert. Or maybe they are not writing compelling Titles to improve click through. Good ranking and poor business results can be due to a combination of many factors.

To achieve good SEO ROI all the links in the chain must be in place; The right keywords, compelling titles for high click through and landing pages designed to convert. So what metrics should the SEO use when reporting to the client if they are going to be truly honest about results?

A high percent of conversions for local businesses are in the form of phone calls. We could ask our clients to diligently track by asking every lead how they found them. And many businesses do. But that can still be misleading because callers many times are confused as to what web source they actually looked at to reach the business.

Three Analytics Stats to Consider

Along with Keyword ranking reports NetLocal SEO clients also get reports on these three additional metrics.
1. look at the keywords you are being found for. Are they they kinds of search phrases people looking to buy would us? Are there head keywords? Are there a lot of long tail keywords? Is the list growing over time?

2. Bounce rate. The bounce rate is the % of people who come to your website but leave quickly, within 10 seconds. There is no hard standard that I’m aware of but I would say that (I’ll probably catch heat for this. I’m basing this on our client’s who I know have good landing pages and are getting clicks for productive keywords) 45% is good. Anything less is great. Anything over 60% or 70% is problematic. A high bounce rate can mean that you are getting clicks from wrong keywords or that your landing pages aren’t effective.

3. Click through rate. Once you have achieved good positions you need the searchers to first at least pick your link to click on. More clicks (for productive keyword searchs) the higher your odds are for getting a call. And it is also an SEO signal. The higher click through rates benefit your rankings.

If your SEO campaign is doing well in all three of the factors above the result should be increased leads. Your in house sales will have to take it from there. Don’t just look at the keyword rankings. That will not necessarily indicate a successful SEO campaign.

NetLocal SEO Packages
Call 800-453-7181 to speak to an Small Business SEO Specialist

John DiBella

John DiBella is the founder and CEO of NetLocal, a local SEO agency specializing in SEO for consumer medical practices and author of the ebook SEO for the Small Business Owner.  email: john@netlocalseo.com

www.netlocalseo.com/