Google use their bots to scan websites, as you can imagine it’s a massive task, one that can’t be done manually as there is just far too much content on the internet for that.

You may be wondering why Google would need to scan websites in the first place. Well there are a number of reasons but one of the big reasons that we are going to discuss here is that it helps Google to decide what position to place your dental website in when listing results from an organic keyword search.

Googles algorithms are a complex system used to retrieve data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. The search engine uses a combination of algorithms and numerous ranking factors to deliver webpages ranked by relevance on its search engine results pages (SERPs).

So if you want to rank higher in Google, you’ll need to consider the recommendations below.

• Improve your onsite SEO
• Use internal linking
• Improve website speed and how quickly content loads
• Monitor your technical SEO
• Match your content to search intent
• Reduce your bounce rate
• Publish high quality content
• Build authorative backlinks to your site (quality is better than quantity)
• Track and monitor your results

Google’s aim is to serve the most relevant and up to date content to their users. Even though your website doesn’t need any serious updates, adding new content should always be a priority. A website that isn’t updated frequently will start to sink in the search engine rankings, be less appealing to customers and worse – no longer deemed a valuable resource.

If your dental website is out of date, chances are, you’ll have to build a new website instead of just updating everything on the old site where you will potentially encounter problems and risk losing rank altogether. It may actually cost you more time and money compared to creating a brand new dental website.

And so the question you need to ask yourself is –Is Google overlooking your site in favour of your competitors? And most importantly can you fix this and start seeing results.

Yes of course, but firstly you need to critically review what’s going on with your site.

• How old is it, when was it built?
• Have you added any new content to the website since then?
• What is the page word count on average and is this enough?
• Do you have a news or blog section?
• Is the video content on your website optimised for speed?
• Are the images on the website compressed for speed?
• Are you 100% sure the content on the site is mostly unique?
• Are your plugins up to date?
• Is your load speed under 4 seconds
• What are your desktop and mobile scores?
• What template is it built on and where is it hosted?

There are lots of things to consider and it’s just really about knowing what to check for. The last Google Core Algorithm update was in June and July and you may have seen your ranking positions fluctuate in August and September as a result. If this is the case, you really should start paying attention to the list above or run the risk of further ranking drops.

If you’d like us to help you with your website performance and speed so that you can maintain or improve Google search engine results, get in touch.