Plastic Surgery SEO, web presence and tools to snoop on your website developers.
Website Developers & WordPress
The emergence of the world wide web and the plastic surgery internet presence over 2 decades ago has revolved around Google’s Zoo animal updates, industry ethics, and general competitive marketing efforts. However, website development has evolved with easier design avenues, software platforms, and of course the emergence of the “plugin.”
Easier web development platforms, such as WordPress, have enabled plastic surgery practices to have better control over content and property. Yet too many plastic surgery practices continue to have a laissez-faire approach and over-trusting ignorance of their websites when dealing with the new mass market of sham-pow WordPress marketing goons. These guys took some courses on how to make WordPress websites, perhaps coming from a sales or business background, maybe a fresh marketing background. Then, acquire a few clients, develop a website, and seek more clients.
Sham-Pow-WordPress-Goons
Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress. It is easy to use and a great platform with great features. If you can properly handle a Gillies Needle Driver, you can learn how to navigate the WordPress admin dashboard to your website. However, these sham-pow-WordPress-goons might be cutting you short in your SEO especially if they are depending on a plug-in to determine your SEO.
These amateur website developers are the equivalent of what “cosmetic cowboys” are to plastic surgery. They take a few courses online, download the ChatGPT app and believe they are ready to go. Have you heard the story about the cosmetic cowboy using ChatGPT to guide them through a tummy tuck in the operating room?
Imagine your website guy using ChatGPT to not only create generic content for your web content, but also depending on it to guide them on their overall SEO efforts. By the way, Google knows the difference.
Asking ChatGPT the simple question, “What is SEO?” It returns a few paragraphs referring to the usual definitions we all know about, but then outlines areas of SEO as:
- Website content
- Meta tags
- Headings
- URLs
- Improving Site Speed
- Mobile friendliness
- User Experience
After the recent acquisition of a few new clients, I write this blog with my new nickname for lousy website developers clouding the internet with their own fancy websites and big talk. From the looks at their work, they are truly sham-pow-WordPress-goons. Perhaps you are one of their victims. Your website doesn’t rank, and your web development guys are stuck on selling you PPC campaigns. Afterall, they love that “French fry” web sale.
So, let’s get back to why you are in this website-drive-through buying that double cheeseburger website. You want it loaded: everything on it, and yes, we all want fries. Instead, you drive off before inspecting the bag to discover your burger doesn’t have cheese or any fixings. Your website SEO would be those fixings.
Bear with me as my creative muses attempt to explain the primary importance of SEO. In no way am I advising to discontinue PPC. The cost of a PPC campaign directly correlates to the landing webpage, or website rank and value. Not to mention the success of the conversion. If your SEO is not top notch, then your PPC campaign will be more costly than necessary.
To understand the building of your SEO, let’s go back to the fixings of that double cheeseburger:
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The Cheese: On-Page SEO
Content is king, and the cheese is king here. Your content should NOT be the robotic ChatGPT these sham-pow-WordPress-goons believe to be not only adequate, but somehow “superior” as they instruct the app to include a key word or two.
How this content creation engine fails as it pertains to plastic surgery and your practice is your surgical preferences, techniques, and the failure to address keyword variations. Merely using “breast augmentation” as the only keyword for this procedure page is a SEO failure as your patients are searching for other variations and questions about the procedure.
Images are huge in the plastic surgery industry and your website is the center of your marketing galaxy for patient acquisition. Failing to post before and after photos on your procedure pages presents a major mistake. Website visitors want to see your work, not buy a painting without seeing it, and if they don’t envision themselves in your photos, they will move on to your competitor. Also, directing website visitors to a sister gallery page may be acceptable, but assuming they will find it on their own is an obvious mistake.
Additionally, the use of before and after photos on the procedure pages increases user engagement and time spent on that page. That time is viewed by Google as the visitor savoring the page and enjoying it: the page has value. Lastly, the presentation of your photos must be great quality, formatted with the same aspect ratio and then optimized for the web which we will address later.
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Lettuce & Tomato: Local SEO
By now everyone should know about Google Business Profile and the importance it has on your business presence on Google. Proper optimization of your GBP is not only important as it pertains to your website, but the general search traffic. Google pays attention to the attention you pay to the assets they provide to you. Like your website content, the content you post here should not be generic, but personalized, showcasing how your practice is different or better than your competitors.
The same attention needs to be paid to local directories and other search engine opportunities to maintain your business presence. Again, your website developers or web presence team should not be spamming these business listings with generic content. Real people are reading it too, not just keyword searching bots.
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Pickles & Onions: Reputation SEO
A major component to your Google Business Profile listing is the review section. Business review sites are growing on the web and compete with each other for traffic. The attraction of the negative review generates more traffic than a handful of positive reviews and review sites know this. They monetize your business reputation and mine your patient’s data. The plastic surgery industry knows the good from the bad as almost every practice has a story of known positive reviews NOT being shown on certain sites, but in many cases unverified negative reviews remaining at the top of their business listing and you have no control to remove it.
Google is aware of these nefarious review sites and their sketchy business practices. Since Google is still king for web search, special attention should be made to your reviews there. Encouraging patients to support you is merely the first step to the optimization of your GBP. Responding to each review with a thank-you or other appropriate response is just as important as the review acquisition.
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The Art of the Sandwich: Technical SEO
The Art of the Sandwich is a great book for any aspiring chef that seeks to master the making of a sandwich. Within the pages of this culinary favorite, is a description of how to properly spread the condiments. Afterall, no one wants to bite into the sandwich and only find the mayo and/or mustard in the center. The technical handling of sandwich condiments directly correlates to the handling of technical SEO.
Perhaps the greatest failure of the sham-pow-WordPress-goons is the technical SEO because these guys aren’t truly HTML coders and haven’t been around long enough to understand old SEO practices Google stopped feeding in their zoo long ago. The world wide web is ever growing and keeping up with the coding side is equally important as the viewing side. Inexperienced website developers are counting on your ignorance and inability to identify the technical SEO inadequacies contributing to your website’s ranking. Google is watching you on the HTML side and so should you.
Perhaps the greatest SEO sabotage to the plastic surgery website is the lack of ALT tags. Any website developer that dismisses the importance of ALT tags should be dismissed themselves.
ALT tags not only tell search engine bots what the image is but are a major component for viewers with disabilities. For this reason, ALT tags are required by Google. Adding keyword rich ALT tags is far too easy to do in WordPress without any knowledge of HTML. Knowing the importance of before-and-after photos to your content and that Google doesn’t know these images exist is a massive reason why your website isn’t ranking. Seriously. If you don’t have ALT tags, don’t even bother putting images on your website.
Another failing factor for the fly-by-night website developers is their dependence on plugins to direct their optimization efforts. However, these SEO plugins fail to tell them everything much less what Google thinks of each web page. They install the plugin but ignore the truly technical HTML SEO. Yes, Google will tell you the errors their bots see, and SEO shortcomings such as proper sequence of header tags: H1, H2, H3, H4. Yeh, Google wants to “see” sequential use of header tags.
Even with access to an array of WordPress plugins, the sham-pow-WordPress-goons still lack either knowledge or integrity to take advantage of them to properly utilize for basic SEO applications such as Schema. Schema is literally a background code that describes webpage elements to search engine robots such as what kind of business, services, products, videos on the page, images on the page, articles, and so on. Legitimate web developers understand the importance of creating these codes for SEO as the existence of these codes on each web page can lead to better visibility. You can check each of your web pages for the Schema coding for FREE using the Schema Markup Validator tool:
For the record, you want the results to show your pages are coded for the local business, physician, and services. Your blog posts should be marked-up as articles.
Then we have site speed and first paint. I recently took on a website from a client that I declared upfront the site was a full-spectrum-sabotage effort: not a single ALT tag, ZERO on page SEO, content was inadequate at best, chaos menu, and even discovered an image with a competitor’s logo (having clearly been snatched from their website). Imagine my horror after stumbling upon this. None of the images had been optimized for web to address first-paint and load speed, but rather appeared to be excessively large, with zero meta file info.
Optimization of your image assets includes not just meta info but begins with the creation of the image. The time it takes for each image to load is vital in technical SEO. This site’s Google PageSpeed Insight Performance score was 24. Without completely redesigning the entire site, I have been able to improve that score to 95. When I presented the Google PageSpeed Insight report to a different client’s website fella, he straight up stated he had no idea what that was. Noted.
For the record, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is their free scoring card. Google literally tells you in this report what to fix, and in many cases how. Why would you NOT want to ask Google what they think of your web pages? You can check each web page score for FREE using PageSpeed Insights:
In Conclusion
By no means is this article a comprehensive Plastic Surgery SEO list, but a starting point of important factors, most of which I have observed by inexperienced website developers. In my observations, their business goals consist of acquiring more clients, preying on the lure of a new website over driving results in the long run through proper SEO, and consistent upgrading of content and design. The merry-go-round of hiring a new website developer to build a new website because their current one isn’t working will never generate results unless the entire sandwich is approached first: identifying why the current website isn’t working.
Building a website is a huge project, but as mentioned earlier, your website is the center of your plastic surgery practice marketing galaxy. Not to stroke your ego, but you are the God of that galaxy, your website is the Sun, leaving Google Business Profile, other search engine business listings, review sites, and back-link sites your planets. It’s your web developers’ job to make sure search engine bots do not get shortchanged on your cheeseburger. Your website is an on-going optimization effort. Google needs to see you pay attention to your website to understand how important it is to you.
In the world of SEO, this article could go on for days, but I need to go make a sandwich and look for my Gillies Needle Driver. Thank you for reading.
