If you monitor the search ranking performance of your website regularly, you may have noticed a change in how your health business appears on Google, more specifically a drop in where your clinic website appears on the Google search results.
This almost certainly isn’t as a result of anything bad or negative with your website. Instead, this has been caused by a recent Google search ranking algorithm change (the biggest change for a number of years), which has dramatically reduced the generic exposure most health business websites receive from Google. This change has been so dramatic that many experts are coining it as “the death of SEO”.
What it basically means is that Google is making it increasingly difficult for your website to rank highly in the search results, regardless of how well it is set up. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon (or marketing expert) to work out why Google are doing this. The simple answer is … MONEY.
Google is a business. When you get past any fluffy, altruistic sounding mission statement, the reality is that Google’s charter is identical to any other business; make more money! It is therefore more interested in getting you to pay for Google Ads then help you rank higher than its paying customers, for free. Being a practical monopoly should trigger some laws about this kind of behaviour of course, unfortunately it doesn’t, so Google are pretty much able to do what they want.
So what can you do?
Well as it happens there is still one free service that Google actually promotes which, if you’re not already using, you probably need to start; Google My Business. If you haven’t checked your Google My Business listing in the last 3 months you’ll be amazed how many new features have arrived. If you don’t even have a Google My Business listing – then you need to get onto this ASAP! If you haven’t configured your GMB listing, please be sure to use the same Google account to which your website’s Google Analytics is attached; management becomes a bit of a nightmare otherwise!
The following two links are useful if you’re new to the whole Google My Business scene. The first is a link to Google’s overview of GMB, while the second is a guide to configuring and optimising GMB:
It is important to note that GMB is NOT a replacement for your website. It is very structured and offers no real method of differentiation, so your primary focus for converting visitors to clients should remain your website. GMB should be viewed as a means of getting exposure and enticing the client to your website.
“I have no idea about any of this Google stuff! Can you help me please?”
Yes, certainly! We have a couple of very competitively priced options available for setting up GMB for you. If you’re not comfortable or “techy” and just want it done, contact us via the following form and mention “Google My Business setup” in the message: