16 Feb
As a doctor who may be new to the field of medical marketing, you may have seen “optimize your medical site!”, “ALWAYS OPTIMIZE YOUR MEDICAL CONTENT” and “one of the keys to online exposure is optimization”. While this all is true and you do need to optimize your medical site to make it “live” on the internet, there may be the risk of you Over-optimizing your medical website.
Yes, there is a reason why all marketing experts warn about marketing strategies. All marketing strategies, whether medical or not, must be conducted in a balanced way. Over-do it, you mess up, don’t do it all the way enough, you still mess up. Similarly, the optimization of a website falls in the same line.
Previously, there was no such thing as “over-optimizing your medical website”, but since Google is continually introducing strict algorithms day after day, over-optimization of a website is now considered a bad practice in the eyes of Google and can cost you, the ranking of your online medical business.
What Is Over-Optimization Of A Website?
According to Google, over-optimization of a website occurs when a website grows heavy with unnecessary and irrelevant SEO and content strategies. The penalty of over-optimization can cost you a downgrade of your medical site’s ranking and a chance to lose all your organic search index traffic.
Over-optimization was made prohibited to improve user-experience online. This was announced as a mal-practice by Google in 2012 when it announced its Penguin update.
How Can You Avoid Over-Optimizing Your Medical Website?
Since it has been quite a while now since over-optimization of a website was announced as mal-practice, it is quite easy to avoid some SEO and content practices that can lead up to over-optimization of your medical site. While you are optimizing your medical site, just keep the below practices in mind to avoid over-optimizing.
Stray Clear From Non-Relevant Medical Keywords
Keywords are the pillar of your online medical business, but to be successful, they need to be as relevant as possible. If you incorporate a campaign full of irrelevant medical keywords, you are ensuring the chances of your medical site being over-optimized.
This is a practice that also affects your patient traffic as well because once patients seek out your medical site, they are quickly going to see that your medical content riddled with irrelevant keywords isn’t the thing they are searching for.
This also affects the audit that Google performs on your medical site to rank it, once it comes across all those irrelevant medical keywords, it will downgrade your ranking and the strength of your medical site on search engine result pages.
Manage Your Link Exchange Wisely
This practice is a trade of links between two admin websites and is one of the most famous link-building practices of all time. Link exchange can result in quite massive link networks if it is used excessively. This is why link exchange is considered a practice that can lead to site over-optimization.
If link exchange is done excessively on a medical site, it can lead up to incorporating toxic or irrelevant links in the network which can damage the link chain and your medical site’s standing. Make sure to only add links that are thoroughly checked for any irrelevant or harmful connections.
Say No To The Practice Of Keyword Stuffing
Some people take keywords almost too seriously and consider stuffing their site’s content with them as a way to get their site to rank higher on SERPs. This practice is called keyword stuffing and is something you should at all costs avoid doing on your medical site. A page of content that is full to the brim with nonsensical keywords is useless and irrelevant to Google, so it doesn’t rank it at all.
If your medical site has content that may have a proportion of 60% keywords and 40% information, you must edit it immediately as this can lead to Over-optimizing your medical site. Google only considers content that depends on its relevance, engagement, and information rather than the keywords as the best type of content.
Keep A Track On Your Backlink Volume
Organic backlinks take some time to build. If Google comes across a large volume of backlinks that are multiplying at a suspiciously fast rate, it immediately recognizes this as a cheat and bars the site that is doing it for ranking.
Always make sure to have natural backlinks on your medical site that has a steady rate of growth. The largest volume of generating backlinks for your medical site can be 50-100 per day, and this also depends on your medical services field, patient traffic, and so on.
Focus On Your Medical Content’s Intent
Google immediately pins down content if it is written just for a keyword, specifically. Content that is only created for the purposes of a keyword campaign is a practice that can severely Over-optimizing your medical website.
While the main reason for content creation is satisfying the keywords but it is crucial to always keep the tone and relevancy of your medical content in check. The best way to create medical content for a high ranking is to focus its objective on just informing, engaging, and providing the patients what they seek from it.
A site that has 100 pages of content will rank lower or not at all compared to the one with just 50 pages if its content intent solely depends upon satisfying its keyword campaign. Make sure that your medical content’s intent is always to engage and inform your patients.
Avoid Over-Optimizing Your Medical Site At All Costs
It is quite easy to over-optimize your medical healthcare website if you don’t conduct your SEO and content strategies in a balanced way. Over-optimizing your medical website also occurs when a site tries to follow cheat hacks to gain traffic. Google is quite fast in shooting these kinds of sites down which is why you should always be extremely careful in optimizing your medical site and following the honest ways to earn patient traffic.
