How to Blow Away Your Competition on Google Search Results-How to Blow Away Your Competition on Google Search Results Recording

How to Blow Away Your Competition on Google Search Results Recording
Video Transcription
Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, How to Blow Your Competition Away on Google Search Results.  We're so glad that you could be here today to learn powerful search engine optimization techniques, specifically for hearing aid practice owners.  Your moderators for today are me, Ted Annis, Senior Marketing Specialist. And Suzanne Hill, Professional Development Supervisor. Our expert presenter today is Stephanie Erickson.  Stephanie is the co-founder of Odd SEO, a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO services for hearing aid practice owners.  Before co-founding Odd SEO, Stephanie worked with small business owners on social media marketing campaigns to acquire new customers in their local markets.  Stephanie has also worked for Yelp.com, a leading review and recommendation site that drives customers to local businesses.  Stephanie combines her hearing industry knowledge with her internet marketing expertise to help hearing aid practices expand and strengthen their online presence.  We're very excited to have Stephanie as our presenter today, but before we get started, we have just a few housekeeping items.  Please note that we're recording today's presentation so that we may offer it on demand through the IHS website in the future.  This website, or this webinar, is available for one continuing education credit through the International Hearing Society.  You can find out more about receiving continuing education credit at our website, ihsinfo.org.  Click on the webinar banner on the homepage or choose webinars from the professional development menu on the left side of the page. There you will find the IHS CE quiz.  Also on the webinar page on the IHS site, you will find slides from today's presentation to help you gather the information you'll need for the CE quiz.  If you haven't already downloaded the PDF, feel free to do so now. Tomorrow you'll receive an email with a link to a survey on this webinar.  It is brief and your feedback will help us create valuable content for you moving forward.  Today we will be covering the following topics, seniors and baby boomers online, major factors in local SEO, content creation, social media, and review sites.  At the end of the presentation, we'll move on to a Q&A session. You can send us a question for Stephanie at any time by entering your question in the  question box on the webinar dashboard, usually located at the right of your webinar screen. We'll take as many questions as we can in the time we have available.  Now I'm going to turn it over to Stephanie who will guide you through today's presentation. Take it away, Stephanie. Great.  Thank you, Ted, and thank you everyone for attending the webinar. I'm really excited to discuss local search engine optimization specifically for hearing aid practices.  I'd like to begin by kind of putting everyone at ease.  We're going to cover a lot of information today, and I want everyone to realize that we're all coming from different places.  Some of you may have a website that has been up for years and you've been investing time and effort into your search engine optimization for a very long time, and you're looking for  new ideas, ways that you can push the ball a little bit farther. Others of you perhaps don't even have a website at all and are looking to get started and  for tips to kind of build the foundation, and I'm sure there's many of you in between. This presentation is designed for everyone.  At the end of the presentation, I'm going to go over some very helpful tips, seven specifically,  of things that you can do to improve your search engine optimization yourself for your practice.  So while this may not really be an ancient proverb, it is still great advice nonetheless. Slow and steady does win the SEO race. All right.  So I'd like to lay the groundwork for why we're even discussing digital marketing and briefly discuss some traditional marketing trends. We have the typical suspects here.  We've got newspaper, direct mail, TV, and radio. So newspapers, unsurprisingly, they're on the decline, and this goes across all age groups.  And more importantly for us, we look at the 65-plus category. We've seen quite a drop in the past decade.  In 1999, 72% was the rate that people aged 65-plus were reading the newspaper. Fast forward to 2013, it's already down to 55%. Direct mail response is also declining.  44% of direct mail never even gets opened, and there's actually even been a 25% drop in the response rate between 2003 and 2012.  And quite honestly, I have clients say to me, well, you know, Stephanie, I know that that's going down. I know newspapers and direct mail is going down.  But my patients in my town, they still read the newspaper. They still call me for my direct mail piece. And while this is true, we have to realize that it's less than it was before.  And these trends are only going to keep going down. Furthermore, looking at TV and radio, you can see that obviously television viewership is down, and so is radio.  So you guys aren't here to learn about traditional marketing data. Let's move into what you are here about.  Seniors and baby boomers online, and we're going to discuss the digital opportunity. So internet usage among seniors has gone up dramatically.  So among seniors that go online, 71% are going online every single day. And there's an additional 11% that are going on three to four times a week.  Okay, so we know 70% are online every day, but what percentage of the age group we're targeting are actually online? Well, for those age 65 to 69, 74% are online.  A few more pieces of data to help win you guys over, specifically for our target demographic,  it's important to note that 90% of seniors that have an annual household income of $75,000 or more are online. 90%, that is a tremendous number that is worth paying attention to.  Furthermore, 87% of seniors with a college degree are also online. So we've got some top online activities for seniors, and surprisingly enough, it's not AARP.com.  Actually, we're looking at Google as the number one activity for seniors, followed up by Facebook, Yahoo, and YouTube. So let's get to the meat of the matter.  We're going to discuss things that you can do, practical, actionable steps that you can take in order to improve your local search engine optimization. So what is local SEO?  Well, they're efforts that you make to rank well specifically for the keywords that are surrounding the products and services that you offer.  So that when somebody in your town, they search locally for what you provide, they can easily find your practice and then, of course, hopefully spend money with you.  So why is local SEO important? Well, one thing to consider, the long-term versus short-term efforts.  So advertising efforts such as pay-per-click advertising, for example, or even direct mail pieces, these can be considered short-term efforts.  And the reason for this is that while you're investing money in these efforts, you're seeing the return, and it's wonderful. You have new leads coming in, and it's great.  But the moment you stop investing money in these activities, the leads stop. It's not a long-term effort. Local search engine optimization can fall under that long-term category.  And the reason for that is we are improving your organic search results. These are results you can't pay directly to rank number one or two on Google.  But the efforts that you make have a long-lasting effect to help your site continuously rank well on Google, and you see new leads coming in down the road month after month without  having to invest a tremendous amount of money. Another reason that we should care about local SEO is that for any of you that may have a  far-off distant fantasy of retiring someday and selling your practice, obviously having  a solid web presence, you have a system in place that helps bring your practice new leads on a consistent basis. This is an added value to your practice.  And finally, I'd like to discuss the return on your investment. So we are focusing on local SEO versus just SEO in general because while it would be incredibly  impressive if we got your local site to rank nationally for these big keywords like hearing aids, for example, get you above all the manufacturers and all the dot orgs that exist  around hearing loss and hearing aids, but really you're not going to benefit if somebody across the United States finds your website.  Our goal is to find local people, bring them in as patients. Okay, so beyond just the long-term versus short-term, because you could just invest in pay-per-click advertising.  It is online. You're getting new patients from it. But something to pay attention to, it's very important, is that 70% of all search traffic  is going to be organic results, not the paid results. And that number actually keeps climbing. So when people do a simple search, I'm sure we've all done this same thing.  You're searching on Google for something. Our brains are now trained to skip over those first three advertisements. The reason for this is that we know they've paid to be there.  We don't necessarily trust that. We want to look at the organic results, the list that is below the advertisement to choose which business we're going to spend money with.  So now moving on. In order to prioritize which steps that you should take, because you guys are all busy. You're running practices. You're seeing patients.  You need to prioritize which efforts you're going to make with your online presence. So let's discuss the major factors in local search engine optimization.  They include on-site optimization, off-site optimization, user experience, social media, and content. So let's begin with on-site optimization.  For those of you who aren't familiar, on-site optimization, it refers to efforts that you make actually on your website in order to get that site to rank better on search engine.  So these type of efforts are going to include things like the copy on your pages. So the wording and the actual content of your website. It also includes the keyword density.  And what this refers to is the number of times that your targeted keyword shows up on your website. Next up are going to be your image alt tags.  And what these are is that each image on your website, on the back end, you can kind of basically attach a few keywords that give Google an idea of what that image is, since  they can't really read your picture. It's a way for them to understand. And you're able to tack on things like hearing aids in Portland, for example.  And finally, we've got meta descriptions and meta titles, which I will explain in more detail. So for meta titles and descriptions, these are, you'll see an example here.  These are little snippets that pop up on search results when somebody does a search for anything. They see a list of results.  And with each result, you'll notice a title in dark blue, as pointed out here. That is called your meta title.  Right below, in green, is the URL where the person will end up if they click on that title.  And then, of course, right below, a couple sentences, mini paragraphs, called your meta description. So meta titles and descriptions are very important, and for different reasons.  They're both basically mini sales pitches. It's your two seconds that you can try and win someone over to click over to your website over clicking on your competition.  The most common mistakes I see with practice owners and their websites' meta titles and descriptions is that perhaps none were set up at all.  And therefore, the website is pulling default titles and descriptions. And they're all exactly the same for all of your pages.  And what we really want to do is make sure that you have unique titles for each of your pages. I highly recommend everybody here combing through your site and looking through to see  what is coming up if you find your website in search results. And spend some time thinking about what keywords do I want to focus on each page.  And then write your meta titles and descriptions around those keywords. So a couple tips on what you should do when you're writing your own.  You want to keep the title between 50 and 60 characters. Otherwise, Google and other search engines are going to truncate your title and not show it all.  Another very important thing to think about is how you're positioning your keywords. You do want to place the keywords first up in the title.  And then at the very end, tag on your practice name as opposed to the reverse, which is actually quite common in the industry. I see it very often.  So place your keywords first and then the branding of your practice. You want to keep it closely related to the page content.  You never want to mislead someone or try and trick them to click on your website. So we all could put free hearing aids, that sort of thing,  and get, I'm sure, a lot of clicks to your website. But that's kind of, not kind of, that is misleading people.  And you are going to have a very high return to the search results because of it.  And finally, you want to keep it clear, simple, and concise and avoid keyword stuffing. So keyword stuffing is saying the same keyword over and over.  So that would be a title like Hearing Aids, Hearing Aids, Hearing Aids in Portland. You want to avoid that. Google frowns upon those sort of actions.  And finally, when possible, you do want to mention your city name. And that is where we get the local SEO aspect included.  Okay, let's move on to meta descriptions. So again, these are the small paragraphs that are listed in the search results describing the page that somebody would click on.  So Google does not directly use these meta descriptions as a way to rank your site. It's kind of an indirect positive benefit for your practice.  And the reason I say that is because while Google doesn't look necessarily at what you say, it's strictly used to try and convince people to click on your site.  And so the more times that Google presents your website as an option, gives you an impression in search results,  it will look at the amount of times that people end up clicking on your website. And the more times that you are able to convert those searches into actual clicks,  you are going to see your website start improving in rank. So tips for writing your own meta descriptions. Just like the titles, you have a limit.  You want to keep it between 150 and 160 characters to avoid truncation. Anything beyond that, some of the search engines are going to just start cutting you off.  You want to write for humans, not for Google. Like I said, this is your sales pitch. You are trying to get somebody to click on you.  You want to keep it closely related to your page content just like the title. Keep it clear, simple, and concise.  So I would like to give you an example of a meta title and description so you can get started on the right foot for writing your own.  So let's pretend that I own a practice in Portland because my husband and I just adore Portland. So here is an example meta title that I would write for our home page,  Hearing Aids and Hearing Tests, Portland, Oregon, ABC Hearing. As you can see, we weren't terribly creative with our business name, but you get the idea here.  We've mentioned two of our most important keywords for acquiring new patients that are going to down the road hopefully buy hearing aids.  We've put the keywords right up front, hearing aids and hearing tests. Not keyword stuffing, even though you see hearing two times  because it's attached to other words that mean different things. We've mentioned our city name and then of course ended with our practice.  As for the example meta description, I put locally owned since 1987. ABC Hearing of Portland offers the best hearing aids with the highest quality aftercare.  Schedule your free hearing test today. So you're going to notice a couple things around this description. I started off with locally owned since 1987.  The reason for this is I wanted to instantly build credibility and trust with the potential patients, but I didn't just put up shop yesterday.  I've been in town for a long time and I'm independently owned. Furthermore, I of course mentioned my practice name,  but then I mentioned of Portland so that they know I'm truly local and it's relevant to them. Moving on, I mentioned best hearing aids.  And while this might not sound incredibly fancy, the term best hearing aids gets searched for quite a bit. People are looking for the best hearing aids. And so  by adding this keyword, I'm more likely to be presented to people searching for that term as well. And finally, I ended it with a solid call to action. Schedule your free  hearing test today. This does two things. It, of course, invites them to take an action, which we want. But it also lets them know, hey, I offer free hearing tests. So that serves  both purposes. Okay. So enough about meta titles and descriptions. Let's move on to offsite optimization. So you guessed it. Offsite optimization refers to efforts that you make  actually outside of your website in order to rank better on search engines. This is going to include directory submissions. So speaking of directory submissions, there  are dozens, if not hundreds, of directories that exist all across the Internet, many of which we don't even know about. But it's very important to consider this for your practice  because you don't have to even submit your practice information to be listed on these directories. They're actually very often pulling from major data aggregators, information  that is very often outdated, has your old suite number, perhaps an old tracking number, and it's posting that inconsistent information on different directories across the Internet.  This will negatively affect you because Google likes to see a consistent image of your practice  online in really any local business. It makes them feel more confident in presenting you. Another offsite optimization is going to be backlinks. So each of these directories,  they very often will have the opportunity for you to add your website URL. You always want to do this. And the reason for that is that it provides you with a backlink. And  these are going to be links to your website from other websites not associated with your own domain. Some steps that you can take to try and improve the quality and quantity  of backlinks you have are, you know, you kind of got to get creative about this. If, for example, you participated on a radio spot locally in your town, and you can possibly  reach out to that company, the radio, and see if on their website they can have a link to your website. Things like that. You have to kind of get creative. If you're a corporate  sponsor for a certain group, you could also ask to include your website URL. Okay. So the next major factor in local SEO is going to be the user experience. So what  is user experience? It's going to include, we're going to discuss the bounce rate, your page speed, your mobile friendliness, and your site layout. So a note about user experience.  This is often a very overlooked part of website design and search engine optimization. And as practice owners, you invest a lot of time and effort to make sure that your patient's  experience with your practice is convenient, it's comfortable, and it doesn't frustrate them at any step of the way. And we really need to think about our website in the same  manner. Because nowadays, many people, their first interaction with your practice is going  to be your website. If they're already frustrated before they've even made an appointment, you know, you're losing the opportunity to get that new patient.  So let's discuss bounce rate. Bounce rate represents the percentage of people that visit your website and then immediately bounce, which means they're going to leave your site  rather than engage in any of the content you have on your website. If you see that you have a high bounce rate, it can be caused by a variety of issues. I'm going to list  the most common here that are most relevant to practice owners. So if you have a high bounce rate, it could be that your site simply isn't providing what the user is seeking.  The pages are loading too slowly, perhaps, or your site may be difficult to navigate. So in order to check out your bounce rate, you simply need to sign up with Google Analytics,  and you're able to see page by page, and also overall, what your website bounce rate is. It's very common that certain pages are going to have a very high bounce rate, but it makes  sense. Like, for example, a thank you page after submitting a form, that's going to have a high rate of departure because they're happy with what they've done. But if your home page  has a very high bounce rate, it is of concern, and you want to look into what could possibly be causing the issue. If you need to sign up for Google Analytics, if you aren't already  signed up, you can click this link right here on the slide and set yourself up. So in terms of appropriate bounce rates, generally, you want to stay between 50 and 70%. And while  that sounds high, that is kind of industry standard. If you're going above a 70% bounce rate, that's when you want to look into what you can do to improve it. Maybe speak to your  webmaster or the company that is managing your website. All right. Next in user experience is your mobile-friendly design. This is important  because 60% of Internet traffic is now coming from mobile devices. Furthermore, Google is now showing a mobile-friendly label next to websites that meet their mobile requirements.  So if someone does a search on Google, and they get a list of results, and they're browsing  on their fancy new iPhone, they can very clearly see a gray label right next to the URL. I'll  show you an example here. You'll see in gray, it says mobile-friendly. It'll sit right next to the description, and it encourages people to click on that site over another site in  the result list that is not mobile-friendly. People know that if they click on mobile-friendly sites, sort of have a better experience. It's going to be easier to read. They're not  going to have to squint or perhaps try and click on a link on the site and accidentally hit the one they don't want. It's just very frustrating.  So in order to find out how friendly your website is, you can, of course, just hop on your smartphone and try looking at your website. But in order to see some finite information  about your mobile-friendliness, you can click on the link I have on this slide. You will simply enter your website URL, and it'll give you information about how friendly you  are and opportunities for improvement. All right, moving on to page speed. This is a very overlooked and this is just a very important part of your local search engine  optimization. This refers to the amount of time, on average, that it takes for a webpage to load for a user. So Google is taking this into account when  ranking you against your competition, because Google has found that users like it and spend  more time on sites when the pages load quickly. And Google's sole goal, their complete intention is to provide a good experience for people using their search engine.  And just like the mobile-friendly label, Google is actually now testing a slow label. It's going to be in red, so it's going to be even more present for people that are searching  on desktop and mobile, and it's going to indicate that your site loads very slowly. And naturally, having a slow-loading website is going to affect your bounce rate negatively.  So if you need to check out how quickly your website is loading, you can check out Page Speed Insights. It's a tool that's actually offered by Google, so they're not trying to  sell you anything. But if you click on this link, you're able to submit your URL and it'll give you instantly the results, basically a grading of how fast your site is loading,  both on desktop as well as mobile. Ideally, you want your – it's going to be  out of 100, so ideally you want to be above 70 or 75. Anything below that, you know, 50 to 70 is of concern. If you're below that, then you really should be concerned.  All right. The final aspect of user experience is going to be the website layout. So since we're targeting older clientele, there's a couple important things to consider. We want  our sites to be easy to read, uncluttered and clean, very easy to navigate, and you  want the location and hours of operation and contact information to be easily found on your website. So this is going to cover how large your font is. If when they first come  to your website, if it looks like a thesis that someone wrote, you know, if it's just a ton of information all in black, small font, that's a huge turnoff, and people are just  simply going to click back to the search results. So let's discuss content, and that I feel that content is queen. The reason I say this  is that content has more power than people give her credit for. So your content is kind  of in the – you know, it's behind the scenes, it's behind the on-site optimization efforts, but it really is driving your website up in terms of ranking. So creating quality content  is key. I highly recommend that everybody here starts considering what they can do to create on a consistent basis quality content for their website.  So this quality word is kind of a fluffy, vague statement, so let's try and quantify what that actually means. So you need your content to be original. You never, ever, ever,  ever want to post duplicate content onto your website. So this is going to include, for  example, copying and pasting an entire article relevant to hearing loss, but still from another  site and just putting that on your blog and writing a sentence or two about your opinion on it. That would be considered duplicate content.  You also want it to be relevant. So I've seen some practices that might be blogging consistently or posting to Twitter consistently, but you're seeing that it's just health-related  information as opposed to narrowly focused on hearing aids and hearing loss. You also, of course, want to be informative, helpful, and interesting.  So traditional marketing, it talks at people. Content marketing talks with them. There's a dramatic shift that's occurred, and the reason that we're focusing on content marketing,  which is creating quality and engaging content in order to invite people to visit your website, we want to put information out there that gets people excited and they want to come  to us instead of us chasing them down. So if you're starting your blog for the first time and you're just jumping in, I'd like  to leave you with a couple important do's of blogging. With any post that you create,  make sure that you're writing at least 400 words at minimum. If you write anything less than that, it's very unlikely that Google is ever going to rank that page well in results.  You also want to stay very narrow in topic. This serves a couple purposes. It allows you  to optimize your blog post for specific keywords, and then you'll be more likely for that post  to rank well. It's also going to make it so that you have more ideas to write about. You know, after a year of blogging, you're going to start to get fatigued out of thinking of  new ideas. And so if you write very specific to a small topic, you can expand thoroughly on that topic and leave other ideas and other topics up for the next blog post.  And a way to think of new blog ideas is to write down any frequently asked questions  that you're getting. I'm sure you guys are like a tape recorder very often at your practice,  and you're explaining the same things over and over again. You're hearing the same questions from patients. So why not write down these questions that you're hearing over and over  again and create them into specific blog posts? If people are actually asking you these questions in your practice, then we can confidently say that a larger number of  people are searching for these questions online, and you'll be more likely to get the traffic coming to your website.  You also want to keep your titles simple and generally helpful. So for your titles on each of your blog posts, while we could get very creative and fancy, it's really a good idea  to keep it simple. What are the causes of hearing loss? You know, signs that you may have hearing loss, things like that, because that's what people are searching for.  And finally, when you are structuring your blog posts, keep in mind that when someone first arrives at your page, you've managed to get them to click on your URL in the search  results, and so this is your first one-second opportunity to make a good impression. If  they arrive at your page and it is just paragraphs and paragraphs stacked on top of each other,  seemingly overwhelming, they're simply going to search, they're going to click back to the results. But if you break your article up into easy-to-digest sections that each  include a nice title that will outline what that mini-paragraph is about, people perceive that in a much more agreeable way. When they arrive, they feel like they can handle it,  they can quickly skim through your blog to find the information that's relevant to their question.  So let's talk about some blogging don'ts. Like I said already, I got a little excited. Make sure you do not paste articles from other sites. This is, like I mentioned, it is viewed  as duplicate content and will negatively affect your website. You want to avoid criticizing competitors. You know, it's just not good practice. It just makes you look bad. I won't  say more about that. And then finally, you don't want to be inconsistent in your timing.  So setting yourself up with a blogging schedule is the best way to set yourself up for success with this. You could even go talk to your FOA, your receptionist, and say, you know,  every two weeks, can you please block out this hour so that I can spend that hour writing and publishing my blog post. It's great if you post a beautiful article on your blog,  but if you don't post again for another couple of months, that one blog isn't going to do you much good. It's the collective effort. It's the many blog pieces, each targeting  a different string of key phrases. That's what's going to get you more and more of that traffic coming to your website.  So let's discuss a few other types of content that you can create for your website. It's not just all going to be words. We can do animated videos as well. You can create some  professional videos or images actually of your office and of your staff, and also infographics and YouTube videos. So with the animated videos, these are a great opportunity to  quickly explain your services. Very often people are going to visit your website, and they might not have the patience to sit and read about how great you are and what makes  you unique. You know, they've seen it before. But if you have a video placed right there on top for them to easily click on, it involves very low effort on their part. People like  that. They just click on it, and you can quickly, within 90 seconds or so, get it through to them why you're different, leave a lasting impression in their mind.  With the professional videos and images of your office, you can put these on your website,  and you can also put these on different accounts that you have and give a very professional  image of your practice. Infographics are also a very fun way to get people to share content  from your site. Infographics are one of the most shareable pieces of content because other people can distribute it on their website and that sort of thing because it's so visually  compelling and it relays information so quickly. And then of course, finally, YouTube videos. The more videos you create that are original  and published to your company YouTube page, you're going to see such a dramatic increase in your ranking. I can't express this enough. It's almost like this hidden treasure chest.  The more videos you create, the better. And you can create videos based on the blogs that you've already created, so you're not having to think of new ideas all the time. Say you  write a blog post about tinnitus. You can then transform that blog post into a video where you are just discussing that exact same topic.  So now you have your very cool content. Now what? You want to make sure that first off, you are posting and publishing your content actually to your own website. Don't just put  it on Facebook directly. You want it to be sourced from your website. And then at that point, you're going to grab that link that you've just created and you want to post that  on all your social media accounts. if you create new videos, like I mentioned, you definitely want to upload them to YouTube.  And make sure you have a company YouTube account set up that has a link going back to your website. And finally, you want to get creative.  You know, you use your content, like I mentioned, to create other pieces of content. This is your opportunity to create whatever you want.  So let's move on to something that pulls at the heartstrings of a lot of practice owners, and very understandably, and this is review sites.  So for many practices, review sites can be very stressful or very wonderful, or a combination of the two.  So some of the main ones that we want to focus on are going to be Yelp, Google+, Angie's List, and Hearing Tracker. So first, digging into Yelp.  So Yelp gets 106 million unique visitors a month. You read that right. That's a crazy amount of people that are going to Yelp every single month to find local businesses.  for our demographics, 16% of total visitors are 45 to 54, 8% are 55 to 65, and only 4% are 65+.  So while this might seem very small at first, if we add that all up, that's nearly 13 million visitors, age 55+, coming to Yelp every single month.  It's definitely worth setting up a free account. So the importance of Yelp beyond just those numbers are a couple of things.  Because there is such trust in Yelp by users, Bing has actually integrated with Yelp, and Yelp is their standard go-to local search engine that they're going to pull information  from on Bing search engines. Also, Yelp has integrated with Apple Maps. So anyone who has a smartphone or has an iPhone, and they ask Siri, or they search  on their map that's pre-installed on their iPhone, they're going to get options that very quickly they can see a stream of reviews coming directly from the Yelp listing of that  business. So this is very powerful. People can also, from that little screen, they can click immediately over to the Yelp  page to verify that they, in fact, want to drive to that practice or that service and spend their money.  Another reason that we care about Yelp is that Yelp has an incredible domain authority. So this just simply means that Google sees them as a huge site that's trustworthy, and  so their authority is higher than maybe a site that was put up yesterday. So what happens with this is that if someone does a Google search for, for example, hearing  aids in Denver, and they're on Google, but very frequently Yelp results are going to come up right on the first page of Google. And it's not always a specific practice.  Sometimes what happens also is that it will show hearing aids in Denver from Yelp, and it will show the top practices, and in their meta description it will list a couple of  the practices that are most predominant on that Yelp listing right there in the meta description.  So even if your website's not doing so hot with search engines, if you're doing well with Yelp, you could basically indirectly get on the first page of Google.  And then furthermore, if someone does hear about your practice not online, say they get a referral from their neighbor or a friend, they're probably, many of them are going to  go online, look for your phone number, or just look up information about your business. And when they type in your company name into Google, they're naturally going to see your  website. But very often they're also going to see your Yelp listing right there, right below your website.  So if you have some great reviews, it will just reinforce their decision to come in and visit you.  If you haven't already done so, you can claim your Yelp listing by visiting this link I have here, biz.yelp.com.  Once there, you want to make sure that you add some important pieces of information. You can add images of your practice.  You want to have at least five, and that's the bare minimum. As many pictures that you have, the better.  Of course, you want to make sure your business hours are up to date, because when people search on Yelp, they're able to filter out businesses that are closed in that moment.  So you want to make sure that that's accurate. Of course, number three, website URL, this is very important for your backlink.  Your business owner bio and headshot, that's number four. That's very important as well, and what it allows you to do is to upload a small picture of yourself.  They require you actually show your face and not your logo, but you can put a small picture of yourself and include your bio.  And what it will do is on your Yelp listing, it will show under the description of your business.  It will show the owner of the service, and that builds credibility for the people that are searching online.  And finally, your business description, this is an opportunity for you to include the keywords  that you're trying to target, so that if someone does search on Yelp for hearing tests instead  of searching for an audiologist or a hearing aid dispenser, they're going to still find your practice, because you've mentioned that specific keyword in your description.  Some other notable review sites, Angie's List, here's a link that you can click to. It's similar to a Yelp, but members have to pay to see the businesses.  And then finally, Hearing Tracker, this is a new website, but it looks like it's working really well for dispensers.  You can go on there and you can set up a free account where you can put in your company  information, your bio, your picture, and it's basically a directory targeting hearing providers.  Okay, so getting reviews is something that a ton of my clients have difficulties with, and so we talked about it and we worked out some solutions for it. So here are a few tips.  You want to first start off by claiming and completing your profiles. You also want to set up a Yelp check-in offer if possible.  What these are is that once you've claimed your Yelp account, you can go into the dashboard and you're able to set up what's called a check-in offer.  And what this means is that when someone actually comes to your practice and they have a smartphone,  which many people do, they can pull up their Yelp application and find your practice. Once they find your practice, a little button will pop up for them that says, hey, do you  want to check in here, because they notice that they're actually standing at your location.  So if someone does check in while at your practice, you can set it up so that they receive some sort of benefit from doing so. And this way you get more people to check in.  So obviously we're not going to set up a check-in offer for one free hearing aid, but what you could do is perhaps a free set of batteries, for example, one package of batteries  for checking in. This is a very low-cost way to get more people engaged with your Yelp listing and more cues to Google that you are important and that you should rank well.  So next up, you want to make sure to respond to each and every review. Let it be known that you're on these sites, so you can actually even print up something  to put at your practice, a piece of paper even, very simple, just so that people know that you are on Yelp and that they can visit you at this URL, and then they're going to  be more inclined to check in and write you a review. So I write train your team for a very good reason.  If you have set up a check-in offer, make sure you let your receptionist know about this and you show her how someone would download the Yelp app, for example.  She can then, while people are waiting for an appointment, she can talk to them and say, hey, did you know about our check-in offer?  You can get free batteries if you just simply check in. And then they go, oh, I don't really know how to do that.  She can jump in and she can help them because you've talked to her about it, her or him about it, and you can, and they can walk them through it, they can check in, and now that  person has a Yelp account, and they are much more likely now to be able to go on and review your business. So let's say you get a negative review.  I mean, these are unavoidable at times. We can't make everyone happy. And of course, there's always going to be some unreasonable people.  And some of these reviews are going to also be opportunities for us to look at ways we can improve.  So we should try as much as we can to view negative reviews, you know, see the silver lightning in it.  But say you have a negative review and it's sticking on your social, on your review site. Here's a few things you can do.  Once you've claimed your profile, like for example on Yelp, you can log in as the business owner and you can respond publicly or privately to the person who left you the review.  This is so important. I recommend that you do this for every review, regardless of whether they're positive or negative.  The reason for this is that as a Yelp user myself, if I find a listing that has some mixed reviews on there, and I see that the business owner is engaged and he's jumped  on there and he's responded to the people that were happy with his service and he was appreciative and grateful and said thank you.  And then on contrast, the people who were not so pleased or didn't have such a great experience, he also responded to them, but in a polite, reasonable tone that offers  perhaps for them to come back in or some way to make it right. That instantly plants the seed in my head that this practice owner cares about his patients.  So when you're writing your review, you want to make sure to think about a few things. You want to keep your cool. Perhaps don't respond immediately. You can always wait.  You know, that review's going to be there regardless. They won't let you take them down, so maybe wait it out 24 hours so you're not so upset. You know, this is understandable.  You've put your blood, sweat, and tears into building your practice, and so for someone to publicly tear it down, it's heartbreaking at times.  But if you can craft a polite response, it's going to serve you so well. I recommend even once you've written that response, send it over to your spouse or friend  or a trusted colleague for them to read it. They might be able to catch things that could be perceived as having a, you know, too much  of a tone in your voice or a little too aggressive, and then that way you can modify it and then post it.  So once you've done this, you can then focus on getting more reviews by taking the steps that I mentioned previously.  And this is important because if you are able to acquire more positive reviews, eventually  if you have, for example, six five-star reviews and just one, you know, negative review, overall your rating is going to be high.  People are going to see that, in general, people are really happy with the service that you provide, and that must have been, you know, an off day for either person involved  with a negative review. Okay. So enough about review sites. Let's dig in a little bit to social media and how you can use it for your practice.  So a little bit of data to win you over about why you should care about social media. I've heard some practices say, I don't even want to start with Facebook, gives me a headache.  But it is important because 27 percent of Americans age 65 and older are social networking site users. So a few important sites are, obviously, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.  So about Facebook, something important to know, it's kind of a new thing that's happened, is that organic reach is no longer.  So organic reach was when somebody liked or followed your company Facebook page. In the future, whenever you would post updates to that company page, when they log into their  personal account, they will instantly be able to see in their stream just all the updates and posts that you have posted as the business owner.  And that happens simply because they liked your company page. In a move recently, I'm assuming to make more money, Facebook is now making that irrelevant.  Your posts are not going to be seen by as many people, around 1 to 2 percent, without advertising the post.  Luckily, Facebook ads are not very expensive, and they've actually been shown to be quite effective. So it's worth looking into.  You can set up Facebook ads quite easily by logging into your Facebook account. If you're brand new to Facebook, here's a little bit of jargon to get you started.  Likes are obviously people that click on the button to like your page. They can also share your content onto their own page so that their contacts will see your information.  Status updates, those are the updates that you give from your company that, you know, sharing articles and that sort of thing.  Your pages, those are going to be the actual profiles for your business. Boost posts, this is specific to Facebook ads.  Once you post an article and your update, it will instantly show a button for you that says boost post.  And if you click on this, it sends you to their Facebook ads section where you can set up an ad in order to promote that post to a wide range of people, not just people who  are liking your page. And then, of course, the goal is to get more friends and more followers to your page.  If you haven't yet jumped on the Facebook bandwagon, here's a link for you to make it easy. Just simply click there.  It's the business section you're able to create your Facebook account right away. All right, let's talk about Twitter. I'm going to be quite honest with you guys.  Seniors are not all about Twitter. Only 3% of seniors are using Twitter. So why am I even talking about this? Well, recently Twitter has actually struck a deal with Google.  They're going to start showing tweets right in Google search results. So while seniors may not be logging on to Twitter themselves and actively participating  in that community, they are on Google, as we saw previously in the top online senior activities.  So when they go on Google, you have the opportunity for your tweet to show up in Google search results.  So now, if someone searches locally for what you do, they could see your website, your Yelp listing, your tweet, perhaps your Facebook page, all on that first page or second page  of Google. And you are taking valuable real estate away from your competition. So a little bit of Twitter jargon for the newbies.  Your Twitter handle, that is the name of your account. So it's typically at something, so it might be at Hearing Denver, for example.  So those are going to be basically your updates. You can retweet something, that's like the Twitter version of sharing content.  You can also favorite someone else's tweet, that's like liking it on Facebook. And then, of course, you're trying to get followers, people that are going to see all of your tweets.  And then finally, Twitter is really known for hashtags. And hashtags tend to give people the most headache, and they're actually quite simple once explained.  So hashtags are basically keywords put right into your tweets. So what happens is, if in your tweet you say hashtag hearing aids, people can then go on  to Twitter and do a search for a specific tweet, and it will pull up all of the tweets that have happened recently that include that keyword.  And people do this quite often, usually for things a little bit more exciting than hearing aids, trending things.  But it does allow the opportunity for your practice to show up and be found by people searching for relevant content. So let's talk about what this actually looks like.  I have an example tweet here that says, have you heard of hashtag ear candling for ear wax removal? What is it, and does it actually work? There's a link, hashtag hearing loss.  So note a couple of things here. I'm putting this in a question form, because your brain can't help but try and answer a question if you see it, whether you like it or not.  I write in the tweet verbage, I put in a hashtag. This is quite common on Twitter, and even though it's not grammatically correct, it's appropriate for Twitter.  So I've inserted hashtag ear candling right in there. And if someone's looking for ear candling, and this actually is more likely to happen,  someone searches for ear candling, it's a little bit more popular, it's become a little more mainstream recently. But now they're going to see why you shouldn't do it.  So you'll also notice that the URL here is shortened. You'll notice at the bottom of my screen, there's a URL shortening service. The link here is bit.ly.  And this is a service that allows you to shorten a long URL that you've created for your website. Because Twitter only allows so many characters for each tweet.  If you need to set up your Twitter business account, I have, of course, conveniently put a link here for you. Just click there. It's totally free to set up.  You do have the option for Twitter ads, as all these services, of course, will take your money if you want them to, but it's by no means necessary. Okay. Next up is Google Plus.  So Google Plus is not talked about as much, but still important. The reason for this is that people aren't really using it as much, but it is the brainchild  of Google, and we're trying to rank well on Google, so we should probably use their products. So by signing up with Google Plus, you can present a seamless image of your practice  across Google products, like Google Maps, Google search results, and the sort. Google is keeping track of plus ones, which are people endorsing your content, and who's  following who. So if someone searches on Google for something, and they're in your network, Google is more likely to show content to you that they have liked themselves.  They feel that it's probably more relevant to you. So some Google jargon for you. Plus ones, like I mentioned, are people endorsing your content, so it's like a like on Facebook.  Pages are the same as Facebook. You can create your company page. There's shares. Circles are going to be, it's unique to Google, and this, you can put people into circles.  So you can create one for colleagues and that sort of thing. And of course, followers. To get your practice on Google Plus, Google Maps, and Google search, here's a link for  you where you can sign up for free and get your business to have a consistent image across Google.  So I'd like to close with leaving you guys with the seven ways, just recapping, of how you can improve your search engine optimization this year.  And remember, you don't have to do everything at once. Doing it little by little is still moving forward. So number one, improving your speed with a premium host.  The biggest way that you can improve your website speed is by making sure you're hosting with a company that has a track record for very fast sites and they offer premium service.  Number two, place a unique video on your homepage. Number three, creating unique meta titles and descriptions for each of your pages on your website.  Number four, you want to get a mobile-friendly web design. You can get a mobile-friendly design without altering the look of your desktop version.  You could actually specifically get one created so that it will automatically show up if someone is on a mobile device. Number five, you want to blog consistently.  Number six, claim your Yelp page, and then of course, add content. And number seven, sign up for Google My Business.  This way, like I mentioned, you have a solid web presence at all Google products. I want to thank all of you for attending today.  I really hope that something got through to each of you and that you feel like you have some great actionable steps to take to boost your practices web presence.  I'll hand it back over to Ted now. Thank you all. Wow, thanks, Stephanie. Great presentation. Stephanie, we're so excited that we had over 150 attendees that joined us today on this  webinar. We do have some time for some questions. We ran a little bit long, so we're going to get as many as we possibly can.  For those that we don't get to, we'll provide Stephanie's contact information in an email tomorrow, and you can reach out to Stephanie directly.  But if you have a question for Stephanie, please enter it in the question box on your webinar dashboard.  Stephanie, our first question comes from Joseph, and Joseph would like to know your thoughts on Yellow Pages Online and Print. Okay.  Hi, Joseph, and thank you so much for attending today. That's a really great question. So I kind of have mixed feelings about Yellow Pages. I never, ever like to slam anyone.  But what I'm finding is that people just simply aren't seeing the return on investment for working with Yellow Pages.  So of course, the actual printed Yellow Pages is a thing of the past, and some cities have actually made it illegal to print them, given the amount of paper it requires.  But even for the online, I always recommend my clients, they create a free account with Yellow Pages in order to get the backlink.  But I just, honestly, I haven't seen the return yet. I don't see people, I don't see practice owners getting the leads to make it worth their while  to actually invest in the couple hundred dollars a year for a premium Yellow Pages listing.  So you know, if you have extra money to throw at it, sure, but if I were any of you, I would invest that money elsewhere so that you can see a higher return. Great.  Thanks, Stephanie. Stephanie, our next question comes from Sherry, and Sherry says, we let patients know that  we are on Yelp, and some did reviews, but Yelp would not recommend the reviews. What can we do about that? Oh, that is such a great question. I'm so glad you brought that up. Okay.  So say you get a bunch of great reviews, and they've all been filtered, that's what they call it.  It's kind of an algorithm that they pass all the reviews that come through, and no one really knows the secret sauce of this algorithm machine, but we kind of see some patterns.  So if, for example, one of your patients for the very first time logs on, they've only  ever written one review, they have no information on their Yelp page about themselves, and they have no Yelp friends, then very often Google is going to filter that review.  And so what you can do is if, you know, a patient comes in, and they're saying, you know, I took the time to review you, and they're really excited and enthusiastic about having  that review show up for you, what you can ask them to do is to log into their account. They can connect with other people that they know on Yelp.  I'm sure their grandkids or their children are on Yelp. They can friend those people, and then recommend that they go in, and they write a couple more  reviews specifically for businesses that are located in your town. That will serve as a cue to Yelp that it's a real person and not a robot, and someone  that is a part of the Yelp community. When reviews get filtered, they're not permanently filtered. This is an ever-changing thing.  You might see reviews pop in and out of your Yelp listing, but those are good first steps that you can take.  One more thing to note is that if you have a bunch of reviews coming in at once, like for example, one month you decide, I'm going to ask everyone for a Yelp review, and after  a year of having your profile, you suddenly get two or three reviews within a couple days of each other.  That's also a signal to Yelp that you asked for it, and they really don't like when business  owners ask for reviews because typically business owners only ask their happy patients for reviews.  What you can do is you can, of course, keep asking people for reviews. Yelp wouldn't like me to say that, but just stay consistent with it because over time  as you get more and more reviews trickling in, it'll look more normal in Yelp size. One more piece I'll leave you with, I'm over-talking Yelp only because I worked for them, so I  kind of know how it all works, is that make sure you never, ever, ever let one of your patients use your computer to write a review about your practice because it's been shown  that Yelp will actually track the IP addresses of where these reviews are coming, and so if they're actually sitting in your office and doing it, it's a very likely chance that  they will filter that review. All right. Well, I'm ready for the next question. Sorry for talking that one to death. Great. Thanks, Stephanie.  Stephanie, our next question comes from Bill, and Bill says, are we posting infographics or videos for manufacturers considered to have a negative impact by Google?  You know, Bill, that's a really great question, and there hasn't been any, you know, actual data on the matter.  I lean towards it is okay to post, but you don't want that to be your dominant strategy for posting content, so if you embed a couple of videos, for example, that are right from,  you know, like Starkey Halo, I think Starkey and a couple, you know, Rezound, they have some great videos about their products, specifically the links in Halo.  They're beautiful commercials that were shot, and it's a great way, you know, on your Starkey or your Rezound hearing aid page to include some visual content right underneath those  pieces of information. I've actually seen pages improve with ranking by adding these sort of things, but you don't  necessarily want to on your home page, on your About Us page, you know, everywhere only include videos and infographics from manufacturers.  You want to try and get as much original content as possible.  Great. Thanks, Stephanie. Stephanie, our next question comes from David, and David would like to know, how do you add meta tags and descriptions to your site?  Oh, hi, David, so that is a wonderful question, and I wish there was a quick answer for it. It's actually going to depend on the platform that you're using for your website, so very  often people have a WordPress platform that is really the recommended, that's what the big companies are using, and to access your meta titles and descriptions, you'll want  to reach out to the company or person that's handling your site. If you log into WordPress, I could list off the steps to take, but it's a little bit lengthy.  You can feel free to reach out to me after this, and I will, I can put together a list if you do have WordPress on how to do this, but it is page by page.  I know if you're using a website builder like GoDaddy or Weebly or Wix, they each have their own way of altering meta titles and descriptions based on their service.  So my apologies, I can't just give you a quick, this is what you do, click this button, because it is so specific to where your website is being hosted and what platform it's on.  Great. Thanks, Stephanie. Okay, our next question comes from Wanda, and she has a question about mobile-friendly sites.  She says that her web developer wants to charge her $1,200 to make her site mobile-friendly. She thinks that's a little high, and she wants your opinion.  Oh, hi, Wanda, and thank you for the question. So like I mentioned on the blogging don'ts, never criticize your competitors.  I'd never want to, you know, criticize my competitors in the industry. Everyone has their reasons for charging what they do.  I personally wouldn't pay that amount to have a mobile version created for your site. There are more reasonable steps that you can take.  I'd never want to, you know, I don't want to shamelessly promote my company, but we actually offer this service for $4.95, where you can add a mobile version of your site,  and it doesn't affect your main site. So there are alternatives, whether it's with my company or other companies.  I would definitely just spend some time looking around, you know, talking to some other companies and getting kind of a second or third quote on that. Great. Thanks, Stephanie.  Stephanie, our next question is from Suzanne, and she says when Hearing Clinic is Googled, the actual term Hearing Clinic is Googled, with her location, a competitor comes up with  a map location of their hearing clinic. She wants to know how can she have her clinic come up with the map location as well. Okay.  So I'm assuming that you're talking about the Google map results that often will come up in Google search.  So for everybody else, say someone does a Google search, and the first three things are ads. Very often, about six or seven below that are going to all be listings being pulled  from Google Maps. And this takes up a lot of the first page real estate, so it makes sense that you would wonder about this.  And the way you get on this is by submitting your information to Google Plus and making sure that you have a solid Google Plus page that's connected to your Google Maps and  Google search, because that way, Google is able to pull your practice information and post it there. You do need to make sure that you verify your account with Google.  Otherwise, you'll just never show up in these results. So if you look on the slides in the Google Plus section, the link that will let you set  up a free account with Google, I recommend you set up there, and you start adding a lot of content to your Google Plus page. Add a lot of pictures and just business descriptions.  Make sure everything is accurate and verified. And then over time, Google most likely will start presenting your practice in that list.  Great. Thanks, Stephanie. Stephanie, our next question comes from Tom. And Tom says, I don't have time to do SEO myself. What should I look for in an outside SEO company?  So Tom, that's a really great question and one I hear a lot, because you guys are running practices. You have a lot on your plate.  You could learn how to do all this, but you don't necessarily want to or have the time. So when you're looking for a provider, you want to make sure of a couple of things.  You want to make sure that they are approaching your online presence in a very well-rounded fashion. So do they do on-site optimization and off-site and content creation?  Because if you just do one or the other, you're not going to see the success that you're hoping for.  They need to be hitting it at all different aspects so that you see the return, your investment, much quicker.  So I would always ask specifically, what do you do and what does the company do to improve your SEO?  Because another important thing to consider is that a decade ago, SEO was a totally different world. Companies and individuals were able to kind of hack the system.  They could get on websites and have a white background and then write in white words your keyword over and over and over again. It would just say hearing aids 400 times.  And those sites would actually rank well, but then Google figured that out and punished those people for doing that. And a lot of websites actually got blacklisted.  So the reason I tell you this is because you want to make sure you go with a provider that's going to do white hat SEO techniques that won't get you penalized now or in the future.  If something's in the gray area, you know, as there's always things you can do that are kind of like, ooh, Google doesn't really view this as negative yet, but we know it doesn't  follow their guidelines, you should always make sure that they will avoid those types of practices so that you really do see the long-term benefits of investing your money in it.  I hope that helps. Great. Thanks, Stephanie. Stephanie, our last question comes from Alex. And Alex says, we are located in a small town.  How do we ensure that our website is found when a search is made from a nearby town?  Oh, hi, Alex. And thank you so much for the question. You know, I hear this one a lot. This is a really great question.  So you, of course, are going to rank well for your small town because you don't have a lot of competition there. You've got those keywords there.  So what you can do, which I always recommend, is on your website, you know, go ahead and pick the top cities nearby that you think that patients would realistically drive to  your practice from, you know, within maybe a half-hour radius. And then you want to go in and you want to create specific pages for each of those cities.  And you're going to name those pages in the metatitles and descriptions. You're going to name it hearing aids and then that city name, you know, that sort of thing.  And that way, you have a chance of ranking well for those city names. And what you need to do for each of these pages is kind of create it like a landing  page because when people find that page from search results and they're in that other town,  you want to make sure you're speaking to them in a way that doesn't make them think, oh, this isn't in my town. How did I end up here? And go back to the search results.  So you want to set it up in a way that's like, you know, instantly they see a title that includes their city name.  And then you mention, oh, just seven minutes from their town located here. And you go on to talk about your practice and you have a call to action button.  That's really the best way to do it. Obviously, you can't, it's going to be a little bit more difficult to gain, you know,  to get above the providers actually located in that town because they have, you know, they have local, they have profiles set up that actually have their address in that town.  So you're kind of, you know, swimming against the stream in that regard. But it at least gives you a chance that you will be presented to potential patients in those areas.  One more thing you can do is content creation. You could, you know, choose two or three cities that you really want to focus on and start  creating content that you title those city names. So, for example, on YouTube you create videos that are testimonials or hearing aid reviews  or, you know, frequently asked questions, that sort of thing. And then you could name that video before uploading it to YouTube, name it something  that includes that city name you're going after. So that's kind of a long-winded way of trying to approach this other market, you know, keyword targeting. I hope that helps.  Wow, thanks, Stephanie. Great answer. Stephanie, thank you so much for an excellent presentation.  And thank you, everyone, for joining us today on the IHS webinar, How to Blow Away Your Competition on Google Search Results.  If you'd like to get in contact with Stephanie, you may email her at stephanie at audseo.com. That's a-u-d-s-e-o dot com.  For more information about receiving continuing education credit for this webinar, visit the IHS website at ihsinfo.org.  Click on the webinar banner or find more information on the webinar tab under professional development. IHS members receive a substantial discount on IHS CE credits.  So if you're not already an IHS member, you will find more info at ihsinfo.org.  Please keep an eye out for the feedback survey you'll receive tomorrow via email. We ask that you take just a moment to answer a few brief questions about the quality of  today's presentation. Thank you again for being with us today, and we'll see you at the next IHS webinar.