When it comes to improving the ranking of your medical centre’s website on Google, it is imperative that you appreciate just how much the design of a website plays a role. As the website design experts at www.slinkywebdesign.com.au will tell you, as much of the work that goes into building a website is about optimising it for rankings, as it is to make that website look good.
As the owner or manager of a medical centre who might be thinking, either about a new website, or about how you might improve your current website, you should know what elements of the website design need to be optimised for SEO. After all, there is no point in focusing purely on making your website look better than any other website if no one ever gets to see it because it is ranked on page 10 of Google.
So, to help you to ensure that your website has the qualities that are needed for good SEO and good ranking, here are the more important ones you should be paying attention to and implementing.
Your Website Needs To Load Quickly
Nothing will kill your ranking quicker than a website that does not load quickly. In this fast-moving world of handheld devices and mobile internet access, people want everything to happen ‘5 minutes ago’. In other words, they want quick and immediate action and that means if your website loads slowly, they are going to click away or ‘bounce’ immediately. Bounces are identified by Google and are one of the factors that will lower your ranking.
Your Website Should Be Easy to Navigate
Nobody likes to be confused and so if your medical centre’s website design seems more like a maze then visitors are not going to stay for very long. The length of time people remain on your website is another indicator to Google as to whether to increase or decrease your website’s ranking, so the longer people remain the better is for rankings.
Also, if you are trying to convert visitors into clients, a confusing website where it is difficult to find certain pages or to leave contact details, is not going to be conducive to that. Instead, you want a menu that is clearly visible and easy to understand. Ideally, this menu should be on each page so visitors feel confident that they can return to another part of the website, no matter which page they are currently on.
Your Website Should Have Internal Linking
You might be aware that backlinks from other websites to your medical centre’s website can help to boost its ranking, but were you aware that linking internally, throughout your website, can help it to rank higher too? This occurs for many reasons but the most important one is that Google follows these links, and for any relevancy or authority that one of your pages has, some of these can be passed onto other pages within your website.
It is a key point that although we often talk of a website’s ranking, it is actually each individual page that Google assesses for ranking. The home page might rank, but in addition, if you can help other pages within your website to rank with the use of internal linking, it can mean your medical centre appears at the top of the rankings for multiple keyword searches on Google, and thus receives more visitors from Google than it would if no internal linking were in place.
