Cook Profitability Services

Website Design, SEO and PPC Advertising

SEO

How long does it take for a Website to show up in Google Searches?

Many people ask, why is my website not showing up in Google searches. 
 
There are two ways you can come up in Google searches on topics relating to what you offer. One is that your website shows up organically and the other is through Google Ads that simply look like website listings.
 
Getting your website to show up organically (not with ads) in key searches is a topic referred to as SEO – Search Engine Optimization (basically this refers to all manner of things that must be done to optimize your website to perform well in search engines, namely Google). In marketing, this is a HUGE subject and big business. People spend thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars over time to get good SEO results. 
 
If your website is less than a year old, your website is simply too new to have gained any traction. It takes a while for Google to index a website, usually several months. If you realize that there are nearly 2 billion websites in existence today, with about half a million new websites added every single day, it helps to understand why it takes time for a website to be indexed and gain any traction at all. But even once it has been indexed, don’t expect any great results. SEO is something that builds over time, if it is worked on, either intensively or consistently over years. Very few websites ever rank on the first page of a Google search within the first year. I know it is disheartening, but it is the truth. That’s why Google Ads are so important, particularly when you are starting something new. It is a way to get you showing up at the top right now.
 
If you don’t believe me, here is a link to an article where millions of websites were analyzed as to what it took to get start showing up on Google searches: https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank/  Here’s a quote from this article: 
Only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top10 search results (first page) within 1 year for at least 1 keyword.”
There is a LOT of work to be done to get to a point where you are coming up on the first page of Google searches for major search terms such as what you checked for. Most of our clients pay us anywhere from $500 to $2000 per month for SEO over a period of years to get good SEO. It is a lot of highly skilled work. 
 
I would recommend that you invest at least $500 per month into SEO work, as there are hundreds of hours of work to be done to get a website really well optimized and showing up on the first page of key Google searches.
 
In addition to a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done within your website, setting up listings on important sites such as Yelp, HealthGrades, ZocDoc and the like, as well as social media sites, will help your SEO of your website. This creates links to your website from other sites, which helps in two ways. 1) It gives you more internet presence through these popular listing services and social media sites, and 2) it helps the SEO of your website to have other sites that link to your website (most listings allow you to add your website as a link in the listing). 
 
There is another very major factor in ranking in Google searches and this is competition. To rank in Google searches, you are not only up against local clinics or businesses that similar services, including some that have been around for years, but you are also up against many other huge websites that may offer general information on your key search terms, such as WebMD, Psychology Today, MedicineNet, etc.
 
You can get a good idea of how much competition there is from the number of ads you see on these search pages. If the competition is very intense, it makes it really tough to get into the first page of Google searches. It also makes your ads run more expensively as many others are bidding against you for these key terms.
 
We will perform very serious work to get your ads and website to perform. It takes time. As well, not all results happen immediately. Good follow up on every inquiry also makes an impact on your ROI and overall results.
 
I really advise having a strategy of running Google Ads to show up immediately of the first page of Google, while we continue to strengthen your website to rank better and better through continuing SEO work. If you will keep at it with us, we will get you there, just like we have done with so many of our clients!

High Bounce Rate – Good or Bad?

Since the “bounce rate” of your website is often a major concern, I wanted to provide some information that I feel is very important to understand on this topic.
 
I am going to try to make this as simple as possible and as short as possible. I am also going to quote from some experts as well (below in quotes) so that you will know that this is not just my opinion, but it is factual.
 

What does Bounce Rate mean?

Bounce rate refers to the number of single-page sessions compared to all sessions on your website. If five out of every ten people who visit your website leave before visiting a second page, your bounce rate is 50%.
 
Another reference clarifies this:

If someone performs an initial action, like a site visit, but doesn’t interact a second time (by viewing another page) within 30 minutes, it’s considered a bounce.

Some people really panic when they see bounce rates over 50%.

Most people assume that if a bounce rate is over 50%, it’s their fault. Their content or landing pages just aren’t performing the way that they should. But guess what? It’s not true.

Most don’t even realize that a 90% bounce rate isn’t out of the norm for certain parts of your website.

In other words, your high bounce rate isn’t telling you the whole story.

Here is a chart that shows average bounce rates for different types of sites and pages.
 
Many websites are constructed in such a way as to create funnels, certainly this applies to all of our current clients. Most of the key pages on these websites have been set up as “landing pages” or “sales pages”. This is done for each of the main services that a client offers. Google ads then drive people to those key pages. If you go to one of these landing pages, you will see multiple blocks of information about the topic, including symptoms, testing, benefits of treatment, etc. Then there is info about each of the providers, info about insurance, and a strong push to call the New Patient Coordinator for a free consultation (or send in a written inquiry at the bottom of that page), who can explain how it all works and answer your questions so you can decide if this is right for you.
 
The idea of a landing page is that all of the information is laid out succinctly in one page, with encouragement to call or write in throughout the page, with the purpose in mind of channeling the visitor to contact the client or call in to our call center. 
 
Most of our websites are not set up in such a way as to encourage people to go through other parts of the website, because our focus is to channel people into inquiring. 
 
Bounce rate can be a confusing metric. When you hear “high bounce rate,” it immediately triggers anxiety in most digital marketers. But it shouldn’t always. Here’s why… In some cases a high bounce rate can actually be a sign of good user experience.
 
So to understand the implications of high bounce rate, you have to assess it based on page type. On landing pages, the average bounce rate is between 70 and 90%.
 
In short, all I am trying to say is that looking at bounce rate is not black and white, or as simple as high is bad and low is good. 
 
When you are talking about landing pages, which is mostly what a website constructed to procure new clients or new patients or sell products would consist of, a high bounce rate is not a bad thing. What is important is whether or not it generates inquiries or leads and ideally bookings or new business.
 
I just wanted to give you a better understanding of this topic and help to clarify this topic.

Add A Manager to Your Google Plus Page or Google My Business Page

Simple and Easy to Follow Instructions:
When You Need to Add a Manager to Your Google Plus or Google My Business Page.

Google supposedly gives the instructions on how to do this here: Add and remove page managers – Google My Business Help. 

But Google packs a ton of stuff into their pages and navigation is not that intuitive.  In fact, its downright hard to follow.

If you are having trouble, try these step by step instructions on how to add someone to help you manage your Google plus or Google My Business Page.

Step 1. Log in to your Account.

Your gmail account allows you access to many Google products. So lets get started, log in to your GMAIL account.

Step 2: Navigate to Google Plus (click the image for enlargement)

Access-Your-Google-Plus-Page

 

Step 3: Access the Google Plus Menu.

Google-Plus-Menu

You will see Google + Home in the upper left. Click there for the full menu. You are looking for PAGES.

Google-Plus-Pages

Step 4: Go to Pages and Select the Google Plus Page you Want To Manage

There will be a MANAGE button on each page that you have in your account. 

Click the manage button and finally you are at the place you need to be to grant access to another person. 

Step 5: You Are On Your Google Plus Page, Click Settings

Google-plus-settings

This will take you to your settings page.

Step 6: Now You Still Have To Navigate to Google Plus Managers.

You are on settings but these are just the generic settings. There is another menu there that allows you to select Managers for your Google Plus page,

Google-Plus-Managers

Step 7: Finally You Can Grant Access To Your Account – Google Plus and Google Business Page is the same thing in this case.

Now the interface becomes intuitive. You can click on Add Manager and just enter the email address of anyone who you need to assist you in managing your page. They will get an invite to manage your page with you.

Congrats!

Google Pigeon Smacks Down the Little Guy In Local Rankings

google pigeon update

Google Pigeon released about 1 week ago now, so we have to assume that the Google engineers have settled down any initial bugs and what we are seeing now is more or less what we are getting. The update has sparked a storm of comment across the biggest SEO sites in the world- with MOZ describing it as the month that Google shook the SERPs.

Many people commented on their particular areas of interest, noting huge shifts in local search results in industries all the way from real estate and hotels to ice-cream. The fact is that Pigeon is another huge shift for SEO consultants – one of a series that has hit this summer.

Google Pigeon Showing Fewer Local Results

One of the most noted effects of Google pigeon was smaller map packs. Instead of getting 7 results of businesses close to you- suddenly we are now getting only 3 or none. In the So-Lo-Mo world (Social-Local-Mobile) the google local results are a mainstay, so dropping these results way down makes little sense. But while that has been getting most of the attention, I am seeing another, much more damaging change.

The Google Pigeon Poops

I follow a particular tight niche and I can’t comment on the world-wide effect of the Google pigeon update. What I can say is that in my niche, the small business owner got a real slap down.

I do SEO work mostly with dentists, and mostly in Central Texas. In San Antonio, Google really smacked down the local dentist with the pigeon update.

In the past, if you were in zip code 78148 and you searched the work “dentist” or “dental” with no other modifier, the map pack would show you a list of dentists that were in your immediate geographical area.  The geolocation was very tight and would center on your zip code. This was also true even if you searched for “san antonio dentist”. What Google would show you was appropriate matches in as close as possible to your location. 

What I am seeing is a massive broadening of the geographical search area to encompass a much larger “local” area. I did not see it in all my searches, but I saw it in a great many of them.  I tested this in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.  What this means is that no matter where you are in any of these huge metro areas, you see the same 8 or 10 top dental offices. Because the “local” area is so wide, google is picking up the ” most important results” – the offices that are perhaps a 40 minute drive from where I am, but they have great SEO.  And lets face it, for a great many local choices, distance is the key – not how well they SEO’ed their site. The super-wide “local” results that I am seeing make them pretty much worthless.

Google Pigeon Hands Local Results to the Big Chains

Another really unpleasant side effect of these large geographical bite is that a chain might have two or three offices in a large city. What then happens is that you might search “dentist” and google maps shows you half of a city as the “local results”. Because the BigBoy Chain has three locations in the area and because they have an overall excellent SEO ranking ALL THREE of their locations show up in the map pack.

This is the antithesis of “local” results. This is Google pushing you to the people who are paying them the big advertising fees. This is squeezing down the small guy. This is the complete opposite of the stated Google objective which is to bring more accurate and more usable local search results.

While the “pigeon” moniker came from SearchEngineLand, not Google, I think it’s time for Google to create a “Scarecrow” update and get rid of all the recent changes. They had a great alogarithm, it worked well. Now they have a real mess.

Please Google, don’t go all Bing on us.

By San Antonio SEO Consultant Wayne Baumgarten

Making Your SEO Efforts Worthwhile

San Antonio SEO ConsultantSEO Ranking and Keywords

When you are doing your SEO, don’t allow yourself to be tempted by  just “high rankings”. You have to ask the questions “high rankings for WHAT search terms?”. It’s  low class SEO is to find the least competitive and least important keywords and offer to make a website to rank #1 for that. You may have a website like “rollingoakdental.com” and with very little work you can boast that this website is ranked #1 for the keyword “Rolling Oak Dental” or “Dental Clinic in Rolling Oak”. Which seems peachy and fine but in fact is not. 

The problem is that when you go ahead and check traffic on these keywords, you find next to nothing at all. In fact, I ran a check on those search terms using some internet advertising I was running and found that search term example showed up 55 times out of 3,000 different searches. So that’s a problem. It means that you are spending money doing SEO on your website to get ranking for terms that will never result in any significant increase in traffic on your website. 

I do mostly dental websites but it’s the same for all websites – traffic is all that matters. You need visitors and if you are paying for SEO that is not resulting in an increased level of traffic – you are throwing your money away. Or if you are doing the work yourself, you are throwing your hard work away.

For this reason it is really important that you have some kind of keyword research done before you start doing SEO.  The simpler and broader the word, the more traffic it will pull and the more competition there is. Very broad words are highly competitive and may result in a long runway before you see any effect of your SEO.  So finding keywords that are not too competitive but which will still provide a decent increase in traffic is incredibly important. If you are embarking on an SEO program for your dental office make sure you see the keyword resarch before you start. I am a San Antonio SEO consultant and have done search optimization on quite a few websites in central Texas and I always do detailed keyword research before I start any search engine optimization.

The other important factor for SEO is to set very specific goals. If you are not interested in brand awareness or number of visits you need to know this before you start doing keyword research. Some websites live on advertising and care only about number of visits. A dental clinic or other medical practice is not really interested in how many people are visiting the site, the interest is in inquiries.  And again, it is possible to waste SEO on keywords that do not result in people inquiring about your services. So another step before embarking on a SEO campaign is to ask yourself this question: “Will this list of keywords result in new patients calling my office for dental services?”. 

How High In The SEO Rankings Before I See More Traffic?

A troublesome aspect of SEO is that if you are going to invest anything in improving your website’s ranking, you really need to be willing to go all the way. If your website currently ranks number 150 for the search term “San Antonio dental clinic” then getting to number 100 will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.  You will get the same number of visits – zero or close to it.   Same when you go from 100 to 50. You should see perhaps a tiny volume of visits when you go from 50th place to 30th.  It is only when you reach the second page of google will you see anything even worth mentioning in terms of traffic.

Studies over many years have never changed. You don’t see any significant traffic until you are placed on the home page of the search results. And then, you only start getting an important percentage of the traffic when you are in first, second or third place.

So if you are not willing to go the whole distance, don’t start the race. SEO is not about simply improving your position- it is about dominating in search. Then and only then do you reap the rewards of your hard work.

Filed Under: News, SEO