Google’s Top Ranking Factors: How Google Ranks Your Medical Website in 2017

Have you ever wondered why some websites rank higher than others on a search results page?  Or why some websites show up on page one versus page two of the results?  Have you ever noticed that sometimes a small business with relevant information can rank higher than the Wikipedia page with the same related content?  In this blog, we’ll take a look at Google’s top ranking factors and how you can help YOUR medical practice obtain a higher ranking than your competitors.
If you read our last SEO blog (Search Engine Optimization: An Introduction) you may recall the various definitions we mentioned for Search Engine Optimization.  But just as a refresher, SEO is defined by one source as a “methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine” (Webopedia).  A search engine, for instance, like Google.  The former CEO of Google once reported that Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine which sites rank higher in the search engine. That’s right…OVER 200!!!  Here’s the thing: the process of SEO and search engine ranking within Google revolves around three main principles:  Relevance, Authority, and Trust.
Google employs complex mathematical algorithms that rely on over 200 clues or signals to determine the relevancy of a website.  These determine how your medical website will rank in online searches.  Yes, these algorithms are complex, but the great news is, as long as you remember those three principals stated above (i.e. relevance, authority, and trust), you can help your medical practice push its way to the proverbial front of the classroom in search results. 

These three principals are the focus and core of Google’s algorithms and can be used to your advantage in obtaining higher rankings:

1. Relevance: Google looks at the content on your site to determine relevancy. The search engine likes to see a website that contains valuable, content rich information.  It’s important to think like a patient when considering relevance, and not like a doctor.  What will your patients type into the search box?  What information will they try to obtain?  Google will only return results relevant or valuable to the searcher’s query, and then will rank those results according to the popularity of the website providing this information.  Relevancy and popularity are gained by providing content rich pages built for your patients (and not for the search engines), building links from relevant sites, and other various SEO techniques that can be read about here.
   
2. Authority: Authority refers to your medical practice’s online strength within your market or field. What it basically boils down to: a numbers game.  For instance, if your practice has 900 backlinks and 900 social media followers while your main competitors have 100 backlinks and 100 social media followers…well….you’re probably going to rank higher than Dr. Competitor on the other side of town.
   
3. Trust: Google’s focus and mission is to keep untrustworthy, crappy quality websites OUT of the search results. In fact, the “trust” principal has been the central motivator behind some extremely crucial Google changes and updates over the past several years.  Your practice’s medical website should contain high-quality content and backlinks (i.e. inbound links from other reputable websites that point back to your website) in order to be considered a trustworthy source by Google.

Ok, and now we get to the fun part people!!  With those three guiding principles in mind, let’s get down to the meat and potatoes of this bad boy.  So what ARE Google’s top ranking factors?  While Google never reveals its algorithm details or exact ranking factors, SEO industry leaders (with lots of study and testing) have been able extract some of the strongest factors that can influence higher search rankings. 
These include:

• Relevant Keywords on the Page
  

              ◊  A keyword is a word or group of words that you would like your site to rank for in Google.

• Keyword in Internal Links

              ◊  These are the keywords within the internal links on your website. Internal links are used for navigation within your medical website…they go from one                             page on a domain to another page on the same domain.

• User Signals

              ◊  These can be viewed on Google Analytics and include signals such as bounce-rate, time on the website, click thru rate, etc.

• Domain Visibility

              ◊  This refers to how strong the domain is in terms of authority and links.

• Search Volume of Domain Name
  
• Total Number of Backlinks and Referring Domains
  
• Google Plus and Facebook Activity

The bottom line is this:  If Dr. Competitor on the other side of town has more of the above factors featured on his website than you do, his website is more likely to rank higher than yours.  We will be discussing each of these above ranking factors in depth within future blogs, so stay tuned!  Also, Medical Site Solutions offers various tiers of SEO packages for ALL our medical website designs.  Contact us today for more information on how we can help your medical practice achieve your online goals for 2017!

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