How to Damage Your Chiropractic Website Search Ranking
Let's call this: What not to do on your
chiropractic site. We have a lot of doctors coming to us for help every week, and we've seen some sites with real problems. Here are a few of the things that will ruin your site rankings pretty quickly:
Stealing Content
This is one of the most common problems, and we've written about it many times in the past, but it needs to be repeated here:
Don't take articles from other websites and paste them into your site!
There are (at least) two reasons: First, it's unethical and illegal. If someone finds their content on your site, they can sue you for damages. Here's a good rule: if you find something online and you don't have explicit permission to duplicate it, it's a violation of
federal copyright law. It's not worth it to "borrow" somebody's work and use it on your site without permission. Second, taking an article from another site
will hurt your site in the search rankings. Google is like Santa Claus: it knows exactly what's on your site and it knows if it exists on another site. If it sees your site has an article that's already published on another site, it's going to think that you're cheating and it's going to hit your site with a duplicate content penalty. And that's not good. It will rank your site page, but waaaaayy down in the search results where your patients will never find you. Again, just so you get the message:
Don't take articles from other websites and paste them into your site!
The Ancient Site
This is another common problem we see on chiropractic sites. A doctor will get a site set up, add a few pages...and then nothing gets added or updated. This is bad for two reasons: First, your patients will be able to tell that your site isn't modern and updated. Again, first impressions are very important. Second, Google's not going to take your site very seriously if you don't update. Plus, if you're in a competitive market with a lot of other chiropractors, you can be sure that other doctors
are working on their sites and adding relevant content and videos. Google is going to those other sites much more seriously and rank them better than a site that hasn't been updated for three years. Keep your site fresh!
Improper Coding
Incorrect
Meta Tags can really hurt your site. We see this every day, where the Title Tag for a site will be "
Smith Chiropractic Center," and that's it. That doesn't help your patient know anything about your practice and it makes it practically impossible for Google to index your site. Make sure your webmaster knows what he or she is doing and knows how to code your site correctly, or you may end up on page 12 of the search rankings. For more about getting the most out of your chiropractic site, check out our
Beginner's Guide to Chiropractic SEO.
