“I Used To Get Lots of Prospects, but Now…”

“What happened? When I launched my Web site I got lots of inquiries, but now it has slowed. I thought it was SEO’d — Search Engine Optimized!”

This is a common experience among Web-site owners, including my clients. After launching a new or redesigned site with all the right stuff in terms of SEO (that is, designed to show up near the top of results when people search for what you offer using Google or other sites), you might get a whole bunch of inquiries from people who find your site online. But later, you find it slows down. How come?

SEO, it turns out, is an ongoing program, not a one-time project. There are several reasons:​

• Your competitors are also trying to get found, and as they improve their own sites’ SEO, they may show up before you, pushing you further down the page or onto a later page.
• Search engines like Google are constantly refining and revising their algorithms, which might help you or hurt you.
• If your site is fairly static — that is, it’s not updated very frequently — it may appear “stale” to the search engines compared to another site that is regularly updated with new information.
• Language shifts over time, and a term that was popular when you launched your site might be used less often in searches today, while other terms might come to the fore. For instance, a few years ago, people seeking pain relief or psychological counseling may have been unlikely to search using the term “neuroplasticity,” but that has become a hot topic of late, so some of my Web clients have been making sure their sites include that word.

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​How do you know whether your SEO is up-to-date or falling behind? One way is to conduct some sample searches on terms you think your prospects might use. For example, if you search Google for “neuroplasticity pain Berkeley,” three of the top five results will be from medicalcounseling.net, my client whose site emphasizes the term, which is a good result. If, however, you conduct a search relevant to your business and your competitors show up first in the results, you can examine those competitors’ Web sites to see how they make that happen. In the above example, if you visit medicalcounseling.net, you’ll see that “neuroplastic” or “neuroplasticity” appears several times on the home page, as does “pain.” “Berkeley” appears twice in the footer, the text at the bottom of every page. That’s important, because people very often search for services near them, and often it is difficult-to-impossible to rank first in search results for a topic worldwide. (Search “neuroplasticity pain” without “Berkeley,” and my client doesn’t show up until the tenth page of results.)

Be careful, though, to make sure the terms you emphasize are genuinely related to the main topic of your site. “Keyword stuffing,” or inserting words onto your site because you want people to find you by searching that term even though it doesn’t really relate to your business, will hurt you in search results: The search engines have algorithms that watch for this strategy and will actually downgrade you for employing it.

I recommend reviewing your search standings every three or four months and adjusting as needed. This is something I do for some of my clients and would be happy to do for you, if desired. I keep on top of SEO trends and strategies, and in just two or three hours can help keep you easier to find by people who are looking for what you’re offering.

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