Plastic surgeon Mr Sudip J Ghosh had commissioned us to move both his own site – SJG Online – and a shared site with plastic surgery colleague Mr Alan Park over to a WordPress platform.
The brief: Platform switch and fresh new design for Just Cosmetic website.
The finished product: Just about to go live so check back…
SJG Online is the website for Mr Sudip J Ghosh, a plastic surgeon based in the Home Counties. He approached us as he’d had a website built a few years ago but it had never worked the way he wanted. The traffic was really not great, it wasn’t appearing in any of his key treatments despite there being extensive content on the site and he wasn’t able to change any of the details which was very frustrating as some were now very out of date.
The brief: Build a WordPress website, with a fresh and exciting design. WordPress is a great platform as Google loves it and it has a easy-to-navigate Content Management System.
Initially, some of the inherent problems in his original website seemed obvious. There was flash on the website that Google doesn’t read and doesn’t really like. However, when we were moving the content over to the new website, a more major problem came to light that would explain some of the problems he was having with Google.
We provide content writing services to our clients and most are happy to take advantage of these – we have a team of experienced writers and our Editorial Director has many years’ experience as a journalist in the beauty, health and medical arena.
With SJG Online, the content was all there so it seemed that it was just a case of moving it to the new site – as a matter of course we always proof content if it is supplied to us, just to ensure it’s as perfect as possible and as our Editorial Director was checking the content she noticed some slightly odd phrases and even a random doctor’s name thrown in. So she CopyScaped the content, which had been commissioned in good faith by Mr Ghosh, and discovered that it had been copied from numerous websites – some American, but some from Mr Ghosh’s UK plastic surgery peers.
Google punishes you for duplicate content and virtually every page of Mr Ghosh’s content had duplicate content on it. We went back to Mr Ghosh and explained the situation to him. Once the site is live, Mr Ghosh has opted for an ongoing content package so our Editorial Director wrote a small amount of holding content for each page and then over the next few months we will be writing comprehensive replacement copy for each page.
The finished product: Just about to go live, so please check back…
Last week we published a piece on how important content is for making your website work harder for you and your business. At BHM Media we’re totally on board with this message and because we have previously worked as writers and journalists, we find it easy to churn content out (sorry, I don’t mean ‘churn’, obviously I mean craft well-written, quality content).
However, this week we have had a number of questions on how best to write content and what advice we can give to those dipping their toe into online marketing. We’re always happy to answer any questions at BHM Media, but I thought I’d put together some top tips that might make things easier.
1. Write for your audience
Identify who is – hopefully – reading your content and write for them. You are an expert in your field and you should convey that knowledge, but write for your prospective patient or client, not your peers. And don’t be afraid to add personality.
2. Grab their attention
To capture a visitor’s attention, you need to use a compelling headline just as they do in the newspapers. Also that title is what the search engines will pick up so it has to be relevant. One way of doing this is thinking of how your visitors might be searching for the services you offer. Rather than just typing in ‘boob job’ they might ask a question, such as, “How do I get a natural look with a breast augmentation?”, so reflect this in your titles.
3. Be careful with keywords
Establish in your mind what keywords you’d like to be optimising for – that might be a specific treatment in a specific area. Use phrases with these keywords so both the visitor and search engines can identify what your post is about, but be careful. Don’t stuff a piece indiscriminately with these keywords. You’ll turn off your visitor and can even get penalised by the powers that be.
4. Think about images
It’s not just the written word that’s important to both visitors and search engines. More people respond to images over text – which is why video can be so important – so you should incorporate images that are relevant in to your posts. Google provides search tools that can help you find copyright free images.
Remember, to give the images a title that corresponds to the keywords you’re aiming for.
5. Monitor what you’re doing
Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that can help you track what all your hard work is achieving and show you how users are interacting with your site. It can help you fine tune the content you’re writing as ongoing posts and give you pointers on what you can do to your existing pages to improve them.
There are lots of other things that you should be doing with your content – proper tagging of articles into a hierarchy, meta descriptions and titles, going for the long tail – but we can cover these another day.
It’s your website, so you are the best person to be writing this content, but if you don’t have the time to update your site regularly, then we can provide well-written, quality content that is relevant to your specialty. If you have any other questions, give me a call on 07768 571493.
Katharine
BHM Media