Ep. 136 - I Audited 5 Practice Websites for SEO. Here's What I Found

Here's the strange part about most of these websites: they're ranking. They're getting traffic. It's just traffic that was never going to turn into a client — recipes, lists of foods to eat or avoid with a condition, and the general questions people ask while they're still working out what's wrong with them. Whitney has brought on a colleague, Matt, to work with her on SEO (he'll be on the podcast at some point), and over the last few weeks the two of them audited five practice websites and kept running into the same four things. In this episode she walks through all of them: why so much of the SEO advice out there was written for blogs that make their money from ads and affiliate links rather than from selling services, what to go after instead, the local SEO opportunity hardly anyone is taking advantage of even if they've never seen a patient in person, the technical and accessibility issues that creep into every site over time, and the Google Search Console problem showing up on nearly every audit.Takeaways:Traffic and clients are two different goals, and most SEO advice is aimed at the first one. Ad revenue and affiliate income need enormous traffic to work, and Whitney notes they can take a year or two before generating real income. If what you're selling is your time and your expertise, you need far less traffic — it just has to be the right people. Write for people who are closer to a decision. Recipes and lists of foods for a condition attract researchers. Searches like "what to expect when working with a dietitian" or symptoms of the specific condition you treat attract people who are close to booking. If you only have time for one blog post a month, Whitney says make it that one. A smaller keyword can outperform a bigger one. Whitney points out that even 200 searches a month for a well-aligned phrase is worth going after, because those searchers are the ones who click through, join your list, and book a call. Local SEO doesn't require a physical office. If you're licensed or credentialed in specific states, or take insurance in certain places, you can create location-specific service pages — a page for nutrition services in a particular metro area, or for an entire state — to signal to Google exactly where you serve. Whitney notes this needs to be backed by keyword data, since some states are better optimized statewide and others city by city. Sites degrade over time, and that's normal. New code conflicts, oversized images, heading structure, and missing image alt text all pile up after launch. Whitney recommends running your site through pagespeed.web.dev and checking Search Console for pages marked as not indexed — not everything needs fixing, the goal is just to move the score up.Resources MentionedPageSpeed Insights — free site performance and accessibility scoring Google Search Console — for checking which pages are and aren't indexed Google Business Profile — for practices with a physical location Mediavine — ad platform referenced as an example of the volume-based blog model Doctolib — European provider booking platform Whitney used in BerlinConnect with Whitney:Follow Whitney on Instagram @whitneybatesonSubscribe & Review:If you’re enjoying the podcast, don’t forget to fo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.