Content is king on when it comes to being found on Google. But for dentists, as well as almost every other business, the right amount of content is the key to keeping your website ranking high.
There are two reasons why too much content is a bad thing: keyword dilution, and reader fatigue.
Keyword dilution can happen in several ways. The most common is to put too many common keywords across all of your site’s pages. Just as an example, you might include the phrase, “(City, state’s) preferred dentist” on all or almost all your pages – whether it’s appropriate or not. If you have a very extensive website with a lot of pages, it’s easy for Google to downgrade your search ranking due to excessive keyword repetition.
These days, excessively repeating keywords is usually due to ignorance of search engine optimization (SEO) principles rather than an attempt at keyword stuffing – including as many keywords as possible trying to game the search engines. Keyword stuffing carries a heavy search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Don’t do it, no matter what some SEO “expert” might tell you.
Reader fatigue is exactly what it sounds like – there are just too many pages to go through and too many of those pages read very much alike. If your dental website is the online equivalent of War and Peace, you’re not doing yourself any favors. Prospects will spend less time on a website with an overwhelming amount of content. And if your site navigation doesn’t take them quickly, easily, and accurately to the information they’re looking for, they’ll bounce off your site and find another dentist.
So, excessive content on your website is counterproductive to your efforts to attract new patients to your practice, to say the least. is bad. Here are two suggestions for pruning your online content for maximum results.
- Repetition is unnecessary.
There are only so many ways that you can write about teeth whitening, gum disease, and root canals. You don’t need all of those ways, you just need the best. Go through your content with a ruthless eye. Which pages or posts are the most informative, expert, and trustworthy? Which pages or posts are written at the most appropriate age level (roughly middle school for online writing) for your audience? Keep those pages and archive the rest, or pitch them if your prefer.
- Identify gaps and fill them.
Your website has to fulfill two crucial needs – the first is to convey the entire breadth of the services you offer, while the second is to convince the reader to choose you to solve their dental problems.
As you review your site, you may discover that it’s out of date. Dentists are notorious for having a “fire and forget” mentality regarding websites. Review what’s changed in your practice since the last time it was updated. Are you using different technology or treatment approaches? Have you added new staff members? Are you offering financing program that you didn’t have before?
Your content has to address both of those needs, but it doesn’t necessarily have to do that on every page. Yes, dental patients can be anxious about different procedures, but if your website does a good job of conveying how well you work with anxious patients, you don’t need to include that on the teeth whitening page.
Once you’ve identified gaps, write your best possible content to fill them. Be sure that the style and tone is consistent with the rest of your site.
Content is king, but not all kings are created equal. Make sure that your content rules.