Why Duplicate Content may be wreaking havoc on your Audiology website’s local search rankings
(and what you can do about it).
For the many of you who have spent time researching local search techniques for your Audiology practice’s website, you have most likely read that placing useful, hearing aid industry related content on your site is critical to ranking organically. It is now common knowledge that Audiology websites must have an abundance of hearing loss and hearing aid related information available to visitors in order to rank well with search engines. The thought is that the more hearing related content you have on your site, the more likely potential patients will type in a relevant query, visit your practice’s website, trust your expertise, and eventually contact your practice for their hearing healthcare needs. All of this results in more revenue for your practice, with a relatively low marketing investment. Easy right?
But ask yourself this very important question,
Is the content on your website original, and unique to your practice and ONLY your practice?
At AuDseo, our team regularly reviews websites for prospective clients and we consistently see duplicate content. In fact, we recently checked one site that had over 90% duplicate hearing aid related content spread throughout their domain! It is important for practice owners to know that any content added to an Audiology website absolutely must be unique to YOUR practice, or else it may actually cause your practice website to rank lower in local search.
So what exactly is considered duplicate content?
According to Google Webmaster Tools, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” – Read more here
See how that sentence was copied and pasted directly from another website online? That sentence already exists elsewhere online, on a website that has already been deemed the original author, the expert in the matter. This would equate to a small chunk of duplicate content. When someone does a search online for “what is duplicate content”, our blog post is certainly not going to rank higher than the original source (Google Webmaster Tools) for that query because they are the original authors, and they have the credibility. Make sense?
The most common types of duplicate content on Audiology websites are:
- How-to videos
- Home Page Content
- Top Ten Lists
- Virtual Seminars
- Hearing Aid Descriptions
- Homepage “About Us” copy – with just the hearing aid practice name altered
Why should you care if your Audiology website has duplicate content?
Duplicate Content = lower search engine rankings for your website
Google and other search engines (yes, there are others) are set up to favor websites who provide original, useful & engaging information. They seek to offer web users the best answer to their query from the most credible source. The only way to be deemed a credible source is to gain that credibility by consistently publishing original content about your field onto your site, and distributing links to your information via outreach.
How to easily check for duplicate content on your Audiology website:
A few easy steps:
- Copy a sentence or two from your website (highlight the text – right click and press copy)
- Head over to www.google.com
- Paste the sentence from your website into the search field on Google – and add quotation marks around the sentence.
- Press Search
- Look in the results for your sentence in bold. These are exact matches to your search.
If a long list of different websites show in the results with your exact copied sentence in bold, then you have duplicate content.
*For videos – copy the title of the video and paste the title into the Google search box. Then under the search bar, you can change your query from “Web” to “Videos” to see duplicate video results.
Uh-0h! You found duplicate content… What you can do:
- Contact your web design or seo partner and ask them to create new, unique content to replace the redundant information contained on your site. Make sure to focus not only on blog posts, but also on the copy that is present throughout your website on it’s homepage, hearing aid description pages, and hearing loss information pages.
- Create your own unique content to place on your site. This can be done by creating your own blog posts, shooting tutorial videos, creating FAQ pages, informational guides, and other useful information.
- Having your site redesigned by working with a partner who will help create the unique and compelling content needed to help your practice website rank well.
Too much on your plate? | We can help
Just because you CAN create all of your own content, does not mean that you, a.) want to — and/or b.) have the time. Running a successful hearing aid practice requires countless hours ensuring all runs smoothly. You’ve probably figured out early on that while you could learn to do payroll or accounting, it’s nice to hire professionals to handle the details for you.
Why not let an expert help you with your online presence as well?
Our team specializes in creating original hearing aid related content & improving the local SEO for busy practice owners. Have peace of mind knowing that every month your site will have new content published automatically for you- content that is original to your website and will not be duplicated for other practice owners. Content that you will be proud of. AuDSEO will develop a content strategy for your website based on your local market and online goals and publish your original content to both your website as well as your business social media profiles.