We spent the evening talking to a friend about her hypnotherapy practice and how to promote it on the web. She's thinking about setting up a website and her previous experience has shown her that it's easy for a website to get lost in the mass of websites out there. Before she started, she wanted to know whether she could get her hypnotherapy website to appear in page 1 of the Google search results, so that someone could actually find it. How can you tell?
Optimising for local search results is becoming a regular topic of conversation, so we thought we'd share our discussion. Hopefully, this will provide you with a practial idea of how to do this SEO assesment for your own business.
Top for What Google Search?
So far today, there have been 1.2 billion Google searches (and it's only 9:30 in the morning!). When you want to be on 'page 1', for which of these searches? The place to start is with your keywords. The most important keyword is easily identified. It's 'hypnotherapy'. A quick Google search on hypnotherapy returns 983,000 results. That's quite a moderate number compared to other business areas (web design, for example, returns 60 million), but it's still an awful lot. It would clearly be a huge challenge to try to rank top of this. Luckily, that's not the goal. Like many local businesses in Witney, she's looking for customers in the local area. This might mean Witney itself, other local villages within Oxfordshire or even in Oxford. Her keywords must include these location names. But how many people search for 'hypnotherapy Witney'? Is it better to target 'hypnotherapy Oxfordshire'? Or maybe 'hypnotherapy Oxford'? It's time to take a more detailed look at the searches.
How Many People Search?
Google provides a wonderful free tool to do a quick keyword analysis. It's called the 'Google Keyword Tool'. It allows you to get the number of monthly searches for any keyword or combination of keywords. Let's plug in the most obvious starting point: 'hypnotherapy witney'. The answer is 140. Not a huge number, but it may well be enough. It depends on how many new clients the business is hoping to pull in per month.
The keyword tool will return other related search terms, which is a useful way of checking whether people really use the term you think they do. In this case, you can see that in UK, hypnotherapist was searched for 18,100 times, hypnotherapy 110,000 times and hypnosis 135,000 times. That implies that hypnotherapy is the keyword to target. It's still worth validating locally. Nobody searched for hypnotherapist Witney or hypnosis Witney. So for Witney the keyword phrase is definitely 'hypnotherapy Witney'.
What about the local area? Might people actually search more for hypnotherapy Oxfordshire than for hypnotherapy Witney? Yes, 590 searches were done for hypnotherapy Oxfordshire. So, Oxfordshire should also be a keyword. What about Oxford itself? Being a city, is that a bigger market? In terms of online searches, 320 searches were made for hypnotherapy Oxford. Is Oxford also worth targeting? We will be better placed to answer that question once we look at the competition.
Who's Top for Our Keyword Phrases?
Going back to Google search, we can instantly see who's currently ranking top. Hypnotherapy Witney returns 7,000 results, that's 44 pages of results. What would it take to get on page 1? The first thing to note is that for this search Google returns place pages first. This is not true for all searches. What this means for this search is that local hypnotherapy practices which are listed on Google places are going to come out on top. Now, interestingly, your place in this ranking is not dependent purely on distance. In the top 5 for this Witney search are a hypnotherapist in Oxfor d and 1 in Carterton. How to rank well on Google Places is a whole separate discussion! For now, note the importance of listing here and of putting as complete a listing as possible. The top ranked hypnotherapy practice here is also the one that appears top of the website listing.
Scrolling down to the websites, who's in the top spots? The first is a local hypnotherapy practice, the second in Yell.com, the third is another local hypnotherapy practice, the fourth is the listing for another local hypnotherapy practice in the uksmallbusinessdirectory and the last is the hypnotherapydirectory. The first obvious action to take is to get listed in the directories.
What Are the Top Ranking Sites Doing Well?
Remember that to appear in the top spots, we have to be doing better than the ones who are already there. So, let's start with the top ranked one and take a look at what's working for them. There are 3 key elements to ranking well: having an SEO friendly structure to your site, having relevant and up-to-date content and having a credible site as reflected by Google Page Ranking and inbound links. The SEO friendly structure is an essential element of your site design, which you must make sure is built in from the start. Links are something to build over time. Let's focus on the quality of the content here.
The top ranked site is very good, full of content with a Google Page Rank of 3. We can look at the keywords for the site as defined in the meta tags, and, as you'd expect, we find hypnosis, hypnotherapy and variations on the theme. More importantly, we need to look a the actual content of the site and see what words are appearing. Google will analyse your content to see what your site is really about and how relevant it is to a specific search. A tool I've just discovered that I love is called Wordle and it produces a word map based on the text content. For me, it's a beautifully visual way to quickly identify the actual keywords in a site's content. The bigger the word on the map, the more often it appears! Looking at the home page of this site, we can generate the following map:
So this site focuses largely on hypnosis. It has a good focus on hypnotherapy. As importantly for us, although Oxford is reasonably prominent, Witney and Oxfordshire are not. Here's the opportunity then. A site well optimised for hypnotherapy Witney. A quick look at the second ranking site confirms this opportunity. This one is not in the same league at all. There's every possibility of grabbing the second spot.
What Next? Do It All Again!
A search on Google for 'hypnotherapy Oxfordshire' returns 27,000 results. A lot more this time, with a search that is not as specific. We still get the Google Places results first, followed the website listing. This time there's a sponsored listing right at the top, for a hypnotherapy practice in Thame. This is obviously one strategy for getting straight to the top!
The businesses in Google Places now cover a wider field, although they are clustered around Oxford, but the business that ranked top for Witney is the second one here, despite not being Oxford based. Interestingly, this website doesn't appear in the top website listings, because the site didn't talk about Oxfordshire. It didn't talk about Witney either, but the fact that is based in Witney and has a good listing on Google Places pushed it to the top.
This time the top ranked website is a nice site, but not an amazing one. It's got a Google Page Rank of 1, but it does focus on oxfordshire hypnotherapy. The phrase is in the name of the hypnotherapy practice and in the website address. This is an Oxford based business, that has clearly made the decision to target Oxfordshire rather than focus purely on Oxford.
The next ranked website is a local hypnotherapy practice, based in Carterton. It also focuses on Oxfordshire and specifically West Oxfordshire. The town focus though is on Carterton and not Witney, which is why it didn't appear in the Witney search.
It should be possible to appear on the first page for hypnotherapy Oxfordshire. The best tactic is to make sure that every time Witney is mentioned, we use the phrase Witney, Oxfordshire.
And again...
Yes, it is tedious, but we've one more search phrase to look at, and that is 'hypnotherapy Oxford'. 47,100 results this time. The results from Google Places are focused on Oxford, as you would expect. The top result in both places and the website listing is a new website that we haven't come across yet. This is because the website doesn't talk about any locations except Oxford. The words hypnotherapy and Oxford are in the name of the hypnotherapy practice, which helps, although they are not in the website name. It's got a Google Page Rank of 1. So, nothing that we can't match, if we want to target Oxford.
Now for something more creative
Google search terms can be very specific. The volume of searches for a very specific key phrase will be lower. However, if someone finds your site with a very specific key phrase and it has what they're looking for, they're more likely to become a customer. So, it's worth some thought. What might these specific phrases be? One example would be 'hypnotherapy weight loss witney'. If there was a page on the site dedicated to how to use hypnotherapy for weight loss and optimised for that keyphrase, there's a good chance of someone finding it. Now, this might not be the best example, as there are lots of people talking about this. You can of course follow the whole process above for more specific key phrases to identify ones that might work.
Another interesting tool is Google Insight. This shows you rising searches. Now, these may well be very small in number, but they are the related search terms that are increasing the fastest. This might give you an insight into the terms that are becoming popular. Looking at hypnotherapy, we see:
- cognitive hypnotherapy
- natal hypnotherapy
- hypnotherapy for anxiety
- hypnotherapy for smoking
Are there some terms here worth thinking about?
And finally...
This looks like a lengthy process, but a high level assessment like this is not actually a big time commitment. As I said, we did it over a glass of wine one evening. It's an investment well worth making to ensure that you have realistic expectations. It helps you decide what your keywords/phrases should be and whether you have a good chance of creating an easily found site for these keywords/phrases.
For this hypnotherapy site, we've identified that there's a good opportunity to rank well for hypnotherapy Witney and Oxfordshire and Oxford. So, it's worth some investment in a good site.
Now, you can of course analyze endlessly. It's easy to get caught up in the mass of information. We recommend a quick analysis, followed by some serious thought about your business proposition and then just go for it. The beauty of a website with a content management system is that you can try things out and adapt your website as you learn from your experience.
That's what we do!
