One of Now Media Group’s specialties is the infosite, which is a website that is dedicated exclusively to providing patients with a rich amount of information about a particular treatment. For an example, check out the dental implants infosite we’ve recently built for Dr. Medhat Dawoud, in West Orange, NJ. A common question we’re asked is whether these infosites replace or compete against a practice’s main website. The answer is an unequivocal no. In fact, main sites and infosites enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. They also work together to better market the practice to new patients by giving it greater online exposure, in both local and organic search rankings.
How Your Websites Work Together
First things first, we should dispel the myth that an infosite can hurt your practice’s main website on the search engine results page (SERP). This could conceivably be true if the content of your infosite was copy and pasted straight from your primary site — this is called content duplication. At Now Media Group, we follow a zero tolerance policy on duplicate content; every single page of our writers’ output is unique, including our blogs. In fact, we apply a very careful and meticulous strategy when it comes to structuring the content, going as far as to avoid repeating even similar ideas. Our goal is to ensure that the patient can find the information he or she is seeking and we do this by making the infosite a comprehensive, one-stop resource on the treatment by delivering professionally-written content.
Infosites actually benefit your principal website greatly. One way it does this is by providing an additional citation. What is a citation? Suppose we’re trying to measure the authority of a scholar in his or her field. How would we go about doing this? One way is to count the number of times a doctor’s research has been cited by his or her peers, weighting each bibliographic citation by the estimated quality of the publication (e.g. getting cited in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics is more prestigious than a bibliographic reference in Dentistry Today). Online citations work similarly, where each reference to your practice contributes to your authority. Your infosite is one such reference, which we accomplish by making sure search engines can read the relevant data about your practice — name, address, and phone number.
Furthermore, the citation on the infosite is harmonized with your Google+ account. This is incredibly important and, in fact, you should make sure that all of your citations — Yelp, Facebook, YellowPages, Yahoo! Local, Localeze, et cetera — match the information on your Google+ page. The reasoning behind this is that Google owns almost 70 percent of the search market in the U.S. and when Google corroborates citations they’re going to use a standard they can trust, which happens to be the social network they control. If your citations are inconsistent, get in contact with us so that we can do that for you. Accomplishing this is vital for maintaining a top rank in local search results, so that when a patient searches for “cosmetic dentist” (or whatever the search string is) he or she finds you, rather than someone else.
Your infosite helps your online authority in another way as well. If the optimization on your primary website is done right — and at Now Media Group we make sure everything is done right —, it should be connected to your Google+ account. The same is true of your infosite. To help explain how this is useful, suppose that your main site is akin to a general reference book on dentistry. If it’s good, that should enhance your reputation amongst your peers. You can think of your infosite as an additional book that specializes specifically on a particular treatment, establishing you as an expert on that topic. Given that search engines are designed to connect users with the most reputable source of information, boosting your online reputation with infosites is crucial to improving your web presence.
By helping to build your reputation as an expert, the work done by our infosite directly improves how your main site shows up in organic (non-paid) results on search engines. Of course, this presupposes that your primary website has been well optimized! No matter how well an infosite does, if the main site is burdened by inadequate SEO, chances are it won’t beat out its competitors in the SERP. If this is true in your case, I encourage you to give us a call at 858-240-4544. We have a long, proven track record of successfully getting our clients listed in the top search results, including in both organic and local listings.
Now Media Group Can Help You Dominate Your Market
The top slots in a search listing are prime real estate. Now Media Group specializes in having your primary website and infosites dominate those positions. Let us help you help your patients and contact us at 858-240-4544 to speak with one of our consultants.