About two weeks ago, a client calls me to discuss his InfoSite. His site being #1 on Google for the trafficked dental implant terms in his market, and with plenty of phone calls and email leads, I figured the call would go very well. “I have no complaints,” he starts, “but, I’m wondering if I should cancel the site. You see, my consultant is telling me that the InfoSite is hurting my practice site.” I explained to him why the truth is the exact opposite.
Your InfoSite Brands You as an Authority in Your Market
InfoSites are built to attract high-value patients to your practice by putting together a comprehensive website on a specific treatment (check out Dental Implants Encinitas for an example). The way the InfoSites attract these patients is by ranking for the trafficked terms on Google, and they accomplish this by making you the local authority on the topic.
You would be hard pressed to use your main practice site in the same way. Your practice site highlights all the services you offer and therefore “suffers” from a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none syndrome. I write “suffer” within quotation marks, because being a jack-of-all-trades website is not a bad thing in this case. That’s the role your main practice site is supposed to play — a place where current and prospective patients can learn more about you, your staff, and the treatments you offer.
We can, of course, write countless pages of content on each service and this will help your main site’s SEO, and I’ll talk more about this in a couple of paragraphs, but it won’t compare to your InfoSite. That’s because, unlike your main site, your InfoSite is entirely dedicated to a specific treatment. It’s a treatment-specific resource that patients can count on to get the information they need to make an educated decision regarding their dental health.
By branding you, your InfoSite is helping not only your main practice site, but all of your digital assets. Every mention of your brand — whether that’s your practice name or your name — will be associated with that role of being the local authority.
Not only do both sites help each other, but by doing so you are working towards capturing a large segment of the local market for the relevant treatments. Dr. Eugene Stanislaus, in Brooklyn, is the perfect example. This is what the search market for the most trafficked dental implant term — “dental implants Brooklyn” — looks like:
His InfoSite is #1 and his main site is #4, just below Yelp and Groupon. In other words, searchers in that market will see his practice TWICE before seeing any other practice on the page.
As I mentioned a few paragraphs above, adding more content to your main practice site will help it SEO-wise. And, although it won’t fulfill the same role as the InfoSite, they can both work together to help you garner an even larger market share than you would with the InfoSite alone. In effect, you can dominate the top 2–4 spots, denying a competitor of that traffic and increasing your chances of getting more patients.
The Link Connection
InfoSites are standalone sites and our optimization campaigns are built around that fact. We don’t piggyback on your main site — at most, we’ll ask for a link to the InfoSite from the main practice site, just to get as much SEO value on the table as soon as possible —, but your main site is definitely boosted by your InfoSite.
The InfoSite SEO strategy is varied: we add fresh, unique, and in-depth content; we build backlinks; we frequently find ways to improve load speed; we make sure the schema is up-to-date and comprehensive. That just touches the surface. The main purpose of all of this is to build the site’s authority, which is reflected in the site’s PageRank (a possibly archaic term; Google is incredibly secretive about PageRank and its evolution over the years).
The greater the InfoSite’s authority, the better the site performs on Google search. Moreover, the greater that authority, the more value the InfoSite passes on to your main site via the link we place in the footer. Link building is incredibly difficult and takes a lot — a lot! — of work. You get a high-value one as an added bonus to having an InfoSite and that’s a big deal.
Your InfoSite as a Citation
Something I’ve talked about before, but worth mentioning again, is how your InfoSite acts as a citation. The basic definition of citation is a brand mention. Every time someone mentions your company name online, that is a vote in your favor.
Your InfoSite mentions your business name, your address, your phone number (your actual number, not a tracking or forwarding number), and has a link to the your main practice site. Furthermore, it’s optimized and earns PageRank and Domain Authority on its own. It acts as a very powerful citation in favor of your practice, which in turn helps your practice perform better in the map area of the search engine results page (SERP) — usually under the purview of local SEO.
Dr. Lockwood, in La Jolla, is a great example of how your InfoSite acts as a citation and how it impacts your practice’s search visibility as a whole:
Not only is Dr. Lockwood number 1 for his InfoSite, but he’s also Position A on the local map area. That is a powerful search presence that captures the two most important spots on the Google SERP for that term.
What About the Tracking Number? Doesn’t That Negatively Affect My Marketing?
Tracking numbers are common in marketing, because they help track the return on your investments. If they were bad for SEO, you’d expect them to be uncommon. I touched upon this in a previous article, but it’s worth going over again.
We use tracking numbers on our InfoSites so that you know for sure how many leads the program has generated for you. That way, you can make an informed decision as to whether the InfoSite is worth the cost. Likewise, we — and everyone else — use tracking numbers to monitor the success of your pay-per-click advertising. These numbers are important, otherwise you’re driving blind, and there’s really no reason not to use them.
But, aren’t your citations supposed to have the same name, address, and number across the web? Yes, and we make sure that your InfoSite is citing your business correctly. Let’s take a look at Dr. Currie’s Atlanta dental implants InfoSite as an example. This is what the citation looks like:
The “Current Patients” number is their actual practice number and the “New Patients” number is the tracking number. How do we make sure that Google doesn’t get confused with which number is the actual practice number? We use schema — something that about 80 percent of businesses don’t take advantage of, but is incredibly useful. This is what Dr. Currie’s InfoSite citation looks to Google:
By using schema, we make sure that the InfoSite is perfectly consistent with the practice’s other citations. That way, the use of tracking numbers doesn’t undermine your local SEO.
Your InfoSite HELPS Your Main Practice Site
Next time someone claims that your InfoSite is hurting your main site, I invite you to point them to this article. Tell them about the value of the site as a lead generator, and how it adds value to your main site by acting as a citation and by providing a strong link — two votes that help your main site’s SEO —, and see what they have to say. I bet you that the style of their approach will change right away, now that they see you’re not so easily fooled.
If there’s an issue that I haven’t addressed in the article, please let me know in the comments. Similarly, if you have anything to add or if you have any questions, don’t be shy and join the conversation below. Would you like to contact us directly? You can reach us at (858) 333-8950 or through the contact page. If you enjoyed this article, you may also love “Spruce Up Your InfoSite!“