How to Improve SEO & Avoid Common Issues

The new year is here, and it’s a perfect time to look at how to improve SEO on your chiropractic practice’s website. Understanding some of the more common issues that prevent websites from ranking to their fullest potential and knowing how to rectify those problems is a great place to start. Let’s explore how duplicate content, keyword stuffing, and other common SEO issues may be impacting your ability to attract new patients. 

Common SEO Issues & How To Fix Them

Optimizing your website to rank on Google gives you a major competitive edge and helps you gain the attention of customers. Correcting these common SEO issues helps you improve the effectiveness of your website and gain more traction: 

Duplicate Content

It’s estimated that duplicate content comprises around 30% of what’s out there on the internet. Duplicate content could be anything from a whole page that reoccurs under different URLs to a large block of text reoccurring throughout your website. While this won’t get you in trouble per se, it can weaken the user experience and make it harder for Google to crawl your website. 

If you have multiple pages hosting duplicate content, try to make it so that every piece of content has a single canonical URL through which it’s accessed. You can figure out where duplicate content lives on your website by manually checking URLs in your sitemap, using a tool like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or contracting a reputable SEO agency to help refine your website. 

Unique Content

The concept of scraping goes hand in hand with content duplication, in this case taking content from other websites. This can be outright lifting content from another website, republishing content with only slight changes, and aggregating content from other sites. Scraped content won’t only negatively affect your website’s ability to rank, but it can also land you in legal trouble. 

Google says that stocking your website with unique, informative content “will likely influence your website's presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions” in its SEO Starter Guide. Unique content should be well-written and -organized, add some value that benefits readers and customers, align with your brand voice and messaging, and ideally be written by a person rather than a generative AI. Tools like SmallSEOTools’ Plagiarism Checker can compare your blogs and website copy against other websites so you can ensure that you’ve got fresh and unique content. 

Keyword Stuffing

Ensuring your content is optimized with valuable keywords is a great way to rank well on Google Search. But there is such a thing as too much. Keyword stuffing is when you intentionally fill a page with keywords for the sole purpose of ranking higher than competitors. The most common sort of keyword stuffing Google cites is inorganically using words and phrases over and over in an effort to get them on the page as many times as possible.

If you build content around keywords, make sure that they fit naturally into the content. As a general rule, keywords should only make up about 1-2% of your content, which means you shouldn’t use them more than a handful of times in a 500-word article. Moreover, it’s important that you select good, relevant keywords that align with users’ search intent. Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for finding keywords and creating plans for your content. 

Learn How to Improve Your SEO With Page One Digital

If you want your chiropractic website to rank better and pull in more patients, Page One Digital can help. We’re experts in all things SEO, and our SEO Audit service can help get to the bottom of the common and complex issues that are stopping you from getting the results you want. And with our recurring SEO marketing services, you can be confident that your website is getting the care and attention it needs to help you succeed.