These past few months, I have been faced with a challenge. Some background: One of my clients is a clinical psychologist on a limited budget. When he first contacted me, he showed up on Page 5 for his main competitive keyword. Within a few months we got him up to page 2, with only a few websites standing in the way of him and page 1 of Google.
But that’s where things started to stall. The pages we used to build his site were successful – several of the pages we added showed up on page 1 of Google, and his hits improved. But when it came to the main keyword we were trying to target, he wasn’t inching any higher. Our successes weren’t translating to results for this keyword, and this keyword was our goal keyword. Stalling was frustrating.
Moving Offsite for Solutions
I checked everything I could find, to no avail. There didn’t appear to be anything I could do on site that would help improve his search engine rank. With nothing interesting to do on-site, we decided to look offsite.
It was there I noticed that, while he was listed in dozens of psychology directories, his bio in each one of the directories was a copy and paste from his main site. He had no unique writing for the biographies he posted on directories that represented a large portion of his business.
Why Unique Bios Matter
There are substantial benefits to having a unique biography on every website directory you’re a part of, even if it’s basically a rewrite of your original biography. It’s also important to make sure that your main keyword(s) have at least some mention (doesn’t have to be an exact match) on those websites as well. All of these can affect your SEO in a variety of ways.
Relevant backlinks are a crucial part of SEO. Directories are relevant backlinks, but they’re only one part of what makes a website relevant. You can improve the value of those backlinks by making sure that the page itself has some of the keywords that you’re hoping to target, because this tells Google that your website is related to that keyword. Unique bios also tell Google that the page your website is listed on is not just a directory, but a place for unique information. This also adds to the benefit of the backlink for your website.
Similarly, one of the reasons directories are so useful is that the directories themselves also show up in search engines. If you have a unique, well written bio with solid keywords, you increase the odds that your page is the one that shows up for that directory when someone does a search in Google, Bing, and other search engines.
Finally, some directories themselves base who shows up for keyword searches on their own site by the keywords the person has on their bio. Making sure that you have those keywords improves the odds that your bio shows up first.
The Results of Changing the Bios
We recently changed all of the bios for the psychologist and we have already seen a benefit. Rewriting biographies in unique and interesting ways, however, can be a challenge. Contact Great Leap Studios, and let us rewrite your bios for you to improve your search engine optimization, and your search engine presence.
