When I first started out in the 90s, I wanted to showcase my work. So I posted critiques in discussion forums with the hope that prospective clients would see my work and hire me. I also did it because I loved doing it.
Today, I’ve decided to do it again. I’m going to randomly select plastic surgery websites and do a quick, high-level SEO audit on them. Hopefully, you will learn something you can apply to your own website.
Selecting Sites For Quick SEO Audits
I select these “auditees” at random. That sounds too much like “oddities” (aren’t we all?), but at least it’s better than “victims.” Anyway, I just typed in “plastic surgery” into Google and selected whatever came up.
Since I’m in Ottawa, OttawaPlasticSurgery.com was the top one.
Granted, I’m picking a highly ranked website that may have hired an SEO consultant or agency already. It’s going to be educational nonetheless. Plus, I didn’t plan this and I’m writing it as I critique the site for the first time.
I want to be completely agnostic. No stats, no inside knowledge, no connections. Plus, everything is public knowledge. So by posting this publicly I’m not stepping on any toes or crossing any lines.
If it’s already doing well, there might not be much here. (And if there is, I’ll say so.) But I prefer to pick websites I’ve never worked with. Next time I’m going to select a deeper SERP (search engine results page) like page three or seven, and randomly throw a virtual dart at one.
Second, this is only a really brief audit.
My 360° SEO Audits go far beyond this, sometimes resulting in 20-50 pages (or 2-3 hour videos). But it might give you some insights into how I work, what I find, how I think, and how you can apply these to your website.
Here we go.
Overview of The Site
Crawl and Visual Walkthrough
Using Screaming Frog SEO spider crawler, I found a few things.
- The site crawled 188 internal HTML pages in total. However, some of these pages are redirects and contain mixed versions:
- https://www.ottawaplasticsurgery.com/
- https://www.ottawaplasticsurgery.com/
- https://www.ottawaplasticsurgery.com/
- https://www.ottawaplasticsurgery.com
- Redirects are pointing to their proper versions, which is good. However, they are sending mixed signals and create unnecessary redirect chains. I would do a full sweep, search-and-replace, and change everything to “https://www” (since that version is the canonical one).
- I also see there are 24 redirects. Many of them are improper base folders, likely based on a switch in taxonomies. Same idea with the previous point, which is that it may be wise to fix those URLs internally. For example:
- /case-study/ and its subpages redirected to /case-studies/
- /treatment/ and its subpages redirected to /treatments/
- Using BuiltWith.com, I see they’re using WordPress, which might explain the issue. Typically, custom post types are not properly configured, where the plural is the taxonomy name and the singular is used for individual pages. Either way, this needs to be fixed.
- The site contains 404 errors (dead pages or pages that were changed), which should be redirected, and the internal links should be updated.
- There are also five internal redirects. Redirects are good as they help Google and backlinks point to the proper page. But if the links are internal, they should be corrected as internal links are strong signals.
- The site seems to have a multitude of duplicate meta-descriptions tags. While they’re not ranking factors, they do help clickthrough rates (CTRs), which do indirectly contribute to higher rankings.
- Finally, 14 of the pages are wrongly canonicalized, meaning they are telling Google that other pages are the correct pages to index but they link to nonexistent pages, probably from a development site of the previous designer that were not properly updated:
25 Treatment Pages
After deleting all the errors and redirects, we’re left with 140 indexable pages. The most content-rich are treatment pages that describe the procedures, including expectations, case studies, and FAQs at the bottom. Each treatment comes with a clear call to action to “request a consultation.”
70 Case Study Pages
About 70 pages are case studies. Lots of proof with before-and-after photos, but the content is thin and weak. There’s a short paragraph describing the patient and their case, but I would have expanded on that a bit more.
I would perhaps add details about that case’s recovery time, some anonymous info about the patient (i.e., lifestyle, career, pregnancies, etc), or details to make the reader understand and identify themselves more with the case. It would also create a lot of good content with keywords for better visibility.
User Interface
Visually, the user interface (UI) is good. The site is well-designed and easy to navigate on both my desktop and smartphone. The navigation is focused on body parts, with submenus leading to procedures.
(Remember the “5 Ps of Plastic Surgery“?)
Let’s take a look at what some SEO tools say.
SEO Audit and Analysis Tools
According to Ahrefs.com, the site is getting about 895 visitors a month, which is not bad but not great, either. At its highest point, it was getting around 1840 visitors. So traffic has literally dropped by 50%.
It might be the sign of a Google algorithm update, a website migration, a new competitor, or a change in content structure. (Without access to the analytics, it’s hard to tell. I would investigate this further if this was a full SEO audit.)
There are over 1,180 keywords indexed for this website. That’s not optimal. I usually shoot for 10 keywords per page (as an average ratio, not a goal). So about 1,400 keywords in total. (The exception being ecommerce sites.)
However, this website has 118 keywords on the first page. Just a cursory look at their keywords, they have a mix of branded traffic and non-branded traffic.
Non-branded terms are highlighted in green, while branded terms occupy the topmost rankings. This means that the intent is navigational, either for research or for trying to reach the site or doctor in question.
Also, since they are called “Ottawa Plastic Surgery” and it’s in the URL itself, people looking for the topic, not the location, may stumble onto the site. It’s a good thing, but it’s hard to tell if the intent is navigational or not.
Using filters, I excluded the doctors and proper names from the list. The site seems to have about 50 top-10 keywords, with varying degrees of traffic. After I remove location names, i.e., excluding keywords with “Ottawa” in them, I’m left with 17 keywords. None are in the top three positions.
This tells me that the traffic is either largely navigational or investigational. In other words, people are aware of the procedure and they want to get to (or to learn more about) the doctor, the clinic, or the specific procedure.
What does this mean?
Their traffic is already either middle or bottom of the funnel (i.e., users are already aware of the problem, the solution, and the procedure). And this site seems to be catering to that traffic well with the number of case studies, before-and-after photos, and FAQs. So their content is relevant.
Looking at their pages for which they are ranking, the bulk of the highest-ranked URLs are treatment pages. Since I already determined in my initial walkthrough that the treatment pages were the most content-rich, this would make sense.
According to their sitemap XML page, their blog has 30 URLs. I exported a list of all the URLs that were already ranking, and excluded any core pages, treatment pages, and case study pages. Of those 30 blog posts, only five blog posts are getting search traffic, and it’s barely any traffic at all.
EAT Signals
EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It is the strongest ranking factor for medical websites. Typically (although, not always), these are usually defined by signals about the author, website, and content:
- Expertise: the author (of the site’s content) has a bio that lists credentials, is recognized in their field, has practiced for a number of years, etc.
- Authoritativeness: the website has links from authoritative websites, valid brand mentions, good external reviews, a positive reputation, etc.
- Trustworthiness: the content is fact-checked, peer-reviewed, well researched, well documented, accompanied by seals of approval, etc.
As far as OttawaPlasticSurgery.com goes, the site does have very strong EAT signals. Each doctor has a page with a bio that lists their credentials, board certifications, even medical research experience. However, Dr. Silverman’s bio has a dead link to a reviews website that’s a 404.
(I would add an author’s bio at the bottom of each blog post and incorporate author schema markup on all articles, even treatment pages, as signals that the content was written or reviewed by a medical professional.)
The site also has 4.6k backlinks, which is pretty healthy. Some of them are strong websites with high authority ratings, such as BBB.org (Better Business Bureau), RateMDs.com, 411.ca, and Medicard.com.
By the way, I’m getting a sense that this site has hired a PR or agency since there are also many press releases, too.
Technical SEO
Doing just a quick technical audit, the site is scoring 43%, which is low. There are 777 issues, 184 of which are critical errors. I’ve pointed out some of these errors earlier, including the 404s, the redirect chains, wrong canonical URLs, the mixed versions, and the duplicate meta-description errors.
There are 553 warnings, which are not critical but, if addressed, do help. For example, there’s a lot of missing data, such as alternative texts for images, H1 headers, and open graph data (for sharing such as social media).
Finally, Google’s schema markup checker has found some unnamed, basic structured data. The vast majority of websites don’t take advantage of structured data. So there’s plenty of opportunity there.
User Experience
This is where the website needs work the most. Page experience (a subset of UX) is going to become a full-fledged ranking factor officially as of May, 2021. If it’s not fixed by then, it might hurt rankings let alone the user experience.
Looking at this initial test shows that the site takes 13 seconds to load and a full 18 seconds before one is able to interact with it.
Having so many photos, which is a vital part of a plastic surgeon’s website, can be incredibly memory intensive. Proper multipoint caching, script deferral, image optimizations, and a content distribution network (CDN), among others, would dramatically improve the performance.
Conclusion
Of course, this audit doesn’t include the full picture. For example, I didn’t cover the competition, keyword research, link profiles, local SEO, and so on. I typically include these in my 360° SEO Audit and 360° SEO Strategy programs for plastic surgery and cosmetic medicine.
But this quick, high-level audit offers a good deal of information.
For example, the biggest missed opportunity is the blog. Developing high-quality content that’s relevant and valuable is often the best way to increase visibility, traffic, and interest. Some of the best-performing plastic surgery websites tend to have at least 100 articles or more.
Plastic and cosmetic surgery are rife with questions — questions about costs, photo appraisals, risks, recovery times, and more. For example:
- How many plastic surgeons are there in Ottawa?
- Should I go to a cosmetic surgeon or a dermatologist?
- Who are the best plastic surgeons in Ontario?
- Are breast implants safe?
- What questions should I ask before getting liposuction?
- Who are the best cosmetic surgeons for gynecomastia?
- Is plastic surgery painful?
- Is cosmetic surgery noticeable?
- How do plastic surgeons remove stretch marks?
- What are the side effects of plastic surgery?
These are only 10 of about 200 questions.
Good content with strong visuals that answer these questions can drive highly targeted users who are just beginning their research. Plus, plastic surgery articles can be easily shared on, and amplified through, social media, where most of the visual-seeking targeted audience hangs out.
Hopefully, this was helpful. Please let me know if you would like to see more.
Sidenote and an Important SEO Tip
I added a small part near the end of the SEO audit I did on OttawaPlasticSurgery.com when I posted it online. But since I did it after I first published it, you may have missed the additional content.
It’s simply this.
In that critique, I said that the biggest missed opportunity is content marketing, and that this website needs a solid plastic surgery marketing strategy — particularly to appeal to a more top-of-funnel (i.e., lesser aware) audience.
I said that plastic and cosmetic surgery are rife with questions — e.g., about costs (most common), appraisals (i.e., before-and-after photos, the second most common), and risks (the third). Those are concerns from the mid to bottom-of-funnel users (or from thinking or hurting audiences).
But there are plenty of topics people ask questions about who are in the initial oblivious or apathetic stages — questions that can turn into some great content that users will love (and therefore, Google will love, too). For example:
- How many plastic surgeons are there in Ottawa?
- Should I go to a cosmetic surgeon or a dermatologist?
- Who are the best plastic surgeons in Ontario?
- Are breast implants safe?
- What questions should I ask before getting liposuction?
- Who are the best cosmetic surgeons for gynecomastia?
- Is plastic surgery painful?
- Is cosmetic surgery noticeable?
- How do plastic surgeons remove stretch marks?
- What are the side effects of plastic surgery?
These are only 10 of about 200 questions.
You can use either SEMRush (under “content marketing,” use “topic research” and a right column will list “interesting questions”) or Ahrefs (under “keywords explorer,” search for the topic and look at “questions” on the left). Or you could use AlsoAsked.com or AnswerThePublic.com. Or even Google itself.
In fact, most of these tools pull from Google’s “related searches” and “people also asked” sections on SERPs. These are questions people are actually asking, so in reality, Google is doing the market research for you.
Now, there are a number of ways to create quality content. Creating an article that answers questions people ask is a low-hanging-fruit way that can easily capture decent traffic because people are specifically looking for answers.
Provide good content that does a good job of answering these questions (and provide a good user experience when people are consuming that content), and you will likely rank. If the content can answer questions better than your competitors (ranking competitors, not business ones), you will rank higher.
I don’t want to mislead you by telling you you will rank only because you offer good content. “Good” is subjective. But let me show you what I would do.
I use an SEO outsourcing template for content writing. But if you’re writing the content yourself, here’s what you could do.
Let’s take “What questions should I ask before getting liposuction?” Type that exact question into Google and see what comes up. For me, this is what I see:
As you can see, there’s a position “zero” result (i.e., a featured snippet) from a Brampton, Ontario plastic surgeon. Then, there’s a first-position result from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (or ASPS, an industry association). And then, there are a few “people also ask” questions.
Now, here’s the interesting part. Here’s the link from the featured snippet:
The article is from a private plastic surgery practice and written in February 2017 on a website that appears a tad outdated. But it’s beating the plastic surgery association’s article written in 2018. And they both beat the third one, an article that was written as recently as last month.
This Brampton, Ontario site gets about 2,900 visitors per month (Canada), whereas the association gets over three million (USA).
The next one down, in position two, is a dermatologist in Long Beach, CA. But this one was written in November, 2020. The traffic is 843 per month. But the article is subpar, the site is hard to read, and the content has no pictures whatsoever.
So it would be a fair assumption that a better article from Ottawa Plastic Surgery can either beat these results and climb to the top position. Often referred to as the “Skyscraper Technique,” the goal is to see what content your audience wants, what answers they get, and provide them with better answers.
It really is that simple.
So what I would do is, first, make the question the title of the article. If you use WordPress, typically it’s going to be the H1 (heading tag), which is a decent signal to Google of what the content is about.
The reason is, the search engine results page (SERP) has links that don’t have that exact question in their titles. Variations are fine, but being closer to what people are actually searching for can up the chances.
Next, select the questions you want your article to answer.
Remember, this article is not just about the answer to a question but also about what questions to ask, too. So it’s an FAQ of sorts. I would do some drill-down research to find what other questions people ask.
You can borrow ideas or get inspiration from competing articles (remember, you’re trying to beat them). But I assume that Ottawa Plastic Surgery has a bank of questions that people always ask them. Use those, too.
Make these questions headers (i.e., H2 tags) in the article. Obviously, I would also add schema markup code to the HTML to indicate a) it’s an article, b) it’s written or reviewed by a doctor, and c) it’s an FAQ.
For additional content, you can, within each question’s answer, link to its own separate page that can really dive deeply on the topic.
What the Brampton website does well is it contains supporting images. But the other two articles have no visuals at all. So a way to one-up them is to choose photographs — which are better than images let alone no images at all.
A final thought.
Remember, the goal is to offer good Plastic Surgery Marketing content.
However, better content will get you ranked higher than your competitors. And better in the eyes of the audience isn’t about being “better” but about being in closer alignment with your audience and their search intent.
Think about it: how often have you landed on an article that, not only gave relevant, helpful information but also gave valuable information that answered additional questions — questions you had or didn’t think you had — that felt as if they were reading your mind?
That’s the power of focusing on user intent as well as search intent.
What kinds of questions do people ask about liposuction? What questions do people really want to know the answers to? What questions would they ask but always seem to forget or fail to ask? What questions you’d wished they asked you (as the doctor) that they didn’t think of themselves first?
Hopefully this gives you some ideas for your own plastic surgery marketing strategy.
