PRC Marketing Articles

Did you know...

Purchase a deluxe client website from Option Line eXtend, and you'll receive our basic pregnancy center SEO services included with the package!

What people are saying

Marketing Your Pregnancy Center Online

How to be found in Google, Yahoo & MSN Live search engines without paying a fortune

Of all the ways to promote a pregnancy center online, my favorite is the least expensive—that which we traditionally call search engine optimization or SEO.

A simple way of defining search engine optimization is “fine tuning a website so it will be one of the first results a person sees when they search online for related subjects.”

A more involved definition is “fine tuning a website to ensure it follows good web design standards & to take advantage of how search engines select results in order to help that website rank better when an individual searches for related subject matter online.”

As search engine optimization can easily become a complex topic, I will break this topic into three parts, each of which will be released as a separate article. In this first article, we’ll look at the basics for optimizing your PRC’s site; secondly, we’ll consider some intermediate SEO techniques; finally, we’ll look at some more advanced methods.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Basic SEO for Pregnancy Center Websites

If you or your webmaster is operating on limited technical web ability, then these are the primary 5 suggestions which I would highly recommend you implement in order to help your center’s website perform better online.

1) Include location specific information on every page on your website

Most pregnancy centers focus on one or several particular regions. With hundreds of PRC websites presently in existence and with thousands of pages of similar content on the web, your site will best target the regions you serve if you make certain to include key locations on every page throughout your site.

I like to recommend centers to come up with 5 key locations and focus on them. One, of course, would be the location of your center. The other locations could be nearby cities/towns from which you see a large number of clients (or from which you would like to see clients). If you have any abortion clinics nearby then, of course, you would want to include that city.

An easy way to include this information across your entire website is to include it in a footer. You could say: Ross City Pregnancy Center provides services to Albanor, Troya, Albatross, Melnor and Ross City in Texas. An even stronger footer wording could be: Ross City Pregnancy Center provides abortion clinic alternative services including pregnancy testing, limited ultrasounds for pregnancy verification, and information on abortion. Our medical center serves Albanor, Troya, Albatross, Melnor and Ross City in Texas.

It’s key to include the location specific information on every page of your website because search engines see each page as, essentially, a separate entity, and the location specific information connects that pregnancy/abortion/abstinence information together with those specific cities. Believe me, a lot of people now include the name of a city/town when conducting a search for services. Including the location on every page can mean the difference between a prospective client located in your region in Ross City, Texas visiting a PRC website based out of southern Florida or finding your own site.

Unless you’re operating a well funded & heavily marketed site like Option Line’s, it’s best to keep your focus sharply pointed on the region you actually serve. Otherwise, your site will easily be lost amidst the millions and millions of web pages that are rarely visited.

2) Strategically word your web page titles

If you open up an internet explorer window and go to www.amazon.com, you’ll notice at the very top of the window on your left the words: Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more. This is what we call a page title. A small portion of that title is also displayed when you minimize that page.

Search engines treat page titles as being key summaries of what that particular page contains. Search engines may also scan a page to verify that the page title accurately depicts a page’s content. Page titles are treated so seriously by search engines that careful changes to your page titles alone (provided that your website is well designed, fully functional, and is well linked) can drastically change how well (or poorly) your website is found when people conduct relevant searches online.

Not only are page titles important in the “eyes” of a search engine, but they are also what a human searcher views (along with two lines of description) when looking at a list of search results. The page title is in bold and only displays 70 characters. If a page title is longer than 70 characters, then the page title is shortened and shows even less than 70 characters such as in this real life example seen when searching for Amazon.com in Google: Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers …

A good page title should be no more than 70 characters (including spaces and punctuation). The first three words of a page title are most important. Page titles should not consist of a bunch of random key words piled together. They should look natural and should accurately represent the content on a given page. Page titles for every page in your website should be worded differently from each other.

To help us understand good & poor page titles, let’s look at some ideas:

Poor pregnancy center website page titles (page first, then page title):
• Home page: Home (You would not believe me if I told you how many websites throughout the net have just “home” for their home page title. As the page title is some of your most valuable “real estate” on your website, this is a glaring waste of opportunity.)
• About us: About us
• Abortion procedures: Abortion Procedures
• Pregnancy services: Pregnancy Services
• Contact us: Contact Us
• Directions: Directions

Some PRC websites I’ve seen have just the center’s name for the page title—and this is on every page. That may help your center be found when people search for you by name, but, I imagine, you probably want to be found when people search for you by other phrases too. As a side note, having the same page title all throughout your site can actually hurt your site’s ranking in search engines. It’s best to be different in contrast with being identical.

Better pregnancy center website page titles (page first, then page title):

• Home page: Abortion clinic alternative, Ross City pregnancy services (This page title is well under the 70 character limit; it’s not a random listing of key words but it does include the key words I feel are most important for my center’s website: location, abortion, abortion clinic,
abortion services, pregnancy, pregnancy services; it’s also ethical because my phrasing is “abortion clinic alternative” and not just “abortion clinic.” This page title should perform well for abortion related searches in Ross City.
• About us: About Ross City Pregnancy Center’s confidential services
• Abortion procedures: Abortion Procedures | Ross City pregnancy services (the “|” is commonly used to provide a full break in page titles—implying there is a division in ideas; I personally wouldn’t use the comma here because I wouldn’t want it to be mistaken that I was claiming my center actually performed these abortion procedures; instead, my center provides free factual information about these procedures—and I would clearly state so on my web page’s content).
• Pregnancy services: Pregnancy Services, Limited Ultrasound, Pregnancy Testing (I don’t have to include the location name in every page title because I make sure I have the location in my page footer and in my page content).
• Contact us: Contact Ross City Pregnancy Center for Confidential Help
• Directions: Directions to Ross City Pregnancy Center

Please note that I am not saying that these are perfect page titles for this fictional pregnancy center. What I am trying to point out is that these are better than the previous page titles which, essentially, were useless.

Keep in mind that your home page title will probably be the most strategic—this is usually because your home page is considered the most important of all your web pages by search engines (and because your home page typically is the one most often linked too by other websites).

3) Develop quality links from other websites

The internet consists of networks of interrelated websites which, in theory, are interconnected. The web is not an ideal place for a stand alone, solitary website to exist. In fact, the probability is minute that strangers could ever even find a solitary website. If you want your website to be found, then you’ve got to connect into the world wide web. And, it’s best to make many of those
connections.

Search engines view a website which has a lot of links pointing toward it from other websites as a site which is well established and popular. With the advent of spam sites, however, it becomes increasingly necessary to make sure you are developing links on not just any website but on other quality sites. If you spend $30 to $300 to purchase a myriad of links on link farm websites, you’ll do more harm than good for your website’s position in search engine result pages.

I recommend that pregnancy centers contact supporting churches, businesses, individual donors, and volunteers and ask them to link to the PRC website from their sites (or even blogs). This could even be a brief article in a newsletter. Emphasize that this can be a way they can help save lives without spending a nickel. Their linking to your website eventually (things take quite some time on the web) will help your site’s strength online. And, as your site grows stronger in
the eyes of search engines, you’ll rank higher when prospective clients search for the key words and phrases you’re targeting.

When you ask others to link to your pregnancy center site, there are two things to keep in mind:

a) Request rich text hyperlinking:

Typically, when a church links to a center’s website, they either set up the link like this (www.RossCityPregnancy.com) or like this (Ross City Pregnancy Center); in the first example, a person sees the exact domain name and can click on it to visit the center’s site; in the second example, a person sees the name of the center and can click on that to visit the center’s site.

The second example is the better of the two. However, there is an even more valuable way which we call rich text hyperlinking. Here, you request the church to link to your site using a variety of key phrases such as this (Abortion clinic alternative in Ross City). In this third example, a person sees the phrase “abortion clinic alternative in Ross City,” and can click on that phrase to visit the center’s website.

The value with rich text hyperlinking is that search engines equate that text with the description of the webpage that text is linking to. Thus, in this case, a search engine would “think” that www.RossCityPregnancy.com equals “Abortion clinic alternative in Ross City.” Months later, after these links remain and search engines realize that they are reputable links there to stay, your site will perform better for searches such as “abortion clinic in Ross City” or “Ross City abortion.”

In comparison, the first linking example would merely help people searching for your domain name, and the second linking example would help people searching for you by your center’s name (somewhat helpful but not strategic). Be sure to use a variety of phrases when asking other sites to link to you using rich text hyperlinks; using the same phrase over and over could be
detrimental. Search engines are looking for natural rich text hyperlinking; repetitive use of the same phrase on many other websites looks suspiciously unnatural.

b) When possible, suggest deep inlinking:

Usually, when someone links to your center, they will just link to your home page (e.g. www.RossCityPregnancy.com). That will help strengthen your home page, but it will do little to help your interior pages perform better when people search for topics covered on those pages.

If you can find some volunteers with personal websites or blogs, provide them with a list of three or so links and ask them to include them on their site. These links would consist of rich text but would point to specific interior
pages.

For example, using our Ross City Pregnancy Center’s interior pages from
earlier:

• Page: About us:
url: http://www.rosscitypregnancy.com/about.html
rich text link: Abortion clinic alternative in Ross City
the link you provide: Abortion clinic alternative in Ross City

• Page: Abortion procedures:
url: http://www.rosscitypregnancy.com/abortion-procedures.html
rich text link: Be informed about abortion procedures
the link you provide: Be informed about abortion procedures

• Page: Pregnancy services:
url: http://www.rosscitypregnancy.com/pregnancy-services.html
rich text link: Ross City pregnancy services
the link you provide: Ross City pregnancy services

Deep inlinking will give importance to your interior pages so that the content on those pages will be able to be found when prospective clients make relevant searches.

A lack of linking to your site’s interior pages could possibly result in the bulk of your website ending up in Google’s dreaded supplemental index; typically, pages that are considered “supplemental” merely exist on the world wide web with untold millions of other pages—they are rarely called for even when internet users perform searches that directly relate to content on those pages. Google began its supplemental index so it could help differentiate for its users those pages with much value from those which have little.

4) Don’t be afraid to use text on your site

Even though flash and a lot of pictures can help a website appear attractive, search engines largely rely on text when it comes to “ranking” your website in search engine result pages.

One of the worst decisions a center can make when having a website designed is to make the home page/entry page pure flash or picture. A search engine then can only rely on the page title and any inbound rich text links to determine what that page (and site) is all about.

One of the best decisions a center can make is removing that flash entry page and developing a home page consisting of an attractive mix of graphics, white space and text. When that text contains your key words/phrases, and those phrases are worded in the same every day language used by your clients, you’ll be amazed at the increase in free visits to your site through better appearance in search engine results.

Throughout the interior pages of your website, be sure to address relevant topics& issues that your clients address in person at the center. If they address them in person, others most likely are also searching online for the same answers. Text is so vital on a PRC website. People won’t find you unless you include text addressing topics they are searching for. If you want abortion minded clients to locate your website, then you have to address abortion related topics. If you want teens to visit your website, then you have to address the hot issues they are looking for online.

You’ll find that the more natural your wording, the more likely your web pages will be visited. Search engines look for pages with text that closely matches the actual search phrase used by a prospective client.

I’ve found that Q & A works great, using actual questions by clients and answers provided by center staff. Because those questions are real, it’s hard to artificially create more naturally sounding sentences! You’d be surprised then how often visitors arrive at that webpage specifically because they are searching using the same or very similarly worded question.

5) Carefully monitor your website’s performance

Any form of marketing is useless unless you are regularly looking for results. This goes for yellow pages advertising, radio spots, billboards, and your website. When people call or clients visit, be sure to find out how they heard about you, and, then, make sure you record it. Though statistics can be a pain to collect and organize, those same statistics can help you wisely invest your money into marketing avenues which are the most effective.

When you obtained your website, it may have come with a free or low cost statistics tool. That can be great, as long as you check it regularly and can easily understand the statistics it provides you.

I personally like to recommend Google’s free Analytics tool: (http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html). This tool requires just a couple invisible lines of coding to be installed at the bottom of each page but it provides thorough, easy to understand reports such as:
• Where visitors to your site are coming from (by city, state, country, etc.)
• What search engines & key words/phrases people are using to find your site
• What page on your site people are arriving at and what happens after they arrive—do they immediately exit or do they click on a button; if on a button, which one is most popular?
• You can also connect it with your Adwords or other paid advertising campaigns to determine the effectiveness of that marketing

Analytics provides so many helpful statistics that I could go on all morning trying to list them! And, just because it’s a free tool doesn’t mean that it’s useless. In fact, it used to be a paid web statistics tool until Google purchased it from another company. Google Analytics is one of the best free tools available and it will give you a glimpse into how effective your website really is. Do keep in mind that the results are not “live,” but are downloaded once or twice a day.

After you’ve kept an eye on your website’s actual performance, you will have a good idea regarding whether people are arriving and instantly leaving or if people are even finding your site to begin with. A several thousand dollar website may look great, but if it’s just there and not being found, that’s a lot of money being wasted. It’s great to launch a good site, but keep a careful eye on it and, like a doctor, make regular tune ups as necessary to help increase its performance. Perhaps some wording on a page needs to be changed so it won’t offend web visitors and throw up a wall preventing you from ever helping that possible client. Perhaps your site’s design is out of date and needs to be updated in order to attract the current generation.

Search engine optimization can be a complex subject. In fact, SEO changes every day as
Google, Yahoo & Microsoft search for new and better ways to fight aggressive spam website operators who are also trying to get the top positions. What works today may not necessarily work down the road. With these articles, I’m trying to provide long lasting improvements & tweaks to your pregnancy center website which will improve your site’s position in search engines for the long term.

In future articles, I’ll address some intermediate SEO techniques and then some more
advanced methods. If you have any questions about anything I’ve said or any SEO strategy you’ve read or heard about, please don’t hesitate to email me, and I’ll gladly address that question in one of the next articles (if I feel it will help others).

As a former PRC administrator, my goal is to serve pregnancy centers with the God given
talents He has loaned to me. If I can be of help to any center in any way, please don’t
hesitate to ask; even if I don’t have the “know-how,” I may be able to refer you to someone who does. God bless you all for your service.

Andrew Jensen is president of Sozo Firm, an SEO/web marketing consulting agency which helps corporations, small businesses, colleges, pregnancy centers & churches effectively promote themselves online.

Consultant Services

Fee Schedule

Contact Andrew Jensen to learn more about our special discounted pricing for non profit pregnancy centers. One time consultation and/or search engine optimization services also available.