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AudiologyMarketing
1 kHz

Word recognition

On-page SEO for audiology practice websites

The page that never answers the question

Indexed, quick to load, and still not what the search was asking for.

Request a practice audiogram(719) 659-9858
Test
Word recognition
Presented
tinnitus treatment near me
Score
1 of 9 parts answer it
  • Title tagHome | Springs Hearing CenterNo response
  • Main headingWelcome to our practiceNo response
  • Opening sentenceWe are committed to excellence in hearing healthcare.No response
  • Where tinnitus appearsParagraph four of a nine-line Services pagePartly
  • Heading structureOne H1, then four headings that skip a levelPartly
  • What tinnitus care actually involvesNot stated anywhereNo response
  • Town and catchmentThe footer address onlyPartly
  • The next stepA contact form with five required fieldsAnswers it
  • Links to the tinnitus lineNone on the siteNo response

An illustrative page, tested against one search. Nothing here is a technical fault: the page loads, it is indexed, and a crawler can read every word of it. It simply answers a different question than the one that was asked.

Presenting complaint

A practice page can be indexed, quick and perfectly crawlable, and still lose every search it appears in. Nothing is broken. It was simply written to describe the practice rather than to answer the question somebody typed.

Mechanism

Detected is not the same as understood

A pure-tone test asks whether a sound was heard at all. Word recognition asks whether it was understood, and the two come apart constantly: patients with almost identical audiograms can differ enormously in how much speech they make out. Pages behave the same way. Technical SEO gets the page detected. On-page work decides whether the search that found it was answered.

Protocol

One page, one search

Before anything is edited, the page gets one job written down: the search it exists to be the best answer to. That sounds obvious and it is the step almost always skipped, which is how a practice ends up with a Services page, a Hearing Services page and a What We Offer page, all half-answering the same query and splitting the signal between them.

Where two pages genuinely chase the same search, one of them wins and the other is merged into it. Consolidating is nearly always worth more than another page, and it is the opposite of what a content quota produces.

Treatment

The title is what gets chosen, not a label

A title tag is read in a list of ten, by somebody deciding where to click. Home tells them nothing. Springs Hearing Center - Home tells them slightly less. The title states the subject and, where the search is local, the place — close to the front, in language a patient would use, and short enough to survive the truncation.

Treatment

A heading that says what the page is

One main heading per page, stating the subject plainly. Welcome to our practice is not a subject. Tinnitus treatment in the town you are in, is. Underneath it the headings follow the questions patients actually ask in order, rather than jumping levels to get a font size — which is also what makes the page navigable with a screen reader.

The heading is not the place for the tagline. The tagline can go directly underneath it, where it will be read by people rather than parsed by machines.
Finding

The answer belongs in the first screen

Nobody scrolls to find out whether you treat tinnitus. If the search was tinnitus, the first screen says that the practice evaluates and manages tinnitus, who does it, roughly what happens at the appointment and how to book. Everything else on the page is elaboration for the person who has already decided to keep reading.

Rx

The searches a page has to answer

These are questions, not keywords, and a page that answers one of them properly will pick up dozens of phrasings of it without being written for any of them.

What patients type

  • does a hearing test hurt
  • audiologist that takes medicare
  • how long does a hearing aid fitting take
  • ear wax removal or drops
Aided

What is included

  • One page, one job: the search it exists to answer, written down before anything is edited
  • Titles and descriptions written to be chosen from a results list rather than stuffed
  • One heading that states the subject plainly, and a structure that follows the questions patients ask
  • The answer inside the first screen, because nobody scrolls to find out whether you treat tinnitus
  • Links out to the related lines, with anchor text that says where it goes
Re-test protocol

How it is measured

  • Every indexable page has one stated search, recorded and reviewed
  • No two pages competing for the same query — checked in Search Console, not assumed
  • Titles and descriptions unique across the site, and written to be chosen
  • Impressions and click-through rate per page, read together rather than separately

Questions

Questions about this piece

Is this just rewriting our website?

No. Most of it is deciding what each existing page is for, then fixing the title, the heading and the opening so they say so. Pages are only rewritten where the page genuinely does not answer the search it ranks for.

How is this different from content marketing?

Content marketing creates pages that do not exist yet, mostly for people who are not ready to book. On-page work makes the pages you already have answer the searches they already appear in.

Will you stuff keywords into our copy?

No, and the audit will say so if a previous agency already has. Repetition reads badly to patients and no longer helps rankings. The words appear where they are useful — title, heading, opening, and the questions people ask — and nowhere else.

This one rarely works alone.

The audit decides which pieces you actually need and in what order. You keep it whether or not you continue.

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