This is still an issue. Slicer shows up on second page on Bing, but it is nowhere on Google. Maybe modernizing Slicer website main page would fix the issue?

For me, even in an incognito tab a google search for just slicer gives slicer.org as the first hit (above the ads).

But overall I agree, the website needs an overhaul for SEO and UX (to be jargony about it).

Interesting, if I open an incognito tab and Google for medical image processing software then Slicer shows up on page 7 (after lots of niche, discontinued, random other software):

Yes, I agree, we should try to be more visible when people do general searches. I was just searching with the keyword "slicer".

I've checked Google's SEO guide (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide) and I didn't find anything obvious that we could easily improve.

Maybe the site description could include more of the important keywords - segmentation, image processing, etc.

Current description (in the site configuration and in the displayed text):

3D Slicer is a free, open source and multi-platform software package widely used for medical, biomedical, and related imaging research.

Something like this might work better, as it may match more closely what most people are interested in:

3D Slicer is a free, open source software for visualization, processing, segmentation, registration, and analysis of medical, biomedical, and other 3D images and meshes; and planning and navigating image-guided procedures.

It would be nice to somehow add "DICOM" as well, but it is a bit too specific compared to how high-level the description is. Planning&navigation is also a bit arbitrarily highlighted and it may not be clear what "procedures" it is referring to.

@pieper @jcfr What do you think about updating the headline ("3D Slicer is a free, open-source, ...") as proposed above?

Yes, makes sense. I don't know the rules either but it seems like including common terms from discourse questions would make sense too, so dicom, stl, morphometry, surgery, nrrd, nifti, CT, MR, ultrasound...

I just added a URL property to https://search.google.com/search-console

In a day or two, we should have relevant data available.

Note: URL property is easier to look as it does not require verification needed by the domain property

I also just associated Google Analytics with the search console:

Something where the keywords "medical imaging" are next to each other in the header could help. In the current there are words "medical" and "imaging research" but probably doesn't make a strong connection of "medical imaging".

Current:

3D Slicer is a free, open source and multi-platform software package widely used for medical, biomedical, and related imaging research.

Potential:

3D Slicer is a free, open source and multi-platform software package widely used for medical imaging research.

We now have consolidated information displayed at https://search.google.com/search-console/insights/

Slicer is now on page 6, along with Osirix and MITK, so the situation is not good but not worse than similar software.

What do you think about updating the headline ("3D Slicer is a free, open-source, ...") as proposed above?

I've submitted a pull request to track the Slicer overview sentence: Slicer/slicer.org#151 (comment)

Something where the keywords "medical imaging" are next to each other in the header could help. In the current there are words "medical" and "imaging research" but probably doesn't make a strong connection of "medical imaging".

We have "medical imaging" on the Slicer download page and that page sees quite heavy traffic, yet it does not show up in the top search hits. Maybe we could add some educational pages (what is medical imaging, what is medical image registration, segmentation, ... ) could rank similarly highly as the "What is medical image processing" page from Synopsis. But I would not keep this issue open here just to keep track of this idea.