When it comes to finding a competent healthcare practitioner, most patients opt-in for Google to help them find the best and closest practitioner, as a medical practitioner, having a website that appears on top of Google’s and other search engine search result means patients are likely to view your brand and schedule an appointment with you instantly.
Search Engine Optimization for medical practices is practicable and essential too. However, it matters less if you’ve got a small or relatively new medical practice. And that’s due to the trend built up towards local SEO for doctors.
Interestingly, you needed to have excellent website traffic, backlinks, and clout to edge your competition in years past, including other established medical practices.
Medical SEO
First, what’s SEO for medical practices? It refers to the process of improving your healthcare brand’s online visibility. It is done by investing in the proper healthcare SEO for your site’s SERPs’. It is needed when you’re trying to reach potential clients and convert patients who need your type of healthcare services.
If your medical practice specializes solely in vascular diseases, let’s paint a scenario. When a prospective client looks for a medical doctor or diagnostic radiologist on Google, the SERPs will display listings for nearby diagnostic radiologists within seconds.
In simple terms, SEO for medical practices refers to a healthcare marketing strategy aimed at making your website and pages rank higher in Google and other search engines for the right keywords that prospective patients are searching for. Ultimately, this will help improve website traffic without investing a dime in ads.
But if you are armed with the proper knowledge and time, and you are consistent, you won’t only show up on Google’s search result pages, you’ll be in Google’s local “3 pack” and probably right at the top. On the flip side, if your medical practice isn’t ranking well on SERPs, someone else is – and that’s not good for business.
Not ranking also means you may be losing out on new and prospective patients, which is why medical practices are incomplete without having a medical website and, more importantly, an effective healthcare SEO. As a practitioner, what would it mean to your brand if you dominate your local medical search results, especially for your practice type?
- High revenue procedures.’
- Increase in the number of patients scheduling appointments with you
- More importantly, practice growth
The good news is that the strategy you need is within your reach. All you need is to invest in the local medical SEO and understand what you are investing in.
Is SEO for Medical Practices Essential?
As we’ve highlighted earlier, SEO helps potential clients find your website by making it easy for internet users to search for these services. Thanks to a proficient healthcare SEO strategy, most patients who surf through your website are organically acquitted and not via referrals, social media users, and paid ads.
With the rise of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization has morphed into one of the critical drivers of new patients to different healthcare practices. If you don’t invest in the right healthcare SEO strategy in this context, you intentionally ignore relatively free clicks and prospective clients. Giving your competitors clicks and patients isn’t the right way to grow your online brand.
Quality Trumps Quantity
You have to factor in quality control. Remember, quality comes first before quantity. There are lots of medical professionals who believe PPC ads are enough to bring in more traffic. However, starting with pay-per-click is like putting a bandage on a problem. Of course, it will only solve the problem temporarily.
As a medical-based business, it is under compulsion for you to bring prospective patients via your website. Meanwhile, it should be done consistently on a long-term basis. Meanwhile, if your website and the content published on it aren’t of “Google Quality,” your traction will be the worst.
There are two concepts you ought to understand. These concepts include YMYL and E-A-T. E-A-T, in this context, stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This concept was designed to help all third-party raters score the search engine’s results.
Even though the E-A-T concept isn’t a strong ranking signal, it does reveal crucial things about what the search engine giant considers valuable.
It is undoubtedly one of the essential web pages that contain medical-related information. The information referred to in this context includes health-based details and stats.
The main point here is that the information published on your website has to be of excellent quality. It has to be authoritative and trustworthy. If you adhere to this principle, it ultimately gives you an edge.
And there’s the YMYL concept. Short form for Your Money or Your Life. This concept means content that directly affects a reader’s/user’s safety, finances, and health. On the flip side, if the content published on your website doesn’t meet the standards set by Google, it will have a tough time performing well on SERPs.
The Benefits of SEO for Medical Practices
- It generates new patient reviews.
- SEO for medical practices improves practice website traffic
- It attracts new patients without the typically paid ads
- Your organization will rank higher for conditions and treatments focused keywords
- Physicians will also gain a reputation as leaders in the industry
- You will capture other competitor’s online traffic
- It will also general prospective patient reviews
The Components of Medical SEO
Optimizing your brand’s online presence via your website makes it easy for Google and other search engines to understand the websites and for your prospective patients to find you. These are the main elements of healthcare SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is unique, and it covers the hidden elements of SEO rankings. In addition, it includes your site’s development and optimization.
On-Page SEO
it focuses more on improving different aspects of your site, including the quality of content published on it and the keywords used. The researched keywords determine which commonly searched phrases are currently used by prospective patients residing in your local area when searching for medical providers related to yours.
Search engines such as google love relevant and authoritative content. However, endeavour to show leadership and publish new and excellent content regularly.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO refers to ranking factors not directly related to the website; relevant online directory listings and backlinks are some of the elements present in this category. They validate a site’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, if many sites link back to yours, you’ll have an accurate practice directory listing coupled with loads of reviews. This ultimately gives your website the edge it deserves – making it a place where patients would want to visit whenever they need medical services related to yours.
Related: Dermatology Marketing for Dermatology Practice
SEO for Medical Practices – The Top Seven Tips You Need
You don’t have to outrank established sites that have been in existence for decades. But by focusing on location-based content and long-tail keywords, it’s feasible to perform relatively well here. In addition, implementing the right SEO ensures that your brand’s online visibility improves significantly. The following tips are the most essential for SEO for Medical Practices.
1. Have a functional Medical Website
This is a brainer. However, before focusing on the other tips we have highlighted in this section, it is essential to point out that having a solid local SEO for medical practices begins right here. Constantly correct and update your website and the content contained therein.
Ensure to have a contact page with your full name, contact address, and phone number. The contact details have to correlate to those published on review sites and listings. In other words, it has to be used uniformly across all platforms. Using contact details uniformly on all platforms is essential if you wish to start on the right path.
2. Make Use of Relevant Medical Keywords
Making use of the appropriate medical keywords is essential when optimizing your content. Start with the medical services you offer – that goes without saying. After all, the services you render define how your prospective patients will interact with you. Investing in tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find the right keywords for your industry, comparing what is being searched for and what is not.
More importantly, avoid stuffing keywords into the published content you have on your website. When you stuff keywords into your website content, it doesn’t make it look and sound organic. Google frowns against this spamming method and might even penalize you for this.
It would help if you placed long-tail keywords into your website content readable and natural. This will separate you from your competitors. You’ll also start to attract the patients searching for the exact services you offer—especially those who live in the geographical area where your office is situated.
3. Opt-in for Online Reviews
Online reviews play a massive role in every industry, and in this case, it would play an enormous role in SEO for Medical Practices. Creating a working SEO strategy for a brand while also making sure you rank on Google for related keywords works best when you have a testimonial page on your website or have positive reviews on a popular review site.
Make sure the testimonials you have on your website and the reviews on the popular third-party review site correlate. Remember, it has to be a perfect blend between first-party reviews ad reviews on third-party sites like Yelp.
4. Have your business listed on Google My Business
To rank well on Google, you need to claim a spot on Google My Business Listings. Being listed in this space increases your chances of ranking first on Google SERPs. So how do you go about this? You start by signing up, verifying, and updating your listing. Google often does this for each provider, but signup and create yours if yours hasn’t been made.
Sometimes, your business might already be listed in Google Maps, even if you’ve never done this before. That’s why it is essential always to stay proactive when it comes to SEO for medical practices because whether you do it yourself or not, Google will do it anyway.
5. Optimize the Visual Elements on your website
The visual element in this context refers to videos. It is one of the popular ways readers consume website content. Having web pages with videos tends to get more organic traffic than those that don’t. It is said that readers spend more time on these web pages because they are consuming the video content published on the particular page.
When a user spends more time on a webpage, it indicates to the search engine bot that something valuable is present on that particular page – something that might be useful to other users. But be careful with the number of videos on your website as they tend to slow down websites.
6. Authority Link Building
Links channelled back to your website is one of Google’s strong ranking signal. Google bot and every other search engine’s AI love to see unique domains linking back to a particular website as it ultimately verifies the site’s credibility. You can inculcate this strategy when optimizing your website.
Search engine rankings are often influenced by the quality of these links – links such as your website, social media files, and even directory listings.
7. Work with a suitable Medical SEO Marketing Expert
It is crucial to understand that search engine optimization is constantly evolving to thrive in this space. This means what works today might not be functional tomorrow. There are many ranking signals to note, but each of these ranking signals is used differently and tends to change over time. Some of the common ranking factors include quality content, website optimization, the number of domains that link back to your website, depth of keyword research, and online doctor reviews, to name a few.
Related: Healthcare Marketing Agency – Grow Your Healthcare Practice Online
So, if you need a medical SEO expert, you need not look any further than our team of SEO experts. Reach out to us today, and we’ll guide you professionally. We work with doctors to help them grow their medical businesses thanks to our proven SEO strategies that work effectively.