Beginners often balk when hearing this internet jargon. But while it initially sounds intimidating, SEO simply means tailoring your site so that it’s easier to find on Google.
There are plenty of practical reasons why healthcare providers who offer their services online must learn search engine optimization.
For one, and perhaps more importantly, SEO drives website traffic, connecting you with potential patients. The more relevant your brand’s name is out there, the faster your content reaches your intended audience.
Medical SEO has now become more relevant than ever. In the U.S. alone, nearly 60% of people use the Internet to look for healthcare information.
Today, we’ll share seven medical SEO strategies to increase your medical website traffic and boost your online presence.
Table of Contents
What Is Medical SEO?
Medical SEO (also referred to as healthcare SEO) is the practice of optimizing your healthcare facility’s website to rank higher in SERPs (search engine results page).
The more visible your site in SERPs is, the more likely it is to gain attention and be visited by users. This increased traffic generates relevant leads, potentially boosting your health clinic’s conversion rate.
Whether your medical center focuses on pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, or mental health, a robust SEO strategy is a straightforward way to succeed in the digital space.
Why Is SEO Important For Medical Marketing?
Any business can benefit from SEO. For a healthcare website, it’s a cost-effective method to market your services without costing an arm and leg.
Here’s why you should invest in medical SEO:
- Increase Reach: By optimizing your content and website design, search engines are more inclined to recommend your web pages to relevant Google searches. This ensures you meet potential new patients right when they need you.
- Improve Relevance: Google receives over 1 billion health-related search queries daily. And this number continues to grow. Implementing keyword targeting allows you to focus on the people who are actually looking for your services and products.
- Boost ROI: Incorporating SEO alongside other content marketing strategies can significantly boost your ROI. According to recent statistics data, businesses that invest in search engine optimizations enjoy an extra 14% close rate than those that don’t.
- Raise Credibility: Credibility is bread and butter for those in the medical practice. One of the best benefits of SEO is how it raises credibility among consumers. Being on the first page of search results tells users that the search engine trusts your website.
7 Medical SEO Strategies For Search Engine Rankings
Search engine optimization is generally viewed as a crucial ingredient for a business’s online success. So, here are seven of the best expert-backed medical SEO practices to secure your place on top of the healthcare industry SERPs.
1. Get to Know Your Patients
The foremost consideration when optimizing your medical SEO is to know how and why users search for your healthcare services or products.
Unlike paid advertising, search engines depend on keywords, among other factors, to reach the right audience. They look at the keywords on your website to make sense of what your business is all about.
If your article or blog contains the right keywords associated with a particular search intent, it increases its chances of ranking on the first page of organic search results.
This is where keyword research becomes valuable. It helps you to develop a keen sense of what the users need and choose appropriate keywords that best match their queries.
Once you have a clear picture of your audience—who they are and what they’re looking for—the next step is to make your content.
2. Provide Helpful Medical Content
Creating useful, high-quality content must be the core of all your digital marketing strategies. Google, in particular, judges a site’s EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) to determine its page ranking.
You can’t simply draft a blog, cram as many keywords as possible, and call it a day. If you want to stand out, you must prioritize value in your content creation.
Your content must first be written for your audience, and second only for search engines. This is especially crucial in healthcare SEO, where the topics can influence people’s major life decisions.
Getting your written works medically reviewed is a fantastic way to increase your EAT rating. Interviews with registered healthcare professionals and proper citation of medical references also reinforce authority.
3. Focus on Medical Long-Tail Keywords
If you’re just getting started in healthcare SEO, you’ll quickly learn that a handful of companies already dominate this space on the internet.
While competing with well-established brands limits the content you can succeed in, targeting low-competition long-tail keywords can be a great way to get around this constraint.
For example, you may be considering short-tail phrases like “clinics near me.” However, SEO experts recommend targeting long-tail keywords like “health clinics San Francisco” instead.
Although low in competition, long-tail keywords have well-defined search intent. This makes it easier for Google to find a connection between your organization’s content and the relevant queries.
There are plenty of useful platforms you can use to find terms for healthcare SEO purposes. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Keywords Everywhere provide resources for discovering and analyzing long-term keywords.
4. Build Links Within the Healthcare Industry
Link building is one of the most important pillars of effective SEO. The same principle applies to healthcare SEO.
To those unfamiliar, backlinks are links from other websites that lead to one of your web pages. Search engines treat these external links as votes of confidence from others attesting to your site’s reliability.
The more of these referrals you get, the higher you can rank for medically relevant search terms. Links from reputable domains (.gov, .edu, .org, etc.) are especially impactful.
Publishing new medical research and observations is an excellent way to earn backlinks in the healthcare industry.
You may also employ traditional link-building methods like email marketing, social media outreach, broken link building, online reviews, and responding to media requests.
5. Optimize Your Website’s Speed
Page speed plays a massive role in technical SEO, particularly in user experience. Slow-loading websites tend to experience higher bounce rates, abysmal user engagement, and rock-bottom satisfaction rates.
Moreover, it makes it harder for search engines to crawl and index your web pages, which is the first step before every metric and ranking factor comes into play.
Start by optimizing the images on your web pages by reducing their dimensions and resolutions. Images typically load longer since they’re often larger than CSS and HTML files.
Take advantage of browser caching to reduce load time for frequent visitors. This practical feature saves copies of important page elements in the user’s browsers, decreasing the data the server needs to transfer.
Minify your CSS and Java files to eliminate everything a computer or smartphone doesn’t need. Utilize content delivery networks (CDN) and limit redirect usage to prevent unnecessary waiting time.
6. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Did you know mobile users make up 60% of internet traffic worldwide? Desktop users, on the other hand, contribute 39% of the global web traffic. That’s a huge number of health-related questions coming from mobiles.
In fact, orienting pages for mobile devices is now an imperative SEO effort given the potential amount of leads it could generate. It’s a great opportunity to earn a competitive advantage in the saturated medical niche.
Moreover, Google’s algorithm prioritizes mobile-friendly websites above others because of the massive bulk of smartphone queries. They show up higher in search results, making them more likely to get clicks.
There are three things search engines look for in sites to consider them mobile-friendly.
First is the load speed. It shouldn’t take more than three seconds for your landing page to pop up to prevent visitors from leaving.
Second, responsiveness. How effortlessly can a visitor perform tasks like commenting, sharing, making a purchase, or contacting your hotline?
Last is your website’s navigation features. Your content should be readable without needing to zoom in and easily accessible through the smaller screens.
7. Reach Local Patients With Local SEO
There’s great value in extending your content marketing strategy to local searches. Think of free business directories like Bing Places and Google My Business Profile.
These platforms provide users with a way to learn about what your organization, healthcare center, or insurance company is all about. This is also where search engines glean important information, including your address and contact information.
Fill out as many important details as you can in these directories. You want to upload relevant photos, a description of your services, and a link to your website.
Many businesses grow online reviews through local directories and citations. Authentic feedback on such platforms can be instrumental in building customer trust and confidence for a company offering medical expertise.
Final Thoughts
In this age of computers and smartphones, the internet is one of the first things people turn to when searching for health-related information.
Medical SEO tailors your website to reach people more easily. It extends your business reach, raises your domain’s credibility, keeps you relevant, and increases the number of potential leads.
Implement these seven expert-backed healthcare SEO strategies and watch your web pages soar through SERPs!
Published on: 2024-11-06
Updated on: 2024-11-08
