Medical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for any long-term medical marketing plan. A thriving healthcare organization, hospital, or practice requires a website to facilitate patient communication and gain new clients. However, if your patients cannot find your website online, it will be of little significance. Proper medical SEO techniques will improve your website’s search engine ranking, thus effectively reaching and converting more patients who need your kind of healthcare services [1].
Medical SEO is a healthcare marketing strategy intended to rank your website and related pages higher in search engines. With the use of relevant keywords searched for by potential patients, you will improve the traffic on your website without using paid ads. You will need a solid medical SEO strategy to rank on page #1 in an organic search [2]. To achieve a strong healthcare SEO strategy, you will need to invest money, time, or both to get your website on page #1.
The influx of new patients through website traffic is one of the many reasons healthcare professionals need to focus on medical SEO. The healthcare industry has stiff competition in today’s world, and with the current digital marketing trends, SEO for doctors has become more critical. With many medical facilities offering the same services competing for the local market, you need to stand out and get noticed online. Here are some of the factors you need to know regarding medical SEO.
Off-site Seo
Off-page SEO involves improving ranking factors that are not directly correlated to your website [3]. Websites with links to other relevant medical-related websites are essential to Google. The backlinks to relevant online directories and Google My Business reviews help validate a website’s legitimacy. The more other websites link to your website, the better your chances of accurate practice directory listings, hence a higher number of reviews.
The Factors That Constitute Off-site Seo
Press releases – Using press releases is a way that you as a medical practitioner can alert major healthcare publications and journalists about significant upcoming events. These events can be things like the launch of a new product/service or announcing the winning of an award.
Healthcare directories – Directories play a role in medical SEO as they are how new and existing patients will find your practice. Ranking factors include the consistency across the directories, how often your practice is listed, and where.
Articles and blogs – Online articles and blog content are significant medical SEO factors, as they position your site as a relevant answer to the user’s query.
Healthcare social media – The number of likes, comments, and follows you get on social media pages helps increase the relevance of your website on search engines like Google.
Reputation management – Most consumers read several reviews of a business before deciding to trust it. As a medical practitioner, you should try to give a response to both positive and negative reviews while being cautious not to violate HIPAA stipulations [4].
On-site Seo
On-site SEO is focused on improving various aspects of your website. These include the quality of the content, keywords used, and individual pages. It involves keyword research for the search terms patients might typically use to look for providers similar to you. Search engines like Google rank compelling, relevant and authoritative content that explains topics in-depth higher. On-site medical SEO refers to the words, images, and code used to make up your website.
The Factors That Impact on-site Seo
Title Tags – This is the clickable headline displayed on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for the search result. It is an HTML coding element from the backend of your website that identifies the titles within your web pages.
SEO Metadata/Description Tags – SEO metadata is a 160-character description that appears right beneath the title tags in the SERP. It gives a summary of the content on the web page.
Site speed – The speed at which your web pages load is a crucial algorithm used by Google to determine where your web page will appear in the SERP.
Mobile responsiveness – Your website needs to be mobile friendly to be accessible to the increasing number of customers using their cellphones to search for healthcare services “near me.”
Keyword Meta Tags – these are only visible to the search engines and not to online visitors. They are tailored to determine the term you wish to be found for in SERPs.
Alt tags – An alt tag is a text alternative in the form of an HTML code applied to image tags for search engines to rank them.
H1’s and H2’s – these important on-page SEO factors are called header tags. They help the search engines to know what your website is all about.
Anchor text links – These are clickable texts that hyperlink your content to other relevant pages. SEO best practices dictate that the anchor text must be relevant to the content or page they are linked to.
Bold & Italics – Google bots tend to like italic and bold texts as they emphasize the statements that should stand out, thus helping Google crawlers to identify what is relevant.
Footer – Optimizing your footer menu is a further way to help Google identify your website relevance on SERPs
Sitemaps – The use of a visible sitemap is an important SEO practice as it helps visitors to navigate your website with ease. It is also vital in helping search engines to crawl the URLs and determine the relevance of your content.
Changing content – Medical SEO is ever-evolving; thus you need to keep updating old content to increase the effectiveness of your SEO strategies and boost the search engine traffic.
Conclusion
Medical SEO is ever-changing, and what works today might not be relevant tomorrow. Many factors such as tailored keywords, website security & optimization, optimizing Google My Business profile, and generating online reviews for local SEO influence search engine rankings. These and the other factors mentioned above are weighted differently and change over time. It would be best to stay on top of the current digital marketing strategies to ensure an irresistible online presence through impeccable medical SEO practices.
