It’s no secret that the internet holds a vast wealth of information that users rely on daily to make important (and not-so-important) life decisions. Everything from the best pizza delivery, to the top-rated pocket spring mattresses, and where to get the cheapest flight tickets.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the internet is the first place people go when they’re not feeling well or are in otherwise need of medical services.
Between Googling symptoms and finding the best local orthopedic surgeon, the internet is where prospective patients go first. That’s why it’s so crucial for healthcare practices to use medical SEO tips to establish an online presence.
So, why is the first page of search results so important? For starters, 91.5% of search traffic goes to sites that rank on page 1 of SERPs. Of that percentage, 61.5% goes to the top 3 results, with 32.5% going to the number 1 result.
As you can see, unless you are ranking in the top 10, you will get very little organic search traffic. These are our top SEO tips to get more patients that your medical practice can apply to your site to rank high on search engine results pages.
Why is Medical SEO Important For Medical Practices?
The majority of potential patients and internet users use a simple online search to find their healthcare providers.
Local searches result in potential patients finding a Google My Business page, scouring the reviews, and making a selection based on their findings.
94% of potential patients use online reviews to select a healthcare provider.
More research discovered that, of the new patients who conducted online searches for healthcare providers and hospitals, 44% of them scheduled an appointment.
It’s clear that medical SEO is the best way to get new patients online. With properly implemented medical SEO strategies, your site will appear before your competitors in local search results.
Medical SEO has taken over traditional advertising when it comes to reaching new and potential patients.
So, how is medical SEO important in getting new patients?
Medical SEO Can Help Get More Patients to Book Online
When more visitors are reaching your site through a well-optimized SEO strategy, there are more opportunities for online appointments to be booked. It’s very straightforward!
Medical SEO is More Relevant Than Most Traditional Marketing Efforts
You don’t have to shell out the same amount of cash as in years past for radio, television, and print ads. In addition to increased relevance, medical search engine optimization SEO will also save you heaps of money that you would normally spend on outdated forms of advertising.
Increase in Patient Reviews and Engagement
One of the number one contributing factors to online prospective patients searching for new doctors of medical facilities is the reviews! When your site is more SEO-friendly, your current patients will be better likely and more apt to leave you reviews, paving the way to acquire even more patients from your medical website.
Manage Your Reputation
Reputation management is another benefit of having your SEO ducks in a row, so to speak. You are able to control the light in which you wish to be seen, allowing you to control your PR a bit.
The ability to respond to reviews also helps a great deal in reputation management.
First Things First – SEO Tips to Get More Patients
- Understand the Role of Search Engines in the Medical Industry
As we mentioned above, the internet is the first place most potential patients go when searching for a new doctor or to find relief from a medical problem. With the wealth of information that’s available on the internet today, that should come as no surprise.
Users trust the information that Google gives them, plain and simple. If Google trusts a site enough to rank it high in the search engine results pages, it naturally follows that we, collectively, trust it as well. This is particularly true of reviews since these are real-life testimonies from real people.
People use the internet and search engine results to research potential doctors or treatments. That’s why showing up on the first page of Google is so important for healthcare sites. That’s where SEO (search engine optimization) comes in.
- Set SEO Goals
Before embarking on an SEO campaign, it’s important to determine what end result you are looking for. What does a ‘win’ entail? You want to set specific and measurable objectives. By setting SEO goals, you build clarity and focus for the campaign.
Since there is so much outside of our control with SEO, it’s easy for things to get blurry. Try to avoid arbitrary goals such as ‘get more search traffic. A more specific and measurable goal would be something along the lines of ‘rank in the top 3 for x-keyword in 6 months.
Think of your SEO goals as a pyramid. At the tip of the pyramid, you have your main goal, your end result. In the body of the pyramid, you have a number of smaller, more achievable goals that help you to reach the tip of the pyramid. After you’ve set your end result goal, you can determine the smaller goals you’ll need to accomplish in order to achieve the end result. This is helpful in defining an actionable plan.
- Identify Your Target Audience
Who is your target audience? Likely, it’s potential patients. What types of patients are you targeting? It can be helpful to think of an imaginary patient that would come to your practice. What is he or she like? What questions do they have? What is bothering them? Why are they in your medical practice to begin with?
By doing this exercise, you can help determine who your target audience is.
If your medical practice specializes in pediatrics, your target audience is going to be parents of sick children. What do parents of sick children ultimately want? Well, for their kid to feel better, of course! We’ll use the example of pediatrics throughout this post.
- Set Up Google Analytics
Setting up and familiarizing yourself with Google Analytics will allow you to monitor and analyze the traffic that’s coming to your website. You can see the time of day users are most active on your site, the device on which they visit your site, and much more.
While it can be initially overwhelming to get over the learning curve, Google Analytics is one of the most useful tools you can use to monitor your traffic.
If you are doing your healthcare SEO yourself, there are plenty of free courses out there to help you understand the basics of navigating Google Analytics.
- Set Up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is equally as important, particularly for SEO purposes. It is among the best (free) tools out there in which to analyze your keyword data and the way in which Google views your site.
The ability to track and monitor your keywords and search performance is highly valuable in any SEO campaign. You can check the performance of a specific page as well as the overall site.
You can check for any errors on your site with GSC as well, such as load times and mobile usability.
Similar to Google Analytics, if you are doing your own medical SEO, there are also free courses out there to teach you the main features of Google Search Console.
- XML Site Map
An XML Site Map allows your website to be properly indexed in the different search engines. Though sometimes overlooked, it allows search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others a layout of your site’s connectivity. This ultimately allows users to reach your website with more ease.
Not sure if your medical website has an SEO site map? This free tool checks for you.
- SEO-Friendly URLs
Though this doesn’t hold too much weight importance, it is still something to consider, particularly if you’re building your site from scratch and determining what URL structure you will use.
In general, it’s best to omit numbers and dates from your URLs and avoid using underscores (use dashes instead).
A good URL: https://domain.com/blog-post-title
A bad URL: https://domain.com/MMDDYY/category/tag/blog_post_title
You want to avoid dates in the URL because, as a general SEO rule, you should be updating content as necessary. If the date doesn’t reflect the last update, it could potentially be viewed as old and outdated.
It’s the same thing with list-type articles. If you have a post titled ’11 Home Remedies for Teething,’ your URL would be better as /home-remedies-teething instead of /11-home-remedies-teething. What happens when you update your article and now have 15 ways instead of 11? It’s best to avoid numbers in the URL.
While this isn’t going to make or break the site’s SEO, it’s certainly not going to hurt, and simply makes things easier for you in the future.
- Site Speed
There are many reasons you want your site to load quickly. The first is that you could lose out on a lot of traffic and potential patients if your site loads too slowly. People are impatient when it comes to website load times. If your site isn’t loading in 3 seconds or less, determine what the problems are and do your best to rectify them.
Use tools like Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix to determine your page speed and see where you can make things run a bit faster.
This could be as simple as optimizing and compressing your images, or something more complicated such as chaining critical requests.
Don’t be afraid to outsource some of this more technical work. It may be easy to be a Jack of all trades, but it’s nearly impossible to be an expert at everything! Particularly with things such as site speed or web design, the experts are your friends and can make life much easier on you.
- Ensure Site is Mobile Friendly
As smartphones get more and more advanced, more and more people are accessing websites via their phones instead of on a laptop or desktop. A mobile-friendly site ensures that the experience on your site is streamlined across all devices.
In addition to improving your mobile conversion rate, you’ll also increase your online search visibility. Google recognizes the importance of mobile-friendliness in regard to user experience and ranks sites accordingly.
- Title Tags
Sometimes, website creators can get a little overly creative with their titles. This results in titles that are too long and that don’t contain the primary keyword.
In general, you want your titles to be below 55 characters. Google will truncate the title if they are too long, which could mean users aren’t seeing important information that could lead to clicks.
You also want to try to put the keyword at the front of the title. This way, people who are searching for your targeted keyword know they will find relevant information on your page.
Example of a good title: 10 Best Children’s Shoes For Flat Feet
Example of a bad title: Top 10 Best New Children’s Shoes to Help With Flat Feet – And Where To Buy Them!
As you can see, the good title is succinct, to the point, and falls under 55 characters. The bad title is a little all-over-the-place and far exceeds the 55-character limit.
- Meta Descriptions
Having a quality healthcare meta description is also important for users to click on your site. A meta description is a brief (<155 characters) overview of what your page is about. It acts as a lure for users to click your site.
Similar to title tags, if the description is too long, Google will truncate it. If you don’t have a meta description, Google could arbitrarily pull text from your page to show up in search results pages.
In general, good meta descriptions should include the practice name, get the users’ attention, and a call-to-action (CTA). For local SEO, it’s a good idea to also include the geographical location.
- Heading Structure
Proper heading structure allows Google and other search engines to decipher what your page is about. Your headings should reflect a hierarchy, similar to an outline you’d write for an essay in high school.
Your page should only have one H1. The H1 is often the same as the title. It should include your primary keyword and tell what the page is about.
- Alt-Text
Alt-text is a brief (usually 1-2 sentences) overview of what an image depicts. It’s a way for visually impaired people to also get the full experience of the page despite the fact that they cannot see the images.
Google also can’t read images. They rely on the alt-text to determine what an image is.
You can include keywords in alt-text, but be careful not to overdo it.
- Consider Silo Pages
If your website has many different blog posts that fall within a particular category, creating silo pages is one way to enhance user experience. For example, if you have a ‘cold and flu’ category on your pediatrics page with many different blog posts falling under that category, it might be wise to create a silo.
When a user clicks on the ‘cold and flu’ category, they will be directed to a landing page of sorts. On these landing pages, you could give general information about colds and flu in children as well as links to your related blog posts.
This enhances the user experience and creates a sense of cohesiveness to your site. It also creates the opportunity for further internal linking.
Keywords & Content
- Content Marketing Strategy
In the world of healthcare SEO, there is simply no substitute for high-quality, relevant content. Content reigns supreme in this industry, and always will. Employing a good content marketing strategy is essential to using SEO to get more patients, as well as creating content on a consistent basis.
Think of content marketing as a way to gain potential patients’ interest in general topics related to your practice with the production of high-quality content.
The easiest way for a medical website to start producing content is to have a blog section on the website. Opportunities are endless, and you can write about important information related to your specialty to appeal to potential patients. How much traffic your web pages get will be directly affected by the rate of content production and the quality of the content produced.
In continuing with the pediatrics example, possible blog post ideas include:
- When to See a Doctor for a Fever
- Preventing Dehydration in Children
- 11 Best Sunscreens for Babies
A solid content marketing strategy is one of the best ways to boost your medical SEO and reach more patients. Your medical practice will benefit from new patients and rank high if you keep producing high-quality content.
- Understand Patient Search Intent
Understanding the ways in which patients search for healthcare information is crucial to producing content that is relevant to your target audience.
When a user inputs ‘best pediatricians near me’, you can be sure that this person is in search of a doctor for his or her child. This would be an example of transactional intent – the user is looking to take an action (make a doctor’s appointment for a child, in this case).
Another type of search intent is informational. An example of this would be a user searching for ‘home remedies teething’. This parent likely wants to learn about different ways to ease a baby’s pain in response to teething. This user is not looking to book an appointment or purchase something online.
Understanding search intent can help you produce content that answers a specific query. If your content is answering the question that users have, you can consider that a win!
- Target the Right Keywords
While creating a blog for the purpose of producing useful content for your users and potential patients is a great idea, it will fall short if you are just writing arbitrary blog posts without doing keyword research.
Targeting the right keywords is arguably the most crucial component of SEO.
You want to attract people to your website who are looking for your product or service and ready to purchase or take action. In addition to attracting the right audience, you also need your keywords to rank in search engines! There’s no point, in terms of SEO, in writing a post and targeting a keyword you won’t be able to rank for.
Keyword volume and keyword difficulty are the two metrics that are most important in determining your target keywords.
If you have a brand new website and want to target the keyword ‘flu symptoms, you will not be able to rank. The search volume is very high, at 377,000, but so is the difficulty at 52. A brand new website will not have a chance at ranking for this keyword.
Instead, look for something attainable. For example, ‘when to take a child to doctor for flu’ has a keyword difficulty of 8 and search volume of 60. Though you won’t get thousands of visitors per day with this keyword, it’s a much more realistic goal for a new website.
By targeting the right keywords, you will undoubtedly see more traffic. How many patients your medical practice sees, whether they are new or returning, can be directly influenced by this. You can choose your organic keywords with the specific intent of appealing to your target patients.
In addition to targeting the right keywords, you’ll need to use the right keyword density. Keyword density used to be seen as inserting the organic keywords as much as possible to let the search engines understand that your page should rank for the targeted keywords. However, today, it’s much better to use keywords naturally for proper search engine optimization.
- Use Long-Tail Versions of Keywords
One of the best medical SEO tips is to use long-tail keywords to your advantage.
Long-tail keywords bring the right audience to your website and have lower competition, meaning you will be more likely to rank for them and show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for higher online visibility.
It might seem counterintuitive to use long-tail keywords since the search volume is generally much lower. However, with proper keyword research, you can boost your medical SEO efforts with long-tail keywords.
In addition to a (generally) lower keyword difficulty, long-tail keywords help you to appear in local search results and appeal to the niche demographic you are targeting.
While using long-tail keywords won’t necessarily result in more site visitors, the visitors you do receive will be searching for exactly what you are offering.
- See What Your Competitors Are Ranking For
One fool-proof way to determine additional keywords you could rank for is to take a peek and see what your competitors are ranking for.
First, it’s crucial to understand who your competitors are. As a local pediatrician, your competitor is NOT going to be WebMD or Healthline.
Find competitors that have a similar domain ranking (DR) or domain authority (DA). Use an SEO tool such as SEMRush or Ahrefs to look at their ranking keywords. Take a look at the content they’ve written, and see how you could do it better.
- Produce Consistent, Relevant Content
If you keep producing content that is relevant to your target audience, you will assuredly give your SEO a boost. This happens in a few different ways.
With more content, there are more opportunities to build authority. There are more opportunities to acquire high-quality backlinks to your site. And with more posts or pages comes more traffic. Regular content production plays a huge role in your content marketing strategy.
Consistent production of relevant content is one of the top medical SEO tips to increase site visitors.
- Write For Users, Not Computers
Sometimes, you might be tempted to keyword-stuff your articles. This is an outdated practice and can earn you a penalty or two from Google. There are ways to ensure search engines know what your content is about without keyword stuffing.
It may also happen that a keyword is worded in a way that sounds unnatural or omits conjunctions, prepositions, or other words. When targeting these keywords with the goal of acquiring more patients, it’s important to write how you would speak.
For example, you may find you want to target the keyword ‘best pediatrician Rhode Island’. You’re missing an important word here – ‘in’.
Always remember to write for the user and not the computer. Google is smart and will understand that when you write ‘best pediatrician in Rhode Island’ it’s targeting the keyword ‘best pediatrician Rhode Island’.
- Well-Written, Grammatically Correct Content
You’re running a healthcare website and people expect doctors to be intelligent. If your writing is full of grammatical errors and sounds otherwise poorly written, it could deter people from trusting your abilities enough to book your services.
It’s ok if you’re not a natural writer – some people excel more in other areas, such as science and math. In that case, you can outsource some or all of your content writing.
- Avoid Thin Content
Thin content refers to a post or page that is under a couple of hundred words. There cannot be much value in something so sparse.
If you want to rank at the top, you need to be producing the best content. In order to write the best content, you want to contain all of the information that would be relevant to your target audience. You simply cannot do that in a mere few hundred words.
When determining how long your posts should be, look at the word count of the other pages ranking on page 1. You don’t need to have the most words, but you can get an idea of how much you should be writing in order to rank that high.
- Internal Linking
Internal linking refers to the practice of linking to different pages on your own website. In addition to giving the user important information within your own site, internal linking also helps Google to better understand and rank your content.
Internal links connect your content and demonstrate to Google and other major search engines what is important. It’s an important component of on-page SEO.
- FAQ Schema
FAQ Schema is a form of structured data that contains a set of common questions and answers. FAQ Schema serves two important purposes.
For one, Google shows a preference for content that addresses FAQs. By using FAQ Schema, you are differentiating that content from other HTML content, which makes it easier for bots to crawl and understand.
Second, you enhance your page’s visibility by appearing for additional keywords. When you input a keyword into the search bar, Google search results have a section marked ‘People Also Ask’. This is a great way to come up with your FAQs and address more keywords that users are searching for.
EAT & Online Presence
EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Particularly in regard to healthcare SEO, EAT is hugely important in the eyes of Google. The healthcare industry is considered YMYL (Your Money or Your Life).
When a niche is considered YMYL, it means that the content produced could have a direct effect on the users’ livelihood. Health, happiness, finances, etc. Google doesn’t mess around with YMYL niches and leaves no room for error, which is why EAT is so important in the medical industry. In fact, it doesn’t matter which search engine is being used – EAT is important regardless of the search engine and off-page SEO.
- About Page
Your ‘About Page’ is your chance to prove to Google (and users) that you are an expert in your field. Listing degrees, certifications, experience, and other pertinent information in your About Page shows that you do, in fact, know what you’re talking about.
- Topical Authority
Topical authority refers to the breadth of knowledge about a particular niche or sub-niche. In healthcare marketing, topical authority is important in both establishing EAT and ranking high for a particular topic.
Topical authority can be easily achieved by writing clusters of posts or pages with similar content. For example, as a pediatrician, you could demonstrate topical authority on the subject of teething. If you write five different pieces of content related to teething that are internally linked, it will demonstrate to Google that you’re an authority on this topic.
- Building Backlinks
Backlinks are like votes of confidence for your website. When an external website links to your site, they are showing search engines that they trust what you have to say. In medical websites and for medical SEO, this is of great importance.
Getting quality backlinks to your medical website increases your DA and DR, both metrics that are used to (unofficially) determine the likelihood of a site’s ranking potential.
- … and Citations
Citations are similar to backlinks, but they hold less weight. They are typically gained by including your medical practice site in local and national directories, as well as things like Google maps and Google My Business.
While they don’t have the same authoritative power that backlinks do, it’s still very important in medical SEO to create and maintain a business profile on these directories. Your business profile will show up in user searches and local listings in order to boost your local SEO and acquire more patients.
- Help a Reporter Out
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a great way to get high-quality backlinks as one of your SEO strategies. HARO is a forum where journalists ask for professional and expert opinions on different subjects.
Considering the fact that the healthcare business is a YMYL niche in the eyes of Google, it makes sense that HARO reporters need actual doctors and medical personnel to write about medical topics.
Responding to HARO inquiries has the potential to land you some great backlinks from high authority sites, such as Washington Post and New York Times.
It is, however, time-consuming to weed through the inquiries and write responses. Outsourcing is a great way to handle HARO.
- Claim and Optimize Google My Business
This is incredibly important for all local businesses, especially medical practices. When you claim and optimize your Google My Business profile, it ensures you show up in every local search to prospective patients.
The best SEO strategies out there use Google My Business optimization to boost local search engine optimization in order to get more patients.
There are a number of ways you can ensure your Google My Business page is optimized for the best results. After the initial set-up, you have to make sure you verify your profile, which is done by standard mail. Following verification, you have to input your basic information (such as hours, address, etc.) and publish your GMB page.
Try to include relevant keywords on your GMB page! If you need to conduct keyword research for this, don’t hesitate.
Add photos of your medical practice as well. This helps potential patients know what to expect when they come to your office, which could give a comforting feeling.
Healthcare providers can also use their GMB profile to let new patients know whether or not online care is available. If your medical practice does provide online care, you should include a direct channel for more patients to set up appointments online.
- Keep Business Listings Current
In order to keep your Google My Business and other directory listings current, be sure to check in on it sporadically and answer questions that new patients may be asking. Always keep your hours and contact information up-to-date.
- Encourage Engagement with Patient Reviews
If backlinks are votes of confidence for your medical practice website, patient reviews are like presidential nominations. For any healthcare practice, reviews are an extremely important way for prospective patients to determine whether or not they want to book an appointment.
After all patient appointments, consider asking them to leave reviews for your business online. This is far better than any form of paid advertising and can also boost your local SEO.
Most potential patients do extensive research on prospective doctors before booking an appointment, which is mostly conducted in the ‘reviews’ section.
If you do happen to get a negative review, be sure to respond to it. Be polite and cordial while addressing the problem that the patient had. This can give you the opportunity to explain in further detail what went wrong or if there was a misunderstanding of sorts. Always, always, always reply to negative reviews, at the very least. You can also reply to positive reviews if you deem it appropriate.
Final SEO Tips to Get More Patients
- Social Media Channels
Although social media doesn’t play a huge role in the algorithms that help you to rank higher, it is still a contributing factor.
Using social media channels in conjunction with a solid digital marketing strategy can help to create linking opportunities and brand mentions.
In addition, your social profiles and posts can also rank in search results! This is a huge win for local SEO if implemented properly.
Be sure to encourage engagement by sharing and replying to comments to bring in more patients. Being active on these platforms is important for their own algorithms so that they see you are an active user. It can be exhausting, at times, however, particularly if it’s not very interesting for you.
If it seems like too much to handle, you can always outsource this task to a social media manager.
- Pick Your Favorite SEO Tools and Learn to Use Them
There are many great SEO tools out there where you can learn things like technical SEO, local SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, keyword research, managing site speed, and other healthcare marketing strategies. Use them! Some can be quite costly, but you can usually find something that works in your budget.
These tools are an integral part of the SEO component of a digital marketing strategy.
Popular SEO tools that we know and love include SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz, Spyfu, Surfer SEO, and more.
The best SEO strategies combine the utilization of these tools with common sense and tenacity to achieve organic search results.
It can be overwhelming to learn and use all of these when you’re just starting out. Pick one that you can focus on initially (we would recommend either SEMRush or Ahrefs) and get the basics down before expanding your SEO tool collection.
- Use Best SEO Practices
While it might be tempting to cut corners and use what SEO specialists refer to as ‘blackhat tactics’, it’s not worth it in the long run. These practices generally go against Google’s Terms of Service.
If Google or other search engines catch you employing these methods to improve your rankings, you could get banned from search engines and affiliate programs, or otherwise penalized.
So what are blackhat SEO tactics? Some common unethical SEO practices include:
Keyword Stuffing: Overly using a keyword in order to manipulate a site’s ranking. Keyword density plays less of a role today than it once did. Using keywords naturally is the best way to optimize your website’s pages for their targeted keywords.
Purchasing Backlinks: Trying to build a site’s perceived authority by purchasing backlinks, usually off of websites such as Fiverr. This also includes things such as link farms, link networks, link wheels, and link schemes.
Cloaking: Presenting different content to search engines versus human users.
Negative SEO: Reporting competitors to negatively affect their reputations and ‘steal’ keywords.
Rich Snippet Markup Spam: Misusing structured data markup in order to manipulate SERPs.
Doorway Pages: Posts or pages that are created in order to manipulate users and search engines by redirecting visitors without disclosure or knowledge.
Blackhat SEO tactics are typically used by digital marketing agencies that guarantee results within a certain time frame. You need to be careful of these sorts of agencies if you are hoping to get in Google’s good graces! As a rule of thumb, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
If you’re going to outsource your medical SEO, keep an eye out for red flags when interviewing agencies, such as ‘guaranteed’ results or any other unrealistic expectations.
- Understand That SEO is Not One-Size-Fits-All
Understanding what worked for one website may not work for yours is one of the most helpful SEO tips to avoid disappointment. You will not get discouraged as easily if you don’t set unrealistic expectations.
In realizing that SEO is not one-size-fits-all, it also helps to create realistic goals that are both achievable and measurable. It helps you to understand that while it may appear on the outside that you are doing everything the same as your competitor, but they are gaining much more organic traffic and new patients than you, it’s not necessarily that you’re doing something wrong. Maybe you just need to try something different.
Again, what worked for one website may not work for yours. And the opposite also holds true.
- Be Adaptable
There is always the possibility of being ‘hit’ with one of Google’s notorious algorithm updates. It’s important to be able to adapt to change in this sense, both to avoid frustration and to rework your website if needed in order to achieve continued success.
Adapting to these changes leads to better rankings, more traffic, and ultimately, more patients.
Adaptability isn’t exclusively meant for Google updates, however. The world of search engine optimization is constantly in flux, always changing. Being adaptable also means keeping up with trends, understanding if something that once worked has since become outdated, as well as learning any new tools or technologies that may help out in the process.
- Stick With It
SEO is not a one-and-done practice. Proper search engine optimization requires consistent work. One of the best SEO tips we can give you to get more patients is to stick with it, no matter how discouraging it may get.
Not only do you have to keep up with SEO trends, you also have to consistently update your web pages with the most current and useful information as well as consistently analyze your competition to maintain your rankings in Google search results and appear to more patients.
A quality SEO campaign is a crucial component of any digital marketing campaign and will involve ongoing work. That goes for developing a content strategy, creating content, analyzing search engine results, ongoing keyword research, maintaining directories’ business profiles such as Google My Business, analyzing local SEO, analyzing the web pages’ technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The best SEO strategies involve the regular production of relevant content that patients search for. It’s about understanding who your target audience is, what their needs are, and addressing those needs in a way that engages and entices them.
That’s why it’s so important to stick with it. Don’t be discouraged if your medical SEO is taking longer than anticipated. Particularly if your site is new, it’s only natural that it takes some time to build trust and authority in the eyes of Google. These things don’t happen overnight!
Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint!
- Hire an Expert
It can be easy to get overwhelmed in the world of search engine optimization. Particularly if you are handling your own SEO strategies and campaign. Hiring an SEO specialist could be the right answer for you.
Depending on your available time and budget, it might make the most sense. An SEO specialist can be completely dedicated to your site and determine how much traffic you’re ultimately getting. This will provide peace of mind as well as the specialist’s expert knowledge in drawing in potential patients and high-quality traffic.
Outsourcing your digital marketing can also help with your technical SEO, something that requires more knowledge and expertise than basic on-page and off-page SEO.
Take Away
If you’ve made it all the way through this article, it should be clear how important medical SEO is to acquire more patients. You will appear more in local searches, appear to the right target patients, and outrank your competitors.
In addition, you’ll spend less on traditional forms of advertising, be able to properly manage your reputation and reviews, and increase the number of online appointments new patients are making.
Properly using medical SEO can help you achieve all of these things and more. If your site isn’t currently ranking as high as you’d like it to for targeted search terms, do an analysis to see which of these SEO tips will help you to best acquire new patients.
If you’re still stuck, consider reaching out to an expert. SEO strategists can help you to uncover why your site is not ranking well as well as increase its rankings naturally.
If you follow our SEO tips as part of your digital marketing strategy, there’s no reason why you can’t succeed in getting more patients to your healthcare practice. These SEO tips to get more patients, when properly implemented and executed, are the key to lasting success in the digital marketing realm.
