Are you satisfied with how many patients your healthcare practice is attracting online? Do you wish your web presence was stronger and more noticeable to individuals looking for local medical attention?
You can show up in the search engine results and land in front of your possible patients. SEO Services For Healthcare practices can help you acquire visibility, have people going through to your website, and have more people visiting the doors of your office.
Understanding best practices and how you could successfully reach your local market will help you before you start search engine optimization on the website of your medical practice. We go over what does and does not work for healthcare practice SEO below.
SEO is not simple, so you cannot perform it by yourself. Get in touch with us right now if you would want to talk about chances to increase your medical practice’s web profile.
What is Involved With SEO For a Healthcare Practice?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a combination of tactics designed to help a medical practice’s website position better in search engine results. SEO for healthcare practices consists of three major components:
- Technical optimization, which addresses any site issues that may be preventing the search engines from fully crawling through its pages
- On-page optimization, which is a collection of techniques that help search engines better understand what the website is about
- Offsite optimization, which consists of building links that point to the site.
Done well, SEO can help a healthcare practice’s website gain prominence in the SERPs, or search engine results pages, and get more visitors which can result in more patients.
Why Perform SEO for Healthcare Practices?
There are many benefits to doing SEO for a healthcare practice:
- Increase the number of potential patients finding your website on search engines.
- The cost-per-conversion for organic traffic is many orders lower than paid traffic.
- The web is a central part of the patient’s journey, with 80% of patients using the internet to make a health-related search in the past year.
- Get in front of patients performing “signs and symptoms” searches.
- SEO is extremely effective for telemedicine marketing, given that you will drive traffic from across the country.
- Establish your practice as a leader in your area of medicine, earning trust and potentially attracting patients throughout the country.
SEO is the solution to getting your medical practice’s website in front of all the patients performing those searches. It all starts with an in-depth analysis of your site to discover what it needs.
Following are several SEO tactics that work and some that don’t work.
10 Tips for Effectively Increasing Organic Traffic for Healthcare Practices
▶ SEO and Mobile-Friendly Website Design
The first step toward an optimized website is ensuring that your site architecture is amenable to crawlers. This involves making sure that your website isn’t presenting any hurdles to the search engine bots that crawl the web. Impediments could be a non-search-friendly URL architecture or a poor internal link structure.
In addition to assessing your medical practice’s website’s ability to perform desktop searches, you want to make sure that your website resolves well on mobile devices, as 68% of health-related searches are performed using them.
▶ Research Your Practice’s Competition
How well do your competitors show up in search? You should search several times with keywords relevant to your website to evaluate the competitive scene. Remember that, although some of them will be, often your brick-and-mortar rivals are not your internet rivals. Click through those websites to learn about their strengths; then, apply that knowledge to guide the optimization of your website.
▶ Identify Your Target Audience
Developing a good SEO plan for your healthcare office depends critically on knowing your target demographic. Knowing your possible patients will assist you in customizing your keywords and material to fit their wants and tastes.
Analyze your present patient base first, then take demography into account including age, gender, geography, and particular medical needs. A pediatric clinic would target parents searching for kid healthcare services, for instance, while a cosmetic surgery center might concentrate on adults looking for aesthetic improvements. Targeting your target audience will help you create more pertinent and interesting material that appeals to and keeps patients.
Building Target Audience Personas
Building target audience personas involves creating detailed profiles of your ideal patients. These personas should include demographic information, health concerns, and online behavior patterns.
Developing these personas helps you to understand the preferences of information consumption and the hunt for knowledge of your audience. This method lets you maximize your marketing plans and website material to fit the particular wants and interests of your clients, therefore increasing the relevant traffic to your site.
▶ Research Search Results
Perform searches for important keywords and look at the search results. What’s showing up there? Are there several educational resources? If so, the search engines may have decided that the intent of the search is strictly informational, and not for someone who’s looking for a healthcare provider. Assess search intent and find out what keywords make sense for your healthcare practice.
▶ Perform Intelligent Keyword Research to Find Out How Patients Are Searching for Healthcare
You should start a more in-depth investigation once you have a first list of keywords. Many tools, such as Ahrefs, will show you the monthly search volume, or MSV, of searches conducted using that keyword together with the degree of competition for that specific phrase, thereby determining the difficulty in placement. Your ideal terms will combine a high amount of traffic and a relatively low amount of competition.
There are times, however, in which those tools don’t list all the keywords that are being searched for. This is when Google autosuggest can help. Autosuggest comes into play when you type a query into the search bar:
The terms in the drop-down menu have appeared in search before, so it’s a safe bet they’ll be used again. While there’s no way to get search numbers for these terms, they’re definitely a solid addition to your keyword list.
Selecting The Right Target Keywords For Your Healthcare Practice Niche
For healthcare SEO to be efficient, proper target keywords must be chosen. Your practice needs to show higher on search results by using keywords that fairly represent the services you provide and appeal to the particular demands of your patient population.
A dental office might, for example, emphasize phrases like “family dentist in [city],” or “emergent dental care close by.” Target keywords like “hair restoration in [city],” or “FUE hair transplant specialists,” for a clinic focused on hair transplants. By use of keyword research tools, you will be able to identify variants and related terms with high search traffic and low competition, therefore ensuring that the website of your practice draws a targeted and relevant audience.
Local keywords also help to improve the visibility of your practice in your geographical area. Many times, patients look for medical treatments inside a given area; hence, using phrases like “plastic surgery in [city],” and “medspa treatments near me,” would greatly improve your local SEO efforts. Your chances of showing up in search results will increase and you will draw more patients if you match your keyword strategy with the particular requirements of your community and the special features of your medical practice.
▶ Fully Optimize Your Practice Pages
Once you’ve generated your keyword list, the next step is to optimize your site’s pages using that list. Start with the page’s title tags and meta descriptions, which, when they show up on SERPs, are respectively the blue links and the descriptions accompanying those links:
The title tag and meta descriptions can be accessed in multiple ways depending on what content management system you’re using. In WordPress, for example, perhaps the easiest method is to use the Yoast SEO plugin. Title tags are one of the most powerful onsite components when it comes to ranking a website, and so should be paid careful attention to.
Your title tag should include the main keyword for that page. Title tags are limited to 60-65 characters, so it’s important to be brief. Anything longer than 65 characters will be truncated by the search engines.
Your meta description should:
- Explain some more about what’s on the page
- Include the search term (which will end up bolded in the SERPs)
- Include a call to action, which could either be your practice’s call to action (“Contact us to schedule an appointment.”) and/or can entice someone to click through to your medical practice’s website (“Click here to learn more about our medical practice.”).
- The character limit for meta descriptions is roughly 160 characters.
The next step is optimizing your content and building content that features your key terms. In this video, we explain in more detail the in-depth process we use for optimizing content to ensure its comprehensiveness and search engine’s ability to “understand” what it is about:
▶ Build Content that Establishes You as a Thought Leader
Your website must represent you professionally. Your content is the meat of your website and thus is extremely important in how the search engines understand what your site is about and whether it’s a good match for what’s being searched for. Use your expertise to establish yourself and your website as a go-to resource for those looking for information.
It’s important to update your website with current content as well. Establish a blog and regularly publish articles. Use your keyword research to inform your new blog topics. Write in-depth on your topics. Answer questions your potential patients may have. The more you grow your website, the more you provide the search engines an opportunity to better understand what you’re all about and put you in front of people who need your services.
▶ Use All Forms of Content
Don’t limit yourself to merely written content. Video, for example, can be a great way to set your medical practice apart from others. Highlight what it’s like to visit your practice. If you’re the doctor, answer common medical questions on video. Upload your videos to YouTube and optimize them, linking back to your website.
Video is much more effective at building a relationship with prospective patients before they’ve even contacted you. By giving those patients faces to associate with your content, they’ll feel like they already know you to some degree which makes it much easier to get them to schedule an appointment.
▶ Perform Local SEO
Establishing yourself in your locality is key to getting visibility for local searches. For searches like “eye doctor in [your city], you want your medical office front and center. Make sure your list of important terms includes local place names, which you should then apply in the title tags, meta descriptions, and body of work of your website. (Don’t overdo it, though.)
▶ Build Local Pages
In establishing yourself as a local entity, it’s important to let the search engines know that your practice lies within that area. In addition to adding local search terms to the main areas of your medical practice’s website, consider creating pages specifically focused on the areas your patients come from. Make sure those pages are unique both from the other pages on your website and from each other. The search engines don’t like duplicate content, and won’t reward your efforts with increased visibility.
▶ Find an Effective Healthcare SEO Provider
SEO is a critically important part of your overall marketing plan. It’s also a lot of work. You need to continue to address several elements regularly. You can’t sleep on search engine optimization. The search engines’ algorithms are updated on a near-daily basis. Keeping your SEO efforts in-house means giving one of your staff a full-time job. Daunting, that.
Luckily, some firms specialize in SEO Services For Healthcare practices. However, healthcare practices are unique entities, requiring specialized language that adheres to industry standards. Finding an SEO firm that understands that can be difficult.
IndeedSEO has an extensive history of success working with SEO providers to enhance your online presence with tailored Healthcare SEO strategies for better visibility.
Contact Us for a Comprehensive SEO Plan
The best place to start is with an audit that addresses your website on a technical level while also determining your current visibility in the SERPs. We can provide you with a comprehensive look at where you are and what you can accomplish with a comprehensive SEO campaign.
Contact us to get the process started. We’ll help you get visibility and put your healthcare practice in front of potential patients.
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