More patients and their carers are making search engines their healthcare partners. They use these platforms to look for potential doctors, book appointments, and even air their complaints or applaud good service on review sites.
You want to ensure your practice is found on the internet. And an effective medical search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is essential for any healthcare organization that wants to stay competitive. But how do you ensure it delivers results?
5 Medical SEO Tips to Improve Your Strategy
Marina Turea of Digital Authority Partners has shared the basics of medical SEO. Here, we provide five techniques that can help strengthen your medical SEO campaign:
1. Take Care of Your Online Reputation
Here’s some good news: most patients still believe their doctors, but that trust is eroding, especially during and after the pandemic. A growing number also opt for Dr. Google to self-diagnose, which is dangerous.
Deal with this issue by including online reputation management in your medical SEO strategy:
- Ensure your NAP is consistent. NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. People use this data in Google to locate or research more about your clinic. Be accurate and update them across platforms.
- Pay attention to online reviews. Respond to both positive and negative feedback professionally and promptly. Correct misinformation and reach out to disgruntled or unhappy patients.
- Set up official social media channels. Claim your profiles on popular networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn before someone else does. Manage these accounts consistently for errors in NAP information and post content related to your medical specialty.
2. Match Your Content with Your Brand
Content is the reigning queen in SEO, but it has to be optimized correctly to work well. One option is to match it with your brand.
What does this mean?
Your tone should align with who you are as a business and what patients can expect when they come to you.
For example, a cosmetic surgeon might want to focus not only on informative but also glamorous and aspirational content. Meanwhile, a pediatrician’s website should be family-friendly and emphasize health and wellness.
Some ideas for developing brand-matched content include:
- Develop buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your target patients. They help you understand their concerns, needs, and objectives. This understanding can help you produce content that appeals to them.
- Create a style guide. This document includes elements like your mission statement, tone of voice, and logo usage. You can share it with everyone who writes for your website, from guest bloggers to in-house copywriters.
- Write long-form content. In-depth articles help establish your brand as an authority in the medical field. They also give you more opportunities to include keywords and phrases. Ideal long copies include case studies, resource pages, knowledge bases, and cornerstone content.
3. Grow Local SEO
How far are people willing to travel for healthcare? Not far at all.
A 2021 report suggested that patients’ average median straight-line driving distance is only 6.6 miles. About 90% didn’t want to go beyond 30 miles.
Because patients are more likely to seek physicians nearby, you should consider growing local SEO, the practice of optimizing your medical website to target certain demographics and geographical locations.
You can enhance this local SEO strategy with these ideas:
- Set up your Google My Business Profile. A free listing appears on the right-hand side of search engine result pages (SERPs) when someone searches for your type of business in a specific location. Include your NAP information, business hours, website URL, and photos.
- Create content for localized keywords. For example, if you’re targeting patients in Dallas, write blog posts such as “Best ENT doctors in Dallas” or “10 best walk-in clinics in Dallas.”
- Prioritize local mentions. Build relationships with local organizations and enterprises. Get involved in local charities, sponsorships, and events. These activities can generate local-based inbound links.
4. Improve Website User Experience (UX)
Mobile-first indexing has cemented what most marketers know: search engines, especially Google, highly value user experience (UX). In fact, UX could already be one of the essential ranking factors.
Medical SEO is no different. To improve your site’s ranking, start by looking at the UX.
Ask yourself these questions:
- How easy is it to navigate my website?
- Do visitors have to click too many times to find the needed information?
- Are my pages loading quickly?
- Is my website responsive?
You can use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check your website’s loading time. Anything above two seconds is too slow and will likely result in a high bounce rate, which could hurt your ranking.
To further improve UX, you might want to:
- Use an internal search function. This feature makes it easier for visitors to find the specific information they’re looking for on your website.
- Install an SSL certificate. Guarantee that patient information is safe at all times by improving data security. Run an SSL website that encrypts the data passing between your server and the visitor’s browser.
- Implement a schema markup. This code helps search engines understand your content better and can result in richer snippets, improving your click-through rate.
5. Get More Strategic with Keyword Research
A medical SEO plan will never be complete without keyword research. However, you need to be more strategic or thoughtful with your approach. Your chosen key phrases and words must:
- Match the SEO objective, whether it is to attract more traffic or encourage patients to book an appointment
- Be relevant to the user’s needs or search intent
- Appear naturally in your content
Perform more effective keyword research with these ideas:
- Know your lead’s journey. Prospective patients are leads. Knowing their process includes knowing the stages a patient goes through before they’re ready to book an appointment. Identify keywords or phrases they might use during each stage, such as “symptoms of a herniated disc” or “best orthopedic surgeon near me.”
- Understand keyword difficulty. This metric tells you how hard it is to rank for a particular keyword. The higher the difficulty, the more time, effort, and resources you need.
- Optimize for long-tail keywords. These key phrases are more specific and usually longer than one or two words. They’re easier to rank for and can result in higher-quality traffic. For example, instead of “back pain,” you can use “lower back pain when sitting.”
Final Words
Medical SEO is vital to the success of any healthcare organization. It can help you attract more patients, build brand awareness, and establish your practice as an authority in your field.
The tips above should give you a good starting point for improving your website’s ranking. Once you’re ready to scale, consider working with a medical SEO agency to hasten your growth.