Everyone requires medical services at a certain point in their lives, but that doesn’t mean the medical industry is easy to do business in. Medical professionals are paid well, and medical services are costly to provide. To make matters worse, certain patients’ fees are not always easy to collect. To stay profitable, your medical practise needs to bring in new patients as frequently as possible, which means increasing web traffic.
There are numerous methods for increasing web traffic. People may learn about your organisation through social media or by clicking on links on medical-related websites. Advertising can be a good source of traffic as well. The majority of your web traffic will almost certainly come from search engines, so optimising your medical website for search engines is critical if you want to receive as much search engine traffic as possible.
What is healthcare SEO?
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to the process of optimising your website to attract more of the people you want to reach through organic search results. In practise, this means optimising your website so that Google and other search engines display it to potential patients looking for services similar to yours.
Searching online is by far the most popular way for patients to find healthcare providers, according to Google: online search drives three times as many visitors to hospital websites as other sources. To attract new patients, your website must be optimised so that it appears near the top of search engine results pages, making SEO a critical investment for any medical practise, clinic, or hospital.
How can search engine optimization help the healthcare industry?
- Grow your patient base
Patients use online searches to find new healthcare providers, book appointments, read provider reviews, and find useful information. To give your patients the best digital experience possible, you should invest in healthcare SEO so that your site appears at the top of their search results, ultimately increasing your patient base.
- Show up for local searches
Another advantage of a healthcare SEO strategy is the ability to appear in local search results. Many patients look for terms that are specific to their location, such as “physical therapist in Delhi.”
Your site must be properly optimised in order to appear for those geographically specific searches. Once it is, you will be able to access highly relevant, local searches from potential patients looking for services similar to yours.
- Rise above the competition
Healthcare is a competitive industry, so investing in SEO is critical. If a patient searches for a hospital in their area and your main competitor appears as the first or second search result, while your hospital isn’t even on page one, you’ll miss out on valuable growth opportunities.
10 Best SEO Practices to Improve Your Healthcare Ranking
The Best Healthcare SEO With an understanding of how your site is currently performing, you can begin to develop a healthcare SEO strategy to help your site rise to the top of search results. Begin with the 10 practical suggestions listed below.
1. Concentrate on high-quality content:
Every day, people search for information about health-related topics, generating massive amounts of search engine traffic. Almost everyone wants to live a healthier lifestyle, even if they aren’t looking for medical services right now. People who see your answers to medical questions will automatically regard them as authoritative because your institution provides medical services — especially if the authors of those answers are doctors and nurses.
These are just a few of the health-related topics that people look up on the internet:
• Recommendations for diet and exercise
• Information for people suffering from specific medical conditions
• Details on new medications and other health-related products
• Information on what certain symptoms mean and when to seek medical attention
2. Begin with local SEO.
Publishing informative medical content is an excellent way to increase search engine traffic, but website visitors have little value if they live too far away to become patients. To increase local traffic, optimise your website for local searches.
Local SEO methods optimise your medical website in order to generate massive foot traffic from local search results. Local SEO efforts, unlike other types of search engine optimization, can directly produce a high ROI for your medical practise.
- GOOGLE MAP PACK
- RATINGS, REVIEWS & TESTIMONIALS
- CITATIONS
3. Google My Business
Begin by ensuring that Google recognises your institution’s location. Create a Google My Business profile and fill it out completely. The Google My Business profile for your institution is the official record of your location, hours, and services offered. Giving Google that information can help you rank higher for local search terms.
4. Social Media and Business Directories
Google looks for third-party websites that list a business’s name, address, and phone number in order to provide accurate local search results. Every website that contains contact information for your institution includes a local citation. For your institution to appear in the featured area at the top of the results page when people search for local providers of medical services, Google will want to see many local citations that agree on your institution’s contact details.
Claim or create company profiles on as many business directories as possible. Yelp and Facebook are both excellent places to begin. Look for medical industry-specific directories as well.
5. Compare your healthcare SEO performance to that of your competitors
Tracking and reporting on your SEO efforts is an important step toward demonstrating the ROI of your SEO efforts.
Keep in mind, however, that SEO performance is always relative to your competition. Your organic traffic may have increased by 50% in the last year, but if you’re still on page two of search results while your competition is on page one for high priority keywords that attract the right type of patients, you’re not capturing the right traffic.
6. Improve your website’s patient experience
A strong healthcare SEO strategy will help you attract new patients, but you must also provide an exceptional digital experience to keep them.
A high-quality website experience is also taken into account by search engines when ranking. Consider the following when considering your overall website experience:
- Site speed
- Straightforward navigation
- Clean, universal design
- Quality assurance
- Simple user journey
- Accessibility
7. Increase the authority of your website.
Building the authority of your website is another way to improve your healthcare SEO strategy. The best way to accomplish this is through backlinks, which occur when another website links to yours.
Backlinks are viewed by search engines as a vote of confidence—basically, if another site is willing to send their users to your site, they must trust your organisation and your content.
However, not all backlinks are created equal. You want links from high-quality, authoritative sites, not spammy or untrustworthy ones.
If your hospital or clinic is mentioned on another website for interesting research, good outcomes, community service, or other reasons, contact the website owner and ask if they would mind including a link to your website when they mention you.
Get your organisation in front of as many trustworthy third-parties as possible, and ask that they link to your site whenever they use your content, mention you, or interview a member of staff.
8. Ascertain that search engines can crawl and index your website.
You must ensure that search engines can index your high-quality, unique, and comprehensive content that is relevant to your healthcare organisation.
Let’s start with the basics: When search engines crawl your website, they save and organise the data they find. When a search engine indexes your page, it means it understands what it’s about and can show it to users as a search result (By indexing content, search engines are essentially creating their own library from which to draw when a user searches for something).
That means your healthcare content must be simple to index for search engines. One effective method is to use a sitemap. A sitemap is a collection of all of your website’s URLs that you want search engines to index and display to users. A good place to start is by creating a sitemap according to Google’s instructions and submitting it to Google Search Console.
9. Consider Off-Site Factors.
Things like social media traffic and links to your website are examples of off-site indicators that can help your search rankings.
Although social media is not a direct ranking factor, it should be one of your top priorities when it comes to off-site SEO. As a result, make good use of social media marketing and post content that can have a significant impact on a patient’s choice of a treatment centre or hospital.
You should be aware that many users read social media reviews before visiting a clinic or making an appointment. This is why you must keep your social media profiles up to date and relevant content posted on a regular basis. After all, social media is a great way to establish potential patient interaction.
10. Use Social Media to Increase Rankings
Social media facilitates two-way conversations between an organisation and the general public. Social media can be used to drive traffic to your website from a larger audience than you would normally reach.
Except for websites like Facebook or Twitter, the impact of social media on SEO is essentially a form of link building. This emphasises the importance of consistently sharing high-quality content across relevant social channels.
Start simple with social media; use LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and Twitter to build an audience and inform them of your unique offerings and industry knowledge.
When creating your social media accounts for the first time, please include as much information as possible in the name, bio, description, and other sections of each account to provide the search engines with as much information as possible to assist them in ranking your social profiles.
Conclusion:
When it comes to the content your company shares on social media, prioritise quality over quantity. When you have a limited budget, time, and personnel, prioritise one-on-one conversations with your community and participation in online discussions that are relevant to your competence.
SEO is a massive task. Most medical institutions, hospitals, and healthcare companies struggle with search engine rankings because they lack the resources to handle content creation, competitor analysis, and link acquisition. It’s time to delegate your Healthcare SEO needs to experts. Contact Solution Next today to learn more about how we can help you improve your search engine rankings.
