If you’re looking to run or expand your medical practice, you need to stay on top of your healthcare SEO strategy. After all, most patients turn to search engines when it’s time to find the best healthcare practitioner closest to them.
If your practice website doesn’t rank highly in search engine results, your competitor will, which means you’ll lose out on potential patients and appointments. However you look at it, healthcare SEO can benefit your medical practice in myriad ways:
- Boost organic search traffic to your practice website
- Rank higher for conditions, treatments, and services you focus on
- Gain a reputation as an expert or authority in your medical niche
- Wrestle web traffic from your competitors
- Increases new patients appointments
- Draw prospective patients without paid ads
- Generate reviews from new patients
The following six healthcare SEO tips and strategies are crucial for expanding your medical practice for the better.
1- Revamp your practice website
Good SEO starts with superb practice website design. It might sound like a no-brainer, but your website can make or break your medical practice’s online visibility and brand reputation.
You can build your medical website from the ground up or revamp an existing one. You can even use professional, health-related themes on platforms like WordPress. As noted by HubSpot, numerous great themes provide you with a way to create and customize your medical practice website in a breeze.
You ensure your medical website design is accessible, Google-friendly, and optimized for mobile devices. In addition, it should be intuitive and easy to use for users. An SEO audit can also point to your website’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
Don’t forget to review, fine-tune, and update your content and landing pages. In addition, it sports a dedicated contact page with your practice name, address, and phone (NAP), which you must consistently use on all online directories, review websites, and other listings.
Your NAP details should appear in the footer of each web page and on the main contact page. Google and other search crawlers look at these places for contact info. In addition, it would help incorporate image alt tags, headlines, and meta-tags to make your website more indexable and searchable.
2- Your patients and their pain points should come first in your keyword selection
Pranjal Bora of Digital Authority Partners, it’s crucial to think about the search terms your target patients use to find healthcare practitioners if you want to use SEO to expand your medical practice. Keywords are one of the most crucial components of a solid SEO strategy, and healthcare SEO is no different.
Google and other search engines use keywords to deliver relevant and timely results. If you want Google to find your website and content, you’ll want to select the right keywords. That begs the question: how do you figure out the best keywords for your practice?
Keyword research is vital but can be tricky at first. Of course, considering the medical services you provide is an excellent place to start. However, if you’re running a new practice, use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest.
Use intent is another strategy that can do wonders for your keyword choice. What do your customers search for regarding services? What symptoms or conditions are they seeking a doctor to treat?
At the end of it all, you’ll need to isolate your patients’ pain points and cross-reference your possible keywords with your competitor’s best-ranking search terms.
3- Focus on a favorable EAT ranking
EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust, three factors you should rank highly for on search. Finding the right keywords is only half the battle in medical SEO. You must ensure your medical website and content have a high search ranking for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
According to Forbes Magazine, Google, Bing, and significant search engines use the EAT system to determine page quality ranking and ensure users get the most relevant and valuable results. Therefore, you need to confirm your SEO campaigns, including your content, provide prospective patients with genuine value.
You can ensure writers produce your content with medical expertise and knowledge. But, more than that, you should provide your content is regularly reviewed and updated.
4- Put serious effort into earning many positive online reviews
Online reviews play a pivotal role in the search ranking of medical websites. And especially true as telemedicine gains more and more traction, as noted by Harvard Business Review.
When looking to set up your healthcare SEO to get to the top of Google search results, you need to build a concerted effort to earn as many positive reviews from patients and industry critics as possible. Therefore, it makes sense to dedicate a page to patient testimonials, reviews, and comments.
You can have a separate page for reviews left by patients straight on the website, and another for reviews pulled off other platforms like Yelp, Google, Facebook, etc. As with EAT, online reviews are an essential factor for Google when determining the authority and credibility of your practice.
5- Claim your Google My Business listing
You need to ensure your practice is on Google My Business (GMB) if you want to rank highly as a doctor’s office on Google local search and mobile search. Claiming, verifying, and updating your GMB listing is not just good for SEO; it’ll also ensure prospective patients are finding correct NAP details about your business.
6- Don’t forget to optimize your website with high-quality visuals
Images, video, and other visual elements can dramatically enhance the power of your content. For one thing, video has become one of the most popular ways patients consume medical content. Using video and other interactive graphics can help supercharge your content marketing efforts and draw more organic traffic.
Users spend more time watching videos and improving their time-on-page, abandonment, and other key performance metrics Google uses to rank page quality. Therefore, relaying to Google and other search engines that you provide valuable content on your web pages. Add high-quality, relevant, and engaging videos, be they how-to videos, virtual tours of your medical practice, or an informative video dealing with specific symptoms.
Wrapping It Up
You need to step up your SEO game if you want to rank better on Google and attract more prospective patients to expand your medical practice. But it takes time. Select patient-centric keywords, optimize your content with visuals, and work on your EAT ranking to win medical SEO.
