Healthcare SEO services help medical organisations to improve the visibility of their brand and healthcare online platforms to win more patients and become more profitable.
According to a 2019 article in The Telegraph, Google Health boss David Feinberg said that around 7 percent of Google’s daily searches are health-related, that’s the equivalent to 70,000 healthcare searches being performed every minute.
With so many people using search engines to look for healthcare information, the opportunities for medical organisations online are huge; but so is the competition. If your medical business’s website is not easy to find on Google, then your business is not reaching its full potential.
A 2020 study by Software Advice found that 71% of people say that looking up online reviews is the first step they take when searching for a new doctor.
No matter what type of healthcare business a person is searching for, whether it’s a private hospital, doctor clinic, nursing home, mental health facility, hospice, dentist, or orthopaedic centre, most of them will have begun their search for healthcare advice or services online.
Having a user-friendly website and an online presence that is optimised for search engines is key to winning more patients.
What is healthcare SEO?
Medical search engine optimisation helps your healthcare organisation become more visible online by putting your website in front of the right people at the right time. This is achieved by improving the quality of your website and optimising it to rank highly in Google’s search results for relevant search terms.
A good SEO service will use a combination of different SEO techniques to achieve this. The exact SEO services you require will depend on your healthcare organisation’s unique goals and objectives and existing position and reputation online.
On-page, off-page, and local SEO techniques can all be used to boost your healthcare business’ visibility on Google.
Let’s find out a bit more about what each of these branches of SEO involves.
How can you optimise your business' website?
On-page SEO strategies
- Ensuring your website can be crawled and indexed by Google. This may involve rectifying problems relating to penalties from Google, crawl budget or your website’s robots.txt file and sitemap.
- Optimising your website’s meta-tags. Examples of meta-tags include title tags, header tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, and canonical tags. Meta tags are an important part of your medical website’s coding, they are used to signpost to Google what the content on a page is about.
- Improving site speed. Google favours websites that load quickly to provide a better user experience. Ideally, your web pages should load within three seconds.
- Improving and optimising the text content on your website. This could involve updating the existing healthcare or medical text content on your website to make it more informative, engaging, and relevant to both users and search engines. It may also include creating new content or blogs for your website. Regularly updating your website with high quality and unique healthcare content can help your organisation to become an authoritative figure within your niche and boost its relevance and ranking on Google.
Off-page SEO strategies
This is primarily about gaining off-site links back to your website to help show Google that your website is important or authoritative. The more relevant and high-quality links there are leading back to your website the better.
Key off-page medical SEO techniques include:
- Executing a Digital PR campaign. Digital PR is about taking those traditional PR tactics and applying them to the digital world, supporting your digital marketing strategy. When done right, it’s a highly effective way to increase brand awareness and buil high-quality, authoritative links. To learn more about Digital PR, visit our article SEO & Digital PR.
- Listing your organisation in online healthcare directories. Submitting your medical organisation’s details to all relevant healthcare directories online will help patients to discover you and gain traffic to your website.
- Writing for external outlets and magazines. Writing engaging and informative blogs or articles that link back to your website for publication on other relevant and authoritative healthcare websites.
- Being present on social media. Linking your website to your healthcare organisation’s active social media presence may also help to improve your website’s ranking.
Local SEO strategies
If you’re a healthcare organisation with physical premises where patients can visit you, then a good local SEO strategy can help your business to appear in location-based search results, helping you to reach customers who are performing relevant local searches.
Local medical SEO techniques may include:
- Optimising your Google Maps listing. Ensuring that your Google business listing is as complete as possible can help to improve your organisation’s visibility on Google Maps and in Google’s local search results.
- Adding location-specific pages to your website. If your medical business operates from multiple locations, then adding location-specific pages to your website can help your business to get found easier in relevant local searches.
- Optimising for voice search. Voice search is growing in popularity, particularly when users are searching for local businesses whilst out and about. Optimise your website for the more long-tail and conversational keywords used during voice searches.
What are the benefits of using medical SEO services?
1. Discover what people search for on Google when looking for healthcare products or services like yours.
2. Optimise your website so that it appears when people search for these keywords or phrases.
3. Win more website visitors and generate more enquiries through your website.
4. Achieve lasting, organic growth online.
5. Avoid receiving damaging penalties from Google.
6. Get ahead of your competitors.
7. Increase your revenue and improve your ROI.
Need help or advice with medical search engine optimisation? Here at topflight – as a healthcare marketing agency – we specialise in providing SEO services that will help to skyrocket your healthcare organisation.Table of Contents
