Are you planning to launch a website for your healthcare practice? Whether you run a primary care, nursing care, drug therapy, or specialty care facility, you need a well thought-out SEO and online marketing strategy to outrank your competition and drive more traffic to your official website. Here in this post, we will discuss the top five SEO tips for healthcare providers. Read on.
1. Create High Quality Content
The information you share through your landing pages, blogs, videos, etc. on your clinic’s website can directly impact the potential patients reading them.
So, it’s absolutely necessary to get all content reviewed by a subject matter specialist. All information, advice, etc. related to various medical conditions, symptoms, causes, standard treatments, medicines, etc. should be top-notch.
Sure, you cannot hire experienced doctors to write a few blog posts for you each month. They would charge a fortune for that. But, you can always hire someone who can create quality based on secondary research.
Such content, whether it is used as an input for creating landing pages, videos, or blogs, should be reviewed by an experienced healthcare professional.
Remember, your content should exhume authority and confidence.
So, make sure to provide references (hyperlinks) to high authority websites. For instance, an article on COVID-19 can have links to web pages, articles, reports, research papers, etc. published by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, World Health Organization, National Institute of Health, COVID-19 Task Force, International Journal of Medicine, etc.
Use a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner to learn what people are searching for and what they aren’t.
Strictly avoid stuffing your content with target keywords.
2. Make Your Content Engaging
Content on medical conditions can sound complex and boring. Potential patients with little or no knowledge of medical terminologies may find it difficult to continue consuming the information shared on your web pages.
So, healthcare providers must make serious efforts to make their content engaging by following simple tips such as:
- Use video content when possible to explain simple concepts
- Optimize visual elements, both for higher engagement and on-page SEO
- Simplify complex medical jargon for the target audience
- Optimize your website’s design for SEO
Failure to engage your audience can lead to high bounce rate and also reduce the visitor retention rate. Both can have a detrimental effect on healthcare service website’s SEO.
In a nutshell, do not ignore user engagement. You are not creating the content for search engine crawlers alone. Search engines will factor in whether your content, whether it includes text, images, or videos, is engaging or valuable enough for people.
3. Encourage Online Reviews
Do you want to create a great first-impression? When a potential patient visits your premises in-person, your receptionist, non-clinical staff, and doctors can surely try to create a good impression. But, when people search for your healthcare practice online, they’re more likely to get that impression if you have a large number of positive reviews.
People wonder whether online reviews really have a positive impact on the SEO of a healthcare provider’s website. Well, they do. Google Reviews, in particular, help increase your website’s visibility and boost its rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
For better results, make sure to implement a review schema for your website. Experienced SEO professionals can help implement different types of schema for your website. For someone with little or no experience in technical SEO, it can be difficult to add schema markups.
4. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
You may never outrank world-famous websites that churn out dozens of high-quality, peer-reviewed articles daily. So, there is no point trying to compete in that segment. This is one of the biggest mistakes healthcare providers make when they launch their websites. They merely populate their websites with tons of content sans any focus keywords that can actually help them get traffic that converts.
For instance, trying to rank your medical practice for ‘arthritis treatment’ when you launch your website is clearly a bad idea. But, you can focus on a keyword like ‘arthritis treatment in Los Angeles’ or dive deeper for a targeted niche keyword-combination like ‘arthritis treatment in Hollywood Hills, LA’ for the best results.
Put simply, healthcare providers should instead direct all their efforts at optimizing their SEO campaigns for long-tail keywords and location-based content in various formats. This way, you can get your medical practice noticed by the target audience more easily in a short span of time.
5. Local SEO
You need your healthcare service to appear in local searches. So, it’s important to optimize your Google My Business page.
People searching on their desktop computers or laptops will see local listings along with other results. But, those searching on mobile devices often see local listings before anything else for local search results.
Make sure our Google My Business page includes all essential information, including the business category, primary contact number, description, hours of operation, address, service area, and reviews.
You can also include local citations to further optimize this page for local SEO of your medical website.
Final Words
If you want higher rankings in the SERPs as well as more patients – you need a healthy SEO strategy based on tried-and-tested methods. Besides following the tips discussed above, make sure that your website loads fast, is mobile friendly, and gets referred to by third-party, authority websites.
Remember, SEO results do not pour in immediately. It takes time to get your web pages rank higher up in the SERPs. When it happens, you can get a steady supply of leads with minimal recurring investment.
Read Also : What Is SEO, OnPage & Content Strategy
