10 Steps To Successful Healthcare SEO

SEO is different for every business.

Every business gets some or the other benefits of optimizing its websites to the fullest…

But today, I will be talking about Healthcare SEO, which is something completely different from any regular SEO. It is not just about giving out a few images, putting up a few keywords on your site, and waiting for the traffic to come.

The Healthcare SEO strategy is built to help medical sites reach more patients, and for patients to get the best medical services.

So let’s get started:

What Is Healthcare SEO?

Healthcare SEO is all that is required to optimize a Medical Website to rank higher for related search queries and reach more potential patients.

As you must be aware, search engine optimization has become one of the most important aspects to maximize your website’s visibility in the SERPs.

Relating this to Medical SEO, it’s all about how well-optimized your website is to attract the attention of potential patients and get them to visit your website.

This takes us to the image below…

See, how easily a well-optimized website drives more patients toward it. With this, it will organically increase rankings, improve sales and generate more revenues as well as increase brand visibility. 

How Is Medical Search Marketing Different? (B2B Vs B2C) 

As I have mentioned earlier, SEO is different for every business, this is because of the different target audience that is served.

For an eCommerce website, the target audience will be people who are looking to buy products, whereas, for a medical website, the target audience will be people who are looking for specific medical services.

And talking about Medical Search Marketing covers both B2B and B2C marketing practices.

The main difference between B2B and B2C marketing is that in B2B, marketers provide services to other businesses, and in B2C they directly sell to customers.

For example- If there is a website that manufactures healthcare equipment, and sells them to hospitals or pharmacies. This is what, business-to-business marketing is called.

Whereas, on the other hand, in B2C, those pharmacies or medical institutions sell the equipment directly to the customers.

Look at the table below…

After discussing so much about Healthcare SEO….you must ask, why is optimizing for healthcare websites so important?? Here’s the answer…

Is SEO Important In Healthcare?

Let me raise a counter question to you…

As a healthcare expert, don’t you want your website to rank in the top position of Google SERPs? Or say, don’t you wanna get more visitors to your website?

Also with the rising competition in the market, and your competitors driving most of the traffic, the ultimate focus is to pull the most patients to your website. For this, you HAVE TO go for health care SEO. 

One of the major reasons to say SEO is important for a medical website is…

Optimizing your medical website will make it appear more professional and will be easier to promote in online search results, thanks to search engine optimization.

And the second one includes, how many positive online reviews your website gets. 

Indeed, with patients searching for online medical facilities, the number raised to 72% of U.S people searching for health-related websites online

To support this statement, here are some facts,

• 90% of patients who responded to our survey evaluate doctors based on online reviews.
• Nearly 71% of patients start their search for a new doctor by reading online reviews.
• This is what makes 1% of patients post negative reviews and just 10% of patients post “somewhat negative” reviews.

So by now, you must have got to know why is it important to optimize your healthcare website and make it reach its potential audience.

With importance, comes the benefits… Benefits of Healthcare SEO

• Increase in visibility
• Increase in organic traffic
• Higher website rankings
• Getting more positive reviews

Now comes the part where you will actually get to know some steps to do healthcare SEO.

Steps To Successful Healthcare SEO

This is the way to successful healthcare SEO. These steps include the best practices to achieve the goal which is, SEO for healthcare websites. So let’s get them one by one…

Find Out The Keywords That People Search To Find Medical Professionals

If you want to up your SEO game, then you have to start searching for the terms your patients are using as search queries on search engines to find SEO healthcare medical services.

Simple as that!

Keywords are considered to be the most vital aspect of any healthcare SEO strategy. Without them, there’s NO CHANCE your website can rank on Google.

Putting keywords in your medical website gives direct indications to Google to rank you higher whenever patients search for related terms. 

With the right keywords, Google also finds it relative to mark you up as your website provides the required information for that search query. And this takes me to tell you…

How, by a chance find the right keywords? 

So, to find the best and high-quality keywords, you have to go for keyword research and to make that task a bit simple, you can use a few keyword research tools among the listed ones.

• Ubbersuggest
• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
• Google Keyword Planner
• SEMrush Keyword Research Tool… and many more

Read More: 11 Best Keyword Research Tools In 2022

You just have to put in a few search terms that you think people are searching for in the search box and you’ll get to see several keywords.

Looking at the above image, you will find various keywords that can be used in your SEO healthcare website.

Fortunately, you don’t just have to list out a few best suitable keywords, either look for the keywords that are more about understanding the intent of your users.

After this, let’s move to the next step.

Focus On Getting High E.A.T Rankings

“E.A.T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”. It is not any rule introduced by Google, It is a PRINCIPLE.

E.A.T has a direct link to how perfectly you know about your topic. This means you must have the expert medical knowledge to create content around that topic and include the keywords.

And talking about the relation between E.A.T and rankings…

It is regarded as one of Google’s most crucial considerations when calculating the overall Page Quality Rating.

It all depends upon you, if you want your healthcare SEO website to rank high, you have to give value to the user’s intent.

To leave an impact on your patients, you can,

• Provide ample information in the ‘About Us section
• Establish a highly designed Contact Us page
• Tell about the expertise and experience in the author’s bios
• Include T&C and other privacy policies 
• Provide the address, google location, and phone numbers on your site

With this, you can literally build your trust among your clients and authoritativeness among the community. This is what E.A.T resonates with- “having Expertise, builds Authority and Trust among potential audiences and society”.

Make Sure The Site Is Easy To Navigate

If users find your website easy to navigate, Mark It! Something good is going to happen. Maybe they render your service or shall visit your SEO medical website.

And the fact that a website with poor design or structure that confuses the visitors and tests their patience would never ever tend to rank high as compared to the websites that provide the best user experience and navigates them while grabbing their attention at every point.

Apart from this, the users should be able to easily find the data they require and be shown data that addresses their pain points. 

With this, they will engage with your content more deeply the longer they stay on your website.

Have a look at my own website…

Every page is clearly aligned and easily navigable. Whether it be, the about us page, services page (navigates you to services we offer), office page or contact us page.

And if I want my customers to stay connected with us on social media platforms (bottom-right corner), I provided the links to every social media platform of www.incrementors.com

Talking for a Medical Website, here’s how it looks…

Let me make it easy with an example,

Suppose, patients who are looking for a medical consultancy visit your website, they look for the menu bar to book an appointment with you, and they find it, at last, they easily booked the appointment. 

Outcome? You made a CLIENT! Now, how this happened?

Because your Healthcare SEO-friendly website has a smooth navigational bar, that led to Conversions.

In conclusion, when it comes to retaining visitors, keeping them engaged, and moving them through the conversion funnel, Navigation can make or break your website’s overall performance.

Follow The YMYL Principle

To uplift your overall healthcare SEO strategy, you have to follow this mantra, which is, ‘YMYL’. Now, being a medical SEO healthcare expert, you must be knowing that your sole purpose is to guard the happiness, health, financial stability, and safety of your customers.

This is what YMYL tells, “Your Money or Your Life”.

Medical SEO is categorized to be way up as compared to other businesses’ SEO. 

The answer to this statement is as simple, the standards are high because Google could not rank low-quality pages.

This could be appointed to take into consideration while Google is indexing the pages. Ranking low-quality pages can cause a hazard and consequences for the patients who may land on those pages.

So, to not face such a situation…

The easiest way to accomplish YMYL is to produce engaging as well as high-quality content that is pertinent to medicine. With this, let’s move to the next healthcare SEO step.

Build Listings For Local SEO

If you have an approach for B2C (business-to-customer) then, have you listed your business for Local SEO? If not, don’t worry at all! I will assist you.

See, Local SEO is all about optimizing your website for local search queries. Optimizing for local search queries helps your website rank higher and be more visible to the audience who are searching for you in a specific geographical area.

It includes putting efforts into on-page optimization, SEO-friendly content creation, and link-building practices that enhance your website’s rankings and visibility.

To make the most of it, you can get listed in a few famous directories or citation sites.

Having cited in these directories can really boost your ability to rank higher.

Here are 2 citation sites that you go for…

Yelp.com

and Zocdoc.com

Remember, you have to provide detailed information including the name, address, and phone number (in short NAP) of your medical SEO website, and submit it to the directories.

This would also benefit if anyone asks Google for your business through voice search.

As Local SEO has a direct link to Voice Search Queries.

Read More: Can Citations Be Your Secret Weapon for Local SEO?

Work On The UX Of Your Website

User Experience (UX) is a factor that makes the users decide whether to take your services or jump to any other website which could be your competitor.

One of the major reasons that point towards your medical SEO is the Site Structure.

Site structure is the way you arrange the content on your website. A website typically consists of posts and pages that present content on a variety of related topics. It includes how the content is organized, connected, and presented to visitors.

Here’s what a basic site structure looks like,

This will not just help the users but also the web crawlers to crawl your SEO healthcare website and later, Index the webpages.

For example, if you visit a website to search for a certain medical treatment but you get lost between too many pages, at last, you are not able to find what you came for, and what happens is… you BOUNCE BACK!

This will result in a bad user experience.

Whereas, visiting a site with a good hierarchy and site structure will make you stay engaged and will result in conversions, which could be rendering a service or booking an appointment, or purchasing any medical product.

This is why focusing on users’ experience is vital in healthcare SEO. It means if a patient comes to your website, they should be left with full satisfaction and remedy.

Read More: What Is YMYL And How Does It Affect SEO?

By now we’ve covered more than half of the part, and now let me discuss how you should optimize the URLs.

Use Short URLs

This is an aspect that sometimes remains unnoticed by the experts. It may not seem to be a major issue of concern but the fact is that… IT IS!

While keeping in mind the other aspects, you should also focus on optimizing the URLs of your SEO healthcare website.

Now, you judge, which one is a good URL.

URL-1

URL-2

Which one is easier to read and understand? Obviously the second one! As you have a clear view of what will you find after you click on the link.

With this, steps to make the URL optimized are given below.

• URLs should be easily readable (short, logical)
• Do not use capital letters in the URL
• The target Keyword should be there in the URL
• Don’t use underscores, use hyphens to break the words

Optimizing URLs is a must-do thing. Although it may only seem to contain a little information about where a web page is located, it actually contains a lot more information.

Read More: How To Create An SEO-Friendly URL

Include The Image Of Your Offices And Equipment

Discussing about optimizing with no place for visuals, could not be very generic…

Adding visuals to your content makes it more powerful and attractive. You should include images of staff, offices, medical equipment, and much more to make your content more engaging to visitors.

Straightforward, It is more likely that your users will trust your brand if you include these images. In addition, they’re a fantastic way to boost conversions.

It is very important to have visuals, why? Look at the page below.

Improve The Interlinking Of Your Webpage

Do know why roads are connected to highways? So that the traffic coming to the highways comes to the roads.

Similarly, let’s consider your main website to be the highway and other web pages to be the roads. With linking, you can connect the web pages with the main website page.

And this is what internal linking is. This SEO healthcare practice is done so that visitors can gain more knowledge and spend more time on your website. This increases the chance of conversion and decreases the bounce rates.

For instance, let me show one of my blogs which shows interlinking…

The above image shows how you can choose the right anchor text (blue text) on which internal linking is done.

Also, you can link to other pages within your website or other websites such as your social media profiles. You just have to insert the link to that page in the correct text.

With this, let’s move on to the last step of the process, Successful Healthcare SEO

Use Your GMB Page

When the topic is SEO health care, to improve it, you can take the help of Google My Business Page.

Although it might seem easy, be careful. This page has the power to fundamentally alter how customers perceive your company online, which is also helpful in Local SEO.

And optimizing for it can place you in the “local 3-pack” of Google searches.

The local pack is what includes 3-5 businesses that appear above the organic search results. Let me show you… 

When I search for ‘Medical Stores near me’ and see what I got in the search results, here the primary role is of GMB which ranks your website or business higher when the audience search for related keywords that match your niche.

So, it is as important to follow this step to improve your website’s healthcare SEO.

Read More: Complete Google My Business Guide

Conclusion

So, SEO, as you might know, is a continuous process that goes on and on…

The need to outperform your rivals is non-negotiable in an industry like healthcare. You can’t just rely on paid advertisements or word of mouth.

Do refer to these 10 steps to get the most out of SEO healthcare strategy.

And if have made up your mind to be found by the patients who are literally looking for you, then…

We have got your back! We’ll assist you with the best Healthcare SEO Services to rank your website higher and drive potential patients.

Come, join hands with the incrementors, and let us be a part of your progress.

FAQs

1. Why do Doctors consider digital marketing important?

In order to advertise the unique services of doctors and consultants, digital marketing is crucial. The search terms that patients use to research their symptoms and available treatments can be found by hospitals with the aid of a clever SEO strategy.

By using this information to guide content creation, hospitals can ensure that their consultants appear prominently in search results related to their specialties.

2. How long does medical SEO take to produce results?

Medical SEO takes time to develop, just like any other type of SEO. The idea is to build a stronger online presence than your rivals gradually and over time.

3. How do you draw patients to the healthcare industry?

Optimizing your website is the best way you can drive more potential patients to your website. A well-optimized website tends to rank higher and this is what matters. More rankings drive more traffic.