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In business, beating your competitors should be one of the most critical objectives toward success, which is also true in the healthcare industry. As more and more patients search for information online, having a good healthcare SEO strategy has become very important.
These days, looking up anything online brings up a large number of search results, which often leaves the patient confused and frustrated. In most cases, they simply end up choosing one of the first healthcare providers’ websites they see.
If you want to create web pages that will attract a high number of online visitors and rank higher on search engines than other healthcare businesses, then you are in the right place. Read on for some great tips for a better healthcare SEO strategy.
How Can You Benefit From an Improved Healthcare Website SEO Strategy?
Proper healthcare search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to help Google and other search engines to direct potential patients to web pages that promote your healthcare organization, services, or products.
Multiple healthcare studies have shown that searching online has become the preferred way for modern patients to find the healthcare services they need.
While dedicating time and resources to SEO efforts is not common among many medical practices, it will have direct benefits, such as:
- Significantly increasing your patient base
- Your medical practice will show up on local search engine results pages
- Puts you a cut above other medical professionals
- Helps improve brand awareness among potential patients
Tips to Boost Your Medical SEO Strategy
As a healthcare provider trying to rank more than other medical sites, it takes a lot more than just keyword research if you want to perform better on a search engine results page. You can make use of the following tips:
1. You Need a Top-notch Google Business Profile
By having a good online business profile, you not only increase your visibility on search engines, but also provide potential new patients with all the important information that they require, such as products and pricing, business hours, website links, and how to schedule a free consultation.
It is a great way to help users interact with your team members, while you can view user reviews and use direct messaging to answer any questions regarding a reader’s health.
Making your business profile compatible with voice search engines is also another way to improve its accessibility.
You can even use Google My Business to publish any blog posts about your practice regarding special events or promotions that you may be having.
2. Target Local SEO and Organic Search Results
Healthcare SEO is not only about driving more traffic to your website without considering their search intent or whether these visitors are within the target local area of your business.
Focusing on local SEO strategies will increase the number of local citations that your web page receives, meaning that your business, services, products, or address will appear on a lot more local blogs and social media pages.
You will also be able to target the right kind of visitors to your site who are more likely to end up needing your products and services.
Healthcare SEO experts recommend the following websites with high traffic and features relevant to medical practices:
- Yelp
- Healthgrades
- WebMD
- Vitals.com
- RateMD
3. Search Engines Love Google Reviews
There is a reason why Google reviews are an important part of SEO best practices, and that’s because it is the best way to gain credibility for your healthcare business. Patients are more likely to trust reviews coming from other patients rather than from your blog post.
It’s a fact that SEO performance is greatly improved by having a combination of Google reviews and high-quality content.
Moreover, you can also include these reviews in your digital marketing efforts to promote your practice’s products and services.
4. Audit and Fix Your Healthcare Website Errors
While great content quality and modern SEO strategies will ultimately result in your website receiving a lot of organic traffic, your rankings will take a huge hit if your site comes down due to common errors.
Some of the most detrimental types of errors are broken link errors (error 404) and these need to be fixed as soon as possible as part of an improved SEO process. Other errors to keep a look out for include toxic backlinks, duplicate healthcare content problems, forbidden access errors, bad requests, and SSL security certificate errors.
One very useful SEO tool that you can use to scan, fix, or remove broken errors from your website is the Google search console. If you do not know how to do this yourself, then hiring an SEO services provider is the best option.
5. Your Website Visitors (And Search Engines) Like Fast-Loading Websites
Google has been putting a lot of effort into providing a better user experience lately, and one area that they are very keen to improve on is site speed. Google now requires websites to look good and load in less than two seconds, even on mobile devices.
To improve the performance of your healthcare website, you can:
- Use a better hosting plan
- Reduce HTTP requests
- Add only internet-friendly pictures
- Use smaller files
- Minimize the use of external scripts and plug-ins
- Optimize CSS files and javascript
6. Request That Search Engines Crawl Your Web Page After New Updates
Google crawlers are responsible for discovering and scanning websites looking for specific search terms and following any links that are there. Google uses Googlebot to match the search intent of the average consumer to the right search result.
Whenever you make changes on things, such as your healthcare practices, content marketing, or even smaller stuff, such as title tags, you can request a recrawl of your website so that crucial ranking factors are not affected.
Why Healthcare Professionals Need SEO Services
If you want patients to find you, then you need to have the best strategy, and this comes from hiring qualified people to help you with:
- Creation of a Google My Business profile
- Targeting local patients
- Boosting social media activity
- Ranking on search engines
Boost Your Medical SEO Starting Today
A better Healthcare SEO is a crucial step in improving healthcare organizations’ content marketing strategies. When carrying out competitive analysis, one of the most common findings is that businesses that rank higher on a search engine page, generally do have better sales.
Improve your healthcare SEO and give your medical business the best chances of success. For more insights about the latest trends in healthcare SEO, visit the Digitalis Blog.
Get your free local SEO report now and schedule a consultation with our healthcare marketing expert! Visit our website for more information.
