Introduction to SEO for Medical Practices
About 7 % of total Google searches are medical-related. Which means about 70,000 searches are about medical concerns. Nowadays, many people look for doctors online. Do you want to expand your domain to get more patients?
This is where SEO for doctors comes into the picture. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. SEO for medical practices is a must to build marketing strategies online.
If you optimize SEO, then your website will attract more patients. Hence, the chances of getting the ideal patients increase. Additionally, such practices instill credibility and build trust in the visitors.
Here, we will discuss everything that you need to know about SEO for doctors.
Keyword Research for Medical Practices
Keyword research helps to find the keywords the patients are typing and searching to find the medical service. Not all keywords will help you find the right patients. There’s a difference between high-intent searches and low-intent searches. High-intent searches lead to conversion. For instance, near me searches, practice or doctor name searches, and so on.
Create a targeted keyword list for medical services. Use tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs. You can combine seed keywords with the brand name, treatments you offer, and your targets to generate keyword lists. Then filter out the low-intent keywords to get the final keyword lists.
On-Page SEO Strategies
On-page SEO for medical practices means devising strategies to make the individual web pages rank higher and garner more relevant visits. Such strategies can be incorporating keywords, optimizing images, using keywords in the subheadings and meta descriptions, including internal links, and so on.
While building on-page SEO strategies, ensure that the keywords used are relevant and specific to medical conditions, treatments, and services that patients search for.
Off-Page SEO Strategies for Medical Practices
Off-page SEO helps to make the web pages more visible online by doing so from outside the website. There are several ways to do so. You can start by putting relevant backlinks from some reputed medical institutions. But you have to build relationships with them.
Other ways are posting blogs on reputed platforms, making a strong social media presence, and putting positive reviews and testimonials on other platforms.
Local SEO for Medical Practices
Let’s talk about the most important SEO for doctors which is local SEO. Local SEO focuses on information about the physical location of the medical professionals. This SEO ensures that your location comes up in the location searches.
After all, the patients rely on the location search results for choosing their doctors. So, optimize Google My Business, and other location-specific searches.
Google offers Google My Business (GMB), an extremely potent tool for your company. As with SEO for doctors, setting up and optimizing your listings in GMB is vital.
Make sure that all of your crucial GMB information is accurate and comprehensive. Double-check all information about your locations, website URL, clinic or hospital name, and other details.
Always add high-quality images of your firm and your team members. Use Google Maps to help people locate you more easily. All of this leads to more customer engagement.
Measuring SEO Success
After you have done all the SEO optimization, you want to measure the success of your work.
Let’s see to measure:
Ranking isn’t the perfect measure
A good ranking is not enough. Even if your page ranks number one, without any traffic your keyword is not worth it.
Measuring traffic is better
Measuring the traffic is a better measure of SEO for doctors because it shows how many potential customers are viewing your medical services.
Leads are better than traffic
Patients merely visiting your website is not enough. You want them to avail your medical services. So, if you measure the leads, you will get to know the optimum searches and locations.
Tools to measure SEO
We recommend using the following tools to measure SEO for medical practices:
- SEMRush
- Ahrefs
- Google Analytics & Google Search Console
- Moz Pro
- Siteliner
How to interpret data and make informed decisions?
You can monitor crucial SEO data with analytics tools, including organic search traffic, keyword ranks, conversion rate, bounce rate, and click-through rate. Monitoring these indicators enables you to gain insight into the functionality of your website and make the required changes to boost exposure and user interaction.
Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Medical Practices
- Don’t use irrelevant or very long keywords
- Ensure that your website has proper architecture to boost user experience
- Your website shouldn’t take too long to load
- Use high-quality, patient-focused, and engaging content for your website
- Your content should be consistent and shouldn’t mismatch
- Make sure your location information is the same everywhere
- Handle your negative reviews with care
Future Trends in Medical SEO
With emerging new technology, SEO for doctors also shifts with new trends. Below are some future trends:
- AI driven world: Content-generating AI tools have transformed how content is created. So, expect the market to be flooded with AI-generated content. Since the amount of content creation no longer works, you should try to keep the quality and originality of the content intact.
- E.E.A.T Model and YMYL guidelines
Use Google’s E.E.A.T Model which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness Model. YMYL (Your money, your life) guidelines are for the topics that could impact someone’s life significantly. It could be related to someone’s life, health, finances, safety, and so on. So, follow the YMYL guidelines to boost quality content.
The healthcare industry heavily relies on trust building and sound information. This model will help you to improve your ranking as well as build trust.
- Rising role of Social media
Social media has started to impact SEO for medical practices, and this trend will rise in the future. So, ensure that you have to be active on social media by putting some engaging content for the patients.
- Need for integrated and compliant tech
You will need a tech stack that is well-integrated and compliant as well to do SEO tracking and analytics for media. At the end of the day, you want to know what drives your patients and how you can gain their trust.
Conclusion
Hope that you have got some insight into SEO for doctors. To mark your digital presence, optimizing SEO is vital. You just need to follow them to reach your potential customers.
You might have noticed that the SEO for medical practices differs from the traditional ones. So, keep a note of these to improve your traffic and convert them into leads.
Or, if you want experts to handle it for you, check out our dedicated page “SEO for doctors“. We take care of it all for you and more. For further information on our SEO solutions, please visit our dedicated SEO service page.
