As the American population continues to increase by 25 million people each decade, the demand for healthcare services is skyrocketing. Factor in an aging population that will require more specialized services, and it’s easy to see why the $4.5 trillion healthcare industry, which accounts for more than 17% of the United States’ GDP is only expected to expand.
To capitalize on this growing field and attract prospective patients, healthcare providers must take an active role in expanding their visibility online via search engine optimization, or SEO.
This piece will equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to successfully implement your own healthcare SEO strategy and maximize your organization’s digital presence to attract potential patients.
What you will learn
- Why healthcare SEO is important for providers of medical services of all types.
- How to identify your audience and create medical content that will lead to clicks.
- The importance of a Google Business profile, local citations and online reviews.
- 3 examples of healthcare businesses that are doing a great job of SEO.
- Deciding whether to hire an SEO agency or perform the work in-house.
What is SEO for Healthcare?
Healthcare SEO, sometimes referred to as medical SEO, is a systematic approach to improving your medical website’s search engine ranking, with the goal of getting more organic traffic and attracting more business.
Broadly speaking, the medical industry covers a range of sub-sectors, including:
- Hospitals and Medical Centers
- Pharmaceuticals
- Medical Device Manufacturers
- Health Insurance Providers
- Biotechnology
- Telehealth and Digital Health Services
- Home Health Care Services
- Mental Health Providers
- Medical Laboratories and Diagnostic Services
Regardless of your healthcare business's specific area, using strong medical SEO strategies will help you improve search engine traffic and increase conversions.
Why is SEO important for healthcare and medical practices?
Healthcare SEO is important because it helps interested users learn about your medical services at a reduced cost to you. Implementing search engine optimization on your medical website can ensure that your content reaches users who may be seeking medical advice that can better their lives.
In an age of smartphones and sites like WebMD, the internet is one of the first places people turn to for information about their health.
In fact, Google receives more than 1 billion health-related queries every day, ranging from basic research into conditions to self-diagnosis to provider locations.
And every year the volume of these health-related searches continues to grow.
To target this traffic, many healthcare industry marketers pump their efforts into Google Ads, with hospitals in particular spending 85% of their budget on paid digital advertising.
This generates a 6.11% clickthrough rate, which while a good rate, does not correlate with the expense.
A better, more cost-effective answer to lead generation may be SEO.
Medical SEO is about providing the answers people are seeking. It’s about convincing potential patients that your solutions and treatments are available to them.
And most importantly, it’s about building connections with patients in need of your services by increasing your digital visibility.
Your best bet as a medical firm is to combine paid advertising and SEO.
Here are 3 additional reasons that an SEO strategy is important for a medical practice.
Your Money or Your Life scrutiny
In SEO, there are pages known as YMYL, which stands for “your money or your life.”
This refers to content that can significantly influence someone’s future health, happiness, safety or financial stability.
Recognizing the importance of YMYL pages and the negative impact misinformation could have on the well-being of others, Google holds them to a higher standard of quality than other pages.
Google's guidelines for its human search evaluators mention this explicitly.
Many healthcare webpages contain information that can influence a viewer’s medical decisions, whether that’s in the form of choosing a treatment provider, medication or medical device.
As such, these pages will fall under YMYL guidelines and require a more nuanced approach than other sites.
Medical advertising restrictions
The healthcare field is overseen by several regulatory bodies, including the FDA, the FTC and various state commissions, which makes it subject to some of the most stringent advertising and marketing restrictions.
Healthcare marketing compliance regulations require extensive measures to ensure accuracy, patient privacy, cultural sensitivity and the overall well-being of web visitors.
Whereas other sites will not be penalized for making unsubstantiated claims, the FDA requires all information on healthcare websites be based on substantial evidence and provide a balance between benefits and risks.
Doctors and other medical practitioners are bound by the physician self-referral law, or Stark law, which prohibits referrals to any healthcare provider with which the doctor or a family member has a financial connection.
This law also limits how doctors and and other healthcare professionals can be used in marketing materials.
SEO therefore becomes an organic way to generate leads for healthcare professionals and companies.
Local searches
Many healthcare providers primarily serve their local community.
Patients prefer doctors and medical specialists who are conveniently located, with the majority of patients opting for providers who are within 9 miles of their location and can be reached in 20 minutes or less.
User preferences for nearby healthcare professionals may also be because of local coverage provided by insurance providers.
For example, a person who lives in Nashville, USA is very unlikely to click on the website of an eye doctor in Albuquerque, regardless of how search engine optimized the New Mexico optician’s website is.
Instead, he or she will be looking for someone in their own neighborhood.
In a 2020 study by Software Advice, 90% of survey respondents acknowledged using online reviews as part of their doctor evaluation process.
This makes the local aspect of SEO extremely important to any healthcare business.
By taking a local-first approach to SEO, you can ensure your healthcare website targets the people in your area who are actively searching for your offering, which, in turn, leads to a stronger chance of landing them as patients.
Successfully implementing and managing a SEO campaign with an emphasis on local search campaign will provide you with numerous benefits as you seek to grow your practice, including increasing your online visibility, improving your credibility and allowing you to more effectively reach sales targets.
Perhaps most importantly, it can help you stand out in a crowded and competitive field.
9 healthcare SEO steps for medical practices
Whether you’re overseeing digital marketing for a giant pharmaceutical corporation, managing a mid-sized clinic or running your own home health services company, medical SEO strategy is similar.
Simple SEO best practices can help your medical website rank higher in Google and other search engines, which will increase your visitors and help you land patients.
Here are 9 SEO tips for medical professionals and companies.
1. Identify how people are searching for you
The most important part of your healthcare SEO strategy is targeting the right people.
Unlike paid advertising, which allows you to target people by area, demographics and a variety of other factors, online search optimization relies on using your content, specifically keywords, to find the right people.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the words and phrases used on your web page. Google relies on keywords, among other factors, to determine what your page is about.
We take note of key signals – from keywords to website freshness
– Google, How Search Works
If your content provides the best answer to a specific search, it will improve its chance of ranking at the top of organic search results. If your keywords do not provide Google with sufficient clues to answer what a searcher is looking for, your page will rank lower.
Get to know your audience
To find the right keywords, you must first know your audience.
Developing a thorough understanding of your audience will help you identify their needs and how they’re searching for you.
A great place to start is with Google Analytics.
A free service that integrates your advertising and analytics, it features a wealth of information you can use to understand users, including the User Attributes report.
- Head to GA4
- In the left panel, select User attributes under User
For example, if you operate a dialysis clinic in Ft. Collins, Colorado, you may notice that a significant number of your visitors are 65 and older and located in the Loveland area.
For instance, our GA4 users report revealed that we have a sizeable number of German readers for a specific page on our website.
This information allows you to generate content that specifically speaks to these searchers and helps them find you.
2. Make a list of seed keywords
Once you have an understanding of who is searching for your site and what they’re looking for, the next step is to develop content.
To do this, create a keyword list.
Based on your experience in the field and the audience information you gathered via analytics, you should compile a list of high level words and phrases commonly associated with your specific offering.
These are your seed keywords, which will serve as a starting point for discovering other keywords.
If you’re running digital marketing for an insulin company, for example, you’ll probably come up with words like
- Insulin types
- Diabetes management
- Insulin pens
- Insulin therapy
- Rapid-acting insulin
You can then use these words to seed even more relevant keywords.
Two simple ways to do this are via Google Autocomplete and Related searches.
Autocomplete are the automatic suggestions appearing as you type into Google's search bar.
They can help you find related words that you didn't think of.
Related searches serve a similar purpose but appear further down the results page.
Once you have a list of keywords, it’s time to choose which ones to target.
You can also use Keyword Surfer, a free Chrome extension, to help you find related keywords.
Enable the extension and you will see a list of keywords when you search in Chrome.
Now that you have a list of keywords that are appropriate for your business, it's time to start writing about them.
But how do you prioritize them and which ones should you write about?
This starts with a content plan.
3. Create a content plan
A content plan is a master document that serves as a strategic roadmap for achieving your SEO goals. It is sometimes called an “editorial calendar” or “content calendar."
Your content plan will detail your topic clusters, which are content hubs around your business's core topics.
You can head to Surfer to automate the creation of a content plan.
- Enter your main keyword and select your target country
- Click Create Keyword Research
Surfer will generate a list of keyword ideas for which you can write articles.
Let's say your seed keyword is cosmetic surgery.
Here are 101 blog topic ideas on cosmetic surgery for your website.
To ensure that you cover important topics comprehensively, you can organize your content plan by content clusters.
Content hubs, also called topic clusters use a main pillar page which is an overview of the topic.
This page links to several supporting pages that go deeper into the topic and are intended for targeted searches.
When combined, these pages together form a cluster. You'll also hear the term "topical map" which as the name suggests, is your content mapped out.
Here's an example of what a content cluster looks like for the topic "dental implants."
Pillar Page: Comprehensive Guide to Dental Implants
- Define what dental implants are and their purpose in dental treatment.
- Briefly introduce the types, benefits, and general procedures involved in getting dental implants.
Supporting Pages
- Types of dental implants
- The dental implant procedure explained
- Dental implant post-surgical care and maintenance
- Cost analysis of dental implants
- Eligibility for dental implants
- Understanding the risks of dental implant surgery
- Advancements in dental implant technology
This approach will help you establish your healthcare site as an authority in the field, which will help improve your rankings.
However, this can be time-consuming and requires some practice.
Surfer's topical map feature can help you segment blog post ideas by their topic cluster so you're not left to identify pillar and supporting pages.
In the example below, you can see that our keywords have been categorized for the topic "facial plastic surgery."
- Facial plastic surgeries is the pillar page
- And the several pages below act as supporting pages.
4. Choose realistic keywords to cover
While you may eventually be able to go after all the words on your list, starting with keywords that you can rank for will lead to faster results.
Prioritize your top keywords by evaluating your list for the following three things:
Keyword difficulty
How much competition is there for this word?
How hard is it going to be to get your site highly ranked for it?
As a rule of thumb, the higher the traffic volume, the greater the difficulty.
Search intent
Does your topic provide answers to users' search queries?
You don't want to choose keywords that appeal to potential customers when people are not yet ready to buy
Local searches
Are the search results dominated by local service provider landing pages?
This can be a local business homepage or a service page instead of an informational blog post.
Business potential
How much will an improved ranking for a keyword move the needle for your business?
A term like “what is rhinoplasty” may generate a lot of traffic for a cosmetic surgeon's office but not convert to new patients.
Ensure that you’re spending time on phrases with the highest potential returns for your business.
For example, "rhinoplasty cost in San Francisco" has more customer potential because the user is actively investigating costs.
Don’t let a high search volume convince you to target a word that isn’t very relevant to your business.
Take a look at the keyword tiles in your content plan inside Surfer.
For instance, you can see that the term "rhinoplasty cost in CT" has
- has local search intent
- a moderate keyword difficulty of 4
- has potential traffic of 122 visits per month.
This is quite obviously a search term with a high potential for a purchase.
5. Write high quality helpful content
If you have useful content that searchers find valuable, you will rank highly.
Conversely, if your copy isn’t very helpful, you probably won’t show up near the top of the search results.
The best performing content from an SEO perspective is that which best matches search intent.
Google has stated in no uncertain terms that its ranking system is “designed to present helpful, reliable information that's primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings.”
In other words, Google is looking to reward the best answer to searcher’s query.
Generally speaking, there are several best practices you should adhere to to achieve good content.
- Be succinct and interesting.
- Deliver something new, whether that’s data, interpretations or opinions.
- Use the vernacular of your intended audience. A web page targeting MDs can use technical terms that won’t resonate with laypeople.
- Write clear headers that explain each section’s content.
- Use lists wherever applicable – these are better for scanning.
- Logically structure your content with only one topic per paragraph.
Using AI content
Content creation can be challenging, particularly for people who don’t enjoy writing or busy medical professionals.
If this is you, artificial intelligence can be helpful to write articles.
Despite rumors to the contrary, Google does not care how content is created, only that it provides value to searchers.
You can use ChatGPT or another AI platform to generate and scale content quickly.
Just bear in mind that these platforms can generate repetitive content, so someone else in your vertical could end up with content very similar to yours.
More importantly, Google punishes websites that misuse AI content generators to write a large amount of content that is not manually reviewed or enhanced.
One workaround is to use AI as a good starting point and then customize it to your unique needs and situation.
Don't reply completely on AI content generators to publish your pages.
Start with an AI draft and improve it with personal insights and experiences so your content provides reader value.
Here's an AI draft we generated in about 20 minutes using Surfer AI.
Evaluate your content
Once you have content created, it’s always a good idea to self-assess it. Google has helpfully provided guidelines to help you optimize your content for quality.
Some of the important things to check in your article are:
- The comprehensiveness and originality of your content.
- Is the content well-researched and presented by an expert?
- Is this content written for real people or search engines?
- Is this the only place this content appears or is an identical or similar copy elsewhere on the web?
6. Showcase authority and expertise in healthcare content
There are two primary acronyms anyone performing SEO for a healthcare practice needs to be aware of
- YMYL, or “your money or your life,” which we discussed earlier
- and E-E-A-T, which is the heart of successful SEO.
We’ll dive deeper back into YMYL in a moment, but first, let’s talk about E-E-A-T.
These letters stand for the four criteria by which Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines score your website: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
While this measure is important for any type of web content, it’s especially important for medical pages where misinformation can have disastrous results.
Thus, most health and wellness pages will be held to the higher YMYL standard that we discussed earlier.
For example, a medical treatment page written by a leading research scientist with experience and related credentials will be considered more reliable than one written by an ordinary content writer.
Web pages that have a low E-E-A-T score run the risk of being red-flagged in Google.
To improve your low E-E-A-T, make sure your content is authored by and attributed to medical experts.
Include author bio pages and bylines that establish credentials wherever they are appropriate.
See how the below article makes it a point to demonstrate its authors' credentials.
Use media features and previous client work to demonstrate your authority and expertise in the area.
Dr. Karen Horton, for example has a page dedicated to showing her public appearances.
You should also regularly revisit your content to update it with the latest medical information and ensure its continuing relevance.
7. Add important keywords to your content
By this point, you should have identified your target audience, developed a content plan and written great, authoritative content.
Now it’s time to optimize your keywords to push you even higher in the search rankings.
In a nutshell, the way Google works, is that when someone enters a search query, a complex algorithm takes a variety of ranking factors into account, including relevancy, site trustworthiness, user location and search history, among other things, to return personalized relevant results.
Keywords play a major role in establishing your site’s relevancy to a particular search.
Keyword optimization is the process of finding and adding the words and phrases into your copy that will drive the right people to your page from search engine results.
This fine-tuning step will help you stand out from the crowd by helping search engines understand the intent and content of your pages.
There are several place you will want to include your main keywords to ensure both readers and search engines understand the content of your page.
Here are the 5 most important places to add relevant keywords,
URLs
Each page of your site should have a primary keyword that is unique to it. This word should be included in the page’s slug to make the page’s content readily apparent.
Title tags
Your page titles tell people and search engines what the page is about. A good page title will encourage clicks by informing searchers about the page’s content. Make sure it includes your keyword.
Header tags
Critical for easy scanning, h1, h2, etc. tags help visitors navigate your page while indicating important keywords to search engines.
Body content
Most importantly, your keyword should be featured prominently and regularly throughout the page’s content, wherever it fits naturally.
It’s important to bear this last bit in mind, as jamming keywords in where they don’t fit can lead to penalties for keyword stuffing.
Alt image tags
Intended to meet ADA compliance needs, alt tags are the bits of copy that display in place of, or when you hover over an image.
These are not necessary, but it is a good SEO practice to use keywords here.
8. Optimize your Google Business Profile
We’ve already discussed how important location is for medical service providers.
Optimizing your Google Business profile will ensure that you’re reaping the full rewards and attracting potential patients within your neighborhood.
A free offering from Google, setting up your Google Business Profile is important for healthcare services because it increases your search visibility, gives you an opportunity to interact with patients and respond to both good and bad reviews, and provides you with local SEO and audience insights.
See how Grace Dental Group prominently lists its contact information and office hours for potential customers to reach out.
They even have a bunch of reviews that can help build trust with newcomers and those considering their business.
Ensure that you fill up your business profile to the maximum. It's the only way for potential customers to learn about your business.
Besides business information, add pictures of your staff and office as well as other customers.
Optimizing your Google Business Profile can also ensure that you show up on Google Maps and in local search results.
9. Build trust with online reviews
When it comes to building customer trust, there’s nothing quite like the power of reviews.
Reviews can quite literally make or break your business, especially in the healthcare field, where trust and promised results are so important.
A 2020 report by Software Advice found 94% of healthcare patients checked online reviews when evaluating providers, with 43% willing to go outside their insurance network for providers with positive online reviews.
Patients use these online testimonials not only when deciding on a provider but also to evaluate their current provider and their options.
Google Reviews is the largest player in healthcare reviews, but numerous other medical review sites, including Healthgrades, RateMDs, and even Yelp, are also factors.
To take advantage of this and build credibility, you should actively solicit reviews from your patients and customers once they're satisfied with your services.
Ideally, only the patients and customers who love you would leave reviews, but there will always be disgruntled people.
The best way to handle these less-than-glowing reviews is to respond to them promptly and professionally.
Explain to the poster that you’re sorry they were unhappy with your services and seek to remedy the situation if possible.
Understand where you fell short of their expectations and if warranted, issue an apology. This shows patients that you care about their feelings and want to make them happy.
10. Boost local citations
Earlier, we discussed the importance of healthcare clinics in appealing to people who live and work nearby. To maximize your regional exposure, you should maximize your local citations.
If you’re not familiar with the term, local citations are any references to your company that includes your contact information.
Also known as your NAP, which stands for name, address and phone number, this is crucial for local SEO.
Google may consider this data when deciding which businesses to show in geo-targeted searches. Therefore, it is extremely important that your NAP information is correct and consistent across all sites to eliminate confusion and poor user experiences.
In addition to your Google Business profile, other important sites for local citations include:
- Other major search engines like Bing Places and Apple Maps.
- Directories and industry-specific review sites like Healthgrades, Vitals. com and WebMD.
- Data aggregators like Infogroup, Localeze and Foursquare.
- Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
- Local directories listing healthcare professionals.
Remember to verify that your NAP is correct and consistent across all your digital properties. Your website is the most authoritative online representation of your practice or business.
Ensure you’ve updated contact information, particularly if you recently moved or expanded into another location.
To find directories to add your healthcare practice, use search operators like the following in Google.
- inurl:directory keyword
- intitle:directory keyword
- inurl:resources keyword
Head to the Google search bar and type the operator in substituting your specific industry or service for “keyword.”
So for example, you'd type in physiotherapist to find directories that list local physiotherapist information in your area.
Or if you’re a podiatrist’s office, you can use “intitle:directory podiatry.”
11. Make your site easy to navigate
Websites that are structured poorly and do not have a logical flow are frustrating for users.
If your site has poor UX, it can lead to higher bounce rates and lower session durations because users will have a difficult time browsing for their needs.
Google notices these signals, which tell it the website isn’t providing good user experiences, which can lower your ranking in search engine results pages.
To make your visitors enjoy using your site, make sure it’s optimized for mobile viewing and has a quick loading speed.
A website that takes too long to pull up content will quickly be abandoned.
Most importantly, make sure your site is easily navigated with a logical flow.
It's a good idea to keep your navigation bar visible with the most common queries that users want to see on your website.
This way, users don't have to visit several pages to find what they're looking for.
Keeping your CTA front and center can also improve your conversions.
Using the strategy of content clusters and pillars discussed earlier makes it easy to visitors to find the information they’re seeking, whether that’s a high-level overview of a medical treatment or a granular dive into the genetic specifics of a condition.
It’s also a good idea to include a breadcrumb trail to help visitors retrace their steps.
Any important information, including your primary offerings, NAP and online appointment scheduling should be easily accessible and not require extensive searching.
3 examples of SEO for healthcare
To help you get a better understanding of what good healthcare SEO looks like, let’s examine a few healthcare organizations that have optimized their healthcare websites for maximum search exposure.
Londent
A London based dentist, Londent offers a complete range of dental services, from routine cleanings to emergency dentistry to periodontics.
One of the first things that jumps out on their website is the prominence of its Google rating, clicking upon which opens up the actual Google reviews the practice has received.
It has a logical structure with pillar pages around important dental topics. Each page includes relevant keywords in the URL, meta tag, page title, and headers.
It also has detailed information about the staff, including bio pages, which helps with E-E-A-T.
Kaizen Physical Therapy
Seattle-based Kaizen Physical Therapy offers specialized treatments to help patients work through rehab or eliminate pain caused by musculoskeletal issues.
Kaizen has taken an excellent approach to ensuring it ranks highly in local search.
From title tags to headers to its Google Business Profile, it has included its location information to show up in local results and attract nearby people.
At the time of this writing, it had 161 reviews, the lowest of which was four stars.
Nearly all of these glowing recommendations were responded to, with the poster thanking them for their input and showing appreciation for the review.
The website is logically structured with increasingly in-depth information as the reader progresses further.
Additionally, it offers helpful information on topics potential patients might be researching, such as neck pain or headaches. Customer testimonials are also featured prominently throughout.
Teladoc
Teladoc Health is an online service that connects people with doctors, therapists, and medical experts from the comfort of their homes via phone or video chat.
They are the number one organic result when searching for “telehealth providers,” which means they’re doing an exceptional job at SEO.
There are several reasons for this, including keyword optimized content on everything from smoking cessation to mental health to general medical information.
The site is well-structured and easy to use, with testimonials strategically placed throughout.
Participating providers are shown with biographical information that establishes their reputation and helps the site’s E-E-A-T.
How long does medical SEO take?
Search engine optimization, regardless of industry, takes time to work. It could be three months before you start seeing results in most cases, but it could potentially take up to six months or longer.
This is because there are a lot of factors that go into determining your ranking, and some things, like high quality backlinks that transfer authority, can take time to generate.
It’s also important to remember that SEO is not a “set it and forget it” process.
Climbing search rankings and, just as importantly, staying there requires consistent effort. This is due to regular updates to search engine algorithms and your competition's SEO efforts.
How much does healthcare SEO cost?
Most businesses spend anywhere from $300 to more than $4000 per month on SEO services. Per hour pricing ranges from $75 to $150, depending on a variety of factors including the SEO expert or agency’s experience and location.
The scope of work can range from simple keyword research and optimization of page titles and meta descriptions to fully integrated campaigns that work seamlessly with other initiatives like paid search and social media management.
Full-service packages with advanced reporting will cost more than a simple website SEO evaluation.
Should you hire a search engine optimization agency for your healthcare practice?
Whether or not you should hire an external SEO agency for your healthcare practice is going to depend on your comfort and ability to perform the tasks that will improve your search ranking.
If you have the time and ability (or willingness to learn) search engine optimization tactics, you can do it at very little cost, except for the labor you perform.
On the other hand, if you do not feel comfortable with technical concepts like editing HTML code, or your marketing department is already pressed for time, you might want to consider bringing in outside help.
A lot of this will also depend on your budget.
Good healthcare SEO services can be costly, but they can also provide great returns, not just in search engine ranking but in website visitors, prospective patients or customers, and increased revenue.
5 tools for healthcare SEO
If you decide to oversee your healthcare SEO efforts in-house, you’ll probably want to enlist the help of one of the platforms designed to streamline the process.
Some of the more prominent SEO tools used in the healthcare industry include:
1. Surfer
Surfer is designed to make the entire SEO process easier for professionals and complete novices. It automatically provides you with relevant keywords, information about their ideal density, and a real-time measure of content optimization as you write.
Surfer acts as an end to end SEO platform that you can use from the ideation and research process, right through to creating AI articles, or writing them yourself.
It also has extensive integrations and suggests improvements based on keyword and search engine data directly from Google.
In addition, members of the Surfer community have access to an extensive knowledge base that contains training material and a community of SEO experts who can answer questions.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console, or GSC as it’s often referred to, is a free tool that provides information about how the search engine giant crawls, indexes, and serves your site.
A GSC account is a must-have for anyone performing SEO, even if you’re using another tool.
It also allows you to see who is linking to your site and disavow spam or any other incoming links that could be hurting your search ranking.
GSC also lets you see which of your pages are the most popular and which queries search engine users are searching for to land on your site.
You’ll also be able to check your site for any issues like bugs, threats and manual actions taken against you.
3. Google Analytics
Another free tool, Google Analytics can be very useful for SEO. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest platform to learn.
However, this shouldn’t dissuade you because there's a ton of freely available learning resources.
Using Google Analytics, or GA, you can get all sorts of helpful insights into your pages, including where visitors are coming from, which pages are generating the most clicks and any 404 error pages visitors are receiving.
This data, in turn, can be used to find opportunities to boost traffic, improve conversion pages, and monitor dips and spikes in organic traffic.
4. Brightlocal
Brightlocal is another platform designed to simplify the SEO process, with an emphasis on local rankings.
In addition to local SEO tools to help you find new opportunities, it includes functionality for tracking listings and finding citations.
This platform also includes tools for optimizing your Google Business Profile and collecting, monitoring and responding to reviews.
A lot of its functionality is directed to helping you improve your site’s ranking within a specific geographical area.
Because local search is so important to the healthcare field, this is a tool worth considering if you plan on doing your own SEO work.
5. Mailerlite
MailerLite offers a suite of email tools to build your email campaigns, automations, landing pages and signup forms to help healthcare providers enhance patient engagement and communication efficiency.
Its automated email system can help you manage appointment reminders, follow-up surveys, and personalized patient care instructions so you stay in touch with patients.
Healthcare providers can user Mailerlite's tools to inform patients about health conditions, treatments, preventive care, and available services.
Unlike enterprise grade email software, the tool is easy to use and can setup email campaigns in a few minutes.
Key Takeaways
- Healthcare SEO will help people find your business, which can lead to more patients, sales and/or revenue.
- Google considers websites in the medical or healthcare field YMYL, which means they are held to a higher standard than other pages where misinformation may be less harmful.
- Healthcare businesses are subject to intense marketing and advertising regulations that strictly limit what can and cannot be said.
- Local search is an important part of attracting new patients and should be prioritized by healthcare providers.
- It’s important to understand how your target users are searching for you online and then create content to appeal to them. Your authority in your area of expertise establishes your credibility and helps you rank higher.
- Use your Google Business Profile and local listings to build trust with your audience by effectively responding to reviews.
- No one likes complicated or broken websites. Make sure yours is intuitive for users and search engine crawlers.
- Do not expect quick results. It takes months before SEO efforts begin to show results.
Conclusion
A solid SEO strategy should be an essential part of any healthcare organization’s marketing plans. Providers, especially, need to be aware of the impact local search has on new patients finding their business and scheduling appointments.
Investing in the right tools and strategies, like those outlined here, can significantly increase your online visibility and traffic, which should translate into more patients.
Start by doing your homework, finding the right keywords, and creating great content. Apply the best practices described here, and you’ll finally start seeing a positive ROI from SEO.
