You want the top of Google’s search results to show your medical website. Explain why. 73 percent of patients search for a health practitioner using search engines, and 89 percent of consumers do so when trying to answer a healthcare SEO question. Should your hospital or treatment center not be among the first three, you are losing patients to your rivals since 55 percent of searches click on one of the first three listings.
➪ What Is Medical SEO?
SEO Services for Healthcare is the practice of raising the search engine results of your medical website so that your doctors and treatment centers may reach more patients seeking your treatments.
➪ Why Invest in Medical SEO?
To be honest, the old approach hasn’t worked for some time. Often using a mobile device, patients search for new hospitals, doctors, and treatment facilities online thanks to the digital expansion of consumer services. Since 55 percent of searchers won’t go past the first three organic results, if you’re not investing in SEO you’re giving away clicks to the competition.
Some doctors think taking out pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Ads is enough. If you’re already pressed for time and lack what you need to produce 1,000 pages of good material, PCV advertising is a terrific approach to demand attention from searchers.
That is not the proper perspective on things. Eliminating PPC ads in favor of SEO is like covering a severe cut with a band-aid. It may solve some problems in the short term, but you’ve got to figure something else out for sustainable results. When it comes down to it, content marketing gets three times the leads per dollar spent than paid search ads.
➪ How to Use Medical SEO to Get Your Healthcare Company to the Top of Google’s Search Results
Some items climb to the top of Google’s search results for a specific purpose. Based on an algorithm meant to offer the most pertinent links and responses to search questions, Google generates search results. While there are more than 200 actual ranking factors that go into the algorithm, in general:
- Your medical website needs to be fast, secure, and mobile-friendly
- You need plenty of pages of quality content optimized for medical SEO
- You need to pick the right medical keywords
- Your web pages need medical schema and optimized title tags and meta descriptions
- You need optimized images and videos
- You need plenty of off-site authority builders like social signals, quality backlinks, and directory citations
- Your Google My Business page needs to be 100% filled out
Below I’ll dive into each one of these in more detail.
➥ YOUR MEDICAL WEBSITE NEEDS TO BE FAST, SECURE, AND MOBILE FRIENDLY
Ranking elements include site performance, security, and mobile friendliness. Most web users will hit the “back” button if your page loads more than three seconds. Google is aware of this; since its objective is to offer the greatest resources, it will not rank a slow website among the top ones.
First, your website needs to be fast. How fast? Google says two seconds is the threshold, but they aim for under half a second. While webpage speed isn’t the most critical ranking factor, it’s up there with security.
Security is a no-brainer. If you’re a healthcare or medical company that doesn’t have a secure (HTTPS) website, you’ve got bigger problems than SEO and I recommend you read this other article right now.
Your website also must be mobile-friendly. See below current web searches for the medical phrases “urgent care near me, “maternity hospital, “primary care physician,” and “allergist.”
➥ YOU NEED QUALITY HEALTHCARE CONTENT OPTIMIZED FOR MEDICAL SEO
Your website must be not only quick, safe, and mobile-friendly but also feature pages of high-quality content suited for SEO.
What qualifies as quality content? Most importantly, quality content is content that genuinely helps make your target audience’s lives easier or better. In layman’s terms, you need content driven by your patients’ wants and needs. Every medical micro-moment—including blogs, landing pages, press releases, e-mail newsletters, e-books, and more—will require optimized content; you will also need a content distribution plan.
➥ YOU NEED TO PICK THE RIGHT INDUSTRY KEYWORDS
To optimize your content for SEO, you need to create content around the right healthcare industry keywords.
Each specialization is different, but considering most patients are looking for local medical services, you can build a basic foundation with the following medical SEO keywords (I’ve used an allergist as an example):
Allergist + your city
Allergists + your county
Allergy specialists + your city
Seasonal allergies + your county
Allergy and asthma center + your city
Asthma treatment + your city
Allergy + doctor + your city
Allergy + treatment + city
➥ YOUR WEBSITE NEEDS MEDICAL SCHEMA AND OPTIMIZED TITLE TAGS AND META DESCRIPTIONS
A major ranking signal is a web page’s title tag. While the meta description used to have more weight, it now spits out automated meta descriptions based on the content. It’s still necessary to fill both sections out.
If you have a WordPress medical website, you can install a plugin to edit your titles and meta descriptions. We recommend you include your keywords in both your title tag and meta description, as well as adding schema for doctors. Schema is a type of website code we add that gives Google more context and information about your page.
➥ YOU NEED OPTIMIZED IMAGES AND HEALTHCARE VIDEOS
One of the most often used methods to consume material nowadays is video marketing. Web sites including videos so often see a 157 percent rise in natural traffic from SERPs. Not only that, but a video by itself is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google than traditional web pages. Take a look at the following search results for the query “what happens during a heart attack”:
The first search results under the knowledge graph are videos. However, for your images to increase your website’s SEO and for videos to rank that well they need to be optimized—39 percent of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load.
➥ YOU NEED TO BUILD OFFSITE AUTHORITY
Did you know that one of Google’s ranking factors is offsite indicators like links back to your website? Google views any type of offsite authority as a badge of approval. These “badges” can be links back to your site, directory listings, and even social media profiles (yes, social media does affect SEO).
➥ YOU NEED A COMPLETED GOOGLE MY BUSINESS (GMB) PAGE
While we’re on the subject of offsite authority, you need a completed Google My Business page. Modern patients want health services that are close to home, and searches containing the phrase “near me” have doubled since 2015. But, for local patients to find you, you need to show up in Google’s local pack. What is the local pack?
The information in Google’s local pack is pulled from a few places, but primarily from your Google My Business page. One of the first things you do immediately after reading this is to check your own GMB listing to make sure the following is filled out:
Your company’s categories (above, you can see it says either “doctor” or “allergist” right under the average review rating. That’s a feature inside GMB, and it helps searchers find specific needs)
- Your main phone number
- Your company’s description
- Your hours of operation
- Your address or service area
- Reviews
➱ The Final Diagnosis:
Einstein is not necessary to understand that the secret to ranking your medical facility or healthcare company highest on Google’s search results is SEO. Still, SEO is not a one-size-fits-all kind of fix. To understand things, you must have a complete diagnosis. That’s why I recommend you start your SEO journey with a digital competitive analysis. It will compare your web presence to the web presence of your top competitors and figure out opportunities you’re missing and where your digital marketing priorities should lie.
You can learn more about medical SEO here, and I can’t wait to help transform your hospital or treatment center into the new industry leader!
