The healthcare industry is quickly transforming to match the pace of technological innovations. This is commonly referred to as digital healthcare, which is defined as the intersection between healthcare and technology. I am sure as a healthcare provider or organization, you have heard of terms and concepts such as telehealth, electronic medical records, wearable devices, and personalized medicine. At the same time, I am certain that you have used Google to confirm a diagnosis, the same way the public consults Dr. Google about their symptoms. This is where healthcare SEO (search engine optimization) comes in.
What is Healthcare SEO?
Understanding healthcare SEO requires a simplified definition of what SEO is to better grasp how it applies to the healthcare domain. Search engine optimization is a collective term that includes a set of practices designed to enhance your appearance and position on web pages.
Practices such as content creation, page types, competitor and keyword research, and customer personas are examples of SEO strategies that make your website and, by extension, your business visible on search engine results pages (SERPs) or web pages.
In the context of healthcare, these strategies also apply. In contemporary society, the internet has become a key source of information for people. When unsure of something or come across it for the first time, the internet is usually their first source of information. The trend is even more common with regard to healthcare, evidenced by the term “Dr. Google”.
The vast majority of people turning to the internet for medical advice gives you, as a healthcare provider or organization, the opportunity to make yourself more visible and reach more users. These users can easily turn into customers, whether they visit your facility physically or come back to your website many times to seek more information, translating to user trust and loyalty.
Healthcare SEO helps you achieve all this. The concept simply concerns providing solutions to problems users have through the internet using the correct SEO strategies. With time, search engine crawlers will get to your content and show it to users, and if they find it valuable, they will trust your website and become loyal. All you have to do is optimize everything that makes up your website, from having a responsive site to providing original and valuable information through blog content.
Benefits of Healthcare SEO
As already mentioned, most, if not all, people first make a stop on the internet to learn more about their symptoms before they seek medical attention. Your website may be one they trust the most to come to, and who knows what steps they may take after that? Some may decide to visit your facility for a physical checkup or treatment. This presents an opportunity for you to grow the number of patients.
Therefore, the core benefit of healthcare SEO is that it is the most effective and affordable way for you to increase your revenue as a healthcare facility by reaching a wider audience that comprises potential customers.
According to a WebFX statistic, 77% of patients use the internet to learn about their symptoms before booking an appointment with their primary care providers or a hospital. Your goal should be to make yourself visible to all these people, get them to trust your organization, and convert them into customers. Healthcare SEO is the surest way to do this. When carried out efficiently, you will rank higher on SERPs, where more patients will likely find you and seek your services.
Therefore, the benefits of healthcare SEO can be summarized as:
- Being ahead of your competitors in solving patient problems and gaining their trust.
- Paying less for ads while still having the prowess to compete with larger healthcare businesses.
- Helping patients find key information.
- Increasing your return on investment by gaining new patients, generating more leads, and increasing sales.
8 Tips to Boost Healthcare SEO
Search engine crawlers look at several factors when determining the content to display on SERPs when users conduct a search. It is also worth mentioning that compared to other industries, search engines use a stricter measuring spoon for healthcare content. I’m sure you understand the risk of harm users can experience if a healthcare provider publishes misleading or inaccurate information. Hence, consider integrating the following strategies when optimizing your website as a healthcare provider.
- Mobile Friendly and Responsive Sites
There is something called bounce rate, which determines how customers engage with your content once they get to your landing pages. It refers to the percentage of users that only view the landing page and leave your website. Many times, this is bad for business because potential customers do not get to see what else you have to offer.
Click here to learn more about bounce rate.
Healthcare SEO requires that you optimize your website to reduce bounce rates and achieve more customer engagement and conversions. More importantly, you have to make your site optimized and friendly for mobile users. Statistics show that 44% of mobile users book appointments after seeking medical information from the internet. As a healthcare provider, you should take advantage of this dynamic by ensuring you have a mobile-responsive website.
Other than the fact that users are more inclined toward their mobile phones to search for medical information on the internet, search engines such as Google also consider mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. Hence, you have all the reasons to optimize your website for mobiles for a good return on investment for your efforts.
- Sitemap
Like the name suggests, a sitemap provides the user with some form of direction concerning what the site is offering, particularly the essential pages of the website. It also adds up to how user-friendly your site is because, without a sitemap, those seeking information will have a hard time navigating your website, resulting in a high bounce rate. Any technical issues in your site will result in a bad user experience, with site navigation playing an essential role. Sitemaps are highly recommended for large websites. However, even small sites will have a lot to benefit from if they include a sitemap to guide users around the website.
- Blog Content/Articles
It is impossible to emphasize enough the significance or the potential impact of helpful and valuable content on healthcare SEO. Articles with meaningful information and the right keywords generate organic traffic by drawing more users to your website.
The best way to use this healthcare SEO tip is to incorporate strategies such as conducting thorough topic research, having a keyword overview, identifying a keyword gap by analyzing the keywords your competitors are using, and leveraging new technology, such as SEO Writing Assistant.
An important factor to note is that search engines have stricter guidelines for healthcare content. As a result, you should regularly update and audit the information you provide in your articles to ensure they are current and accurate based on new medical findings. You are likely to boost organic ranking and site visits, which will easily translate to conversions, guided by available data on the actions people take after getting the information they need.
- Local SEO
For you to make the conversions you need as a healthcare organization, you have to be within the user’s proximity. Therefore, you should include local SEO factors, particularly a Google Places profile, to enable potential patients to find what they need for a specific area faster.
The best way to go about this is to pay attention to service and physician pages on your website. Your website must have key and enough information about office locations, services, and physicians, including their photos, specialities, and education.
You should ask yourself about the kind of information you would want to see before booking an appointment. Many healthcare organizations with websites, for example, display limited information for each doctor. This makes it impossible for potential patients to develop the right amount of trust to seek your services in most cases. Such is the local information you need to include for healthcare SEO.
- Social Media
There is no denying the power of social media in today’s society. Businesses and organizations leverage social media differently to boost their visibility and reach wider audiences with their content, with the objective of converting them into customers. In addition, search engine crawlers also consider social media engagements as one of the ranking factors.
You can post valuable content on your organization’s social media platforms, encourage and ask for patient feedback to act as reviews, and create communities where people with the same health issues engage. These are just but some of the strategies to improve healthcare SEO through social media. Facebook and Twitter social media platforms are believed to have a direct positive impact on your site’s relevance in the eyes of search engine crawlers.
When you integrate the mentioned strategies, combined with that of linking the provided information to your website, you will likely get organic traffic and increase site visits. This is why it is important to also ensure that your site is mobile-friendly for a positive user experience and more engagement.
- Links
Your reputation as a healthcare organization directly influences the success of your healthcare SEO efforts. Ensuring the information you provide is credible is an effective way to increase your reputation. Outbound links are those that redirect users to other websites from which you got certain information that you may have included in your content, such as a fact, statistic, or claim.
For this reason, it is fundamental that you only link to credible websites, an SEO practice that impacts your ranking on SERPs. However, you should avoid including outbound links to competitor websites. I don’t have to tell you what will happen.
On the other hand, internal links are also crucial for your SEO. Internal links help you identify related content in other parts of your website, thereby improving site navigation while reducing bounce rates. You also get to increase page authority that reflected in how search engines discover and understand the structure and content of your website. For search engines, internal links determine the relevance of the website. Hence, you should make your website as relevant as possible.
- Metatags
A key component of healthcare SEO is an accurate description of the content on your site. Metatags or meta descriptions position you to achieve this outcome and, by extension, attain lead acquisition goals. SEO sites such as Semrush even recommend optimizing HTML tags but this will make the article more technical, which can be discouraging. Therefore, we will stick to optimizing metatags.
The best approach to use to optimize meta descriptions is to add keywords in the right places, such as headers, tags, and image descriptions (known as alt tags). Simply put, your URLs, and title tags should be keyword-rich. Metatags are good for your healthcare SEO because they make your site more visible through different elements, such as headings and images.
- Track and Monitor Your Results
It is pointless to incorporate all these tips if you are not going to monitor and evaluate the impact of your efforts, as well as review and adjust accordingly. It would be difficult to determine whether or not you are meeting your target in your healthcare SEO efforts without using the proper mechanisms to track and monitor your results.
SEO audit tools and technologies will come in handy here. Google Analytics is renowned for its ability to track texts and calls back to campaigns, which will help you calculate your ROI and overall performance in boosting your SEO as a healthcare organization. You can also track your daily positions based on keyword ranking on SERPs.
Conclusion
The article provides the most simplified strategies to boost your healthcare SEO. There is a bit of technical jargon but you can always seek the services of a marketing agency to help you optimize your website to make yourself more visible to patients.
Healthcare providers and organizations are critical for society. Hence, it is essential to get everything you are doing right because the impact of small mistakes can be detrimental. Carefully integrating these various strategies will earn you remarkable outcomes, which will not only be good for your business but will also create a ripple effect and positively impact your target users.
