When doctors or healthcare centers are just an online appointment away, people waste no time and turn to the Internet. So whether you are involved in a medical practice or have an ecommerce healthcare store, you must go for Healthcare SEO.
There is no rocket science in the fact that online marketing is tough in the present times, especially when it comes to a sensitive service area like healthcare. It’s not a walk of roses to build a trusted name in the healthcare industry. That’s why where some medical centers are busier, some are not even heard of.
While quality healthcare services are the core factor that can fetch you a credible name in this industry, a little push of SEO will make your work less painstaking. Today we’ll discuss 15 Healthcare SEO Tips that every medical practitioner and online healthcare store owner must be considerate of.
What Is Healthcare SEO?
SEO for the healthcare industry means formulating and implementing such techniques that will make your medical services a recognizable and established name in the industry.
Digital marketing gave rise to tough competition, and search engine optimization helps in gliding through it smoothly. Whether you’ve an online healthcare product site or a brick-and-mortar clinic, Healthcare SEO can take its name a level up. SEO is like a health potion that keeps your business’ online presence intact.
Benefits Of Healthcare SEO
Builds Brand Credibility
SEO techniques can drive a massive upgrade to your medical practice site’s or medical ecommerce site’s ranking factors. It fosters your online presence and reputation so that you can build a trustworthy identity in the healthcare industry.
Attracts More Web Traffic
One of the key benefits of healthcare SEO is that it makes your prospects aware of your medical services/products to help you rake in quality traffic for your business. Such web traffic will have higher chances of converting into leads.
Boosts Organic Results
SEO generates over-the-top organic results for businesses. While heavy amounts have to be invested in top-class medical equipments and services, SEO will assist you in managing your budget with organic results.
Healthcare SEO Tips For Medical Practitioners & Online Healthcare Store Owners
Whether you’re just starting with medical SEO or looking for tactics to upturn your healthcare SEO journey, these 15 tips will surely assist you. So ready for SEO diagnostics of your site? Let’s start.
1. Get A Mobile Friendly Website
Yes, it’s not just about getting a functional website but a mobile-friendly website. A mobile-friendly website is the first requirement of any medical practitioner or healthcare product seller who wants to get online prospects. It is imperative because as per Statista, 50% of website traffic accounts for mobile users over a few past consecutive years. So here is your prescription for a mobile-friendly website SEO:
Optimized Page Loading Speed- Remember your patients won’t like to wait for more than 2 seconds to see your website. That’s why you need to make it fast. The overall user experience of your practice site must be hindrance-free with easy navigation.
Functional Call To Action (CTA) Tabs- As soon as your prospective patients are confident about your services, they would like to reach out to you directly from your site. Whether for making a call or messaging, you must have functional CTAs that are displayed best to your target audience while on site.
Optimize Page View For Mobile Devices & Desktop- One of the potential reasons that can make you lose your prospects is not optimizing page views for different devices. Your website’s page view must be adaptable to any device be it a desktop, smartphone, tablet, iPad or iPhone.
2. Maintain A Healthy GBP
Over 92% of people turn to Google for searching anything over the internet. That’s why maintaining a Google Business Profile (GBP) Listing becomes a key to driving potential prospects to your clinic. In fact, GBP Listings have increased the probability of generating leads by 50 percent for businesses even without a website. Now that’s intriguing, isn’t it?
Your Google Business Profile is a one-stop place to inform people about-
GBP Listing will give information about what medical practice you serve or which products you sell, where is your medical clinic/shop and when can people avail them. This tip will enhance Local SEO for doctors and will attract over-the-top organic results for them.
3. Search For Healthcare SEO Keywords
Targeting the right keywords is quite important for healthcare SEO. This is so because your audience is not much aware of the technical terms of your professional line. Moreover, search engines favor results that have fostered their content for the actual search intent of users. This makes it important to research the keywords that your audience is using and understands well. For instance, if you’re an Orthodontics Surgeon, then, you can also include the following keywords in your content-
- Maxillofacial Surgeon
- Facial Lacerations
- Intra-oral Lacerations
- Facial Injuries
- Fractured Facial Bones, etc.
Now the question is how you’ll discover such keywords that speak about your audience semantics. Well, there are a plethora of keyword research tools available online. Plus to that, Google Related Searches and People Also Search For Queries can help you a lot for this purpose. The main objective of optimum keyword targeting is to answer what users actually want to know about.
4. Maintain A Health Blog Section on Your Website
A blog section is as essential for a website as Vitamin D for bones. Yes, it makes your healthcare SEO Strategy strong.
It gives you the most discoverability and fosters your SEO Strategy quite well. How? Firstly, every prospect of yours can face one or more syndromes of a similar disease.
Secondly, the age factor too can result in different health conditions. Then, if you’re a medical clinic that offers multi-specialty medical services, your prospects’ health problems will be as distinct as day and night. So, you must maintain a blog section on your website to expand your reach to different audiences.
If you still think a blog section is not that important for healthcare SEO, then think about how you will answer the queries of different prospects on just your homepage. That’s why blogs are the optimum way to generate web traffic, expand your reach, attract new prospects, maintain an authoritative reputation, and leverage your ROI.
5. Provide YMYL & Double EAT Appropriate Content
If you maintain a professional medical practice website, it has to be given a boost of quality content. For one thing, your content must be helpful to people. Plus to that, it has to follow YMYL and E-E-A-T Content Criteria. Let’s break it down.
‘Your Money, Your Life’ (YMYL) is the benchmark criteria set up by Google to evaluate the content type. In simple words, YMYL differentiates the content type that has the power to affect well-being, happiness, health, financial stability, and safety of a person. Since healthcare content falls into this category, maintaining E-E-A-T criteria for such content becomes imperative.
E-E-A-T (Double EAT) is the acronym for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google’s Quality Raters (manual reviewers) evaluate the information and its source for these factors. This means your healthcare SEO content must have these three qualities-
Experience: Experience was made a part of the former EAT principle by Google in December 2022. Whether it is healthcare informational content or a product or service review. Google demands that it comes from those who’ve actually experienced them. This can be an honest review of your patients about your practice. It is demonstrated by genuine reviews.
Expertise: The Main Content (MC) must showcase Expertise in the topic. This means the Main Content must be provided by someone who has qualifications and/or hands-on experience on the topic being talked about or has real-life experience related to providing accurate information. For instance, a pediatrician providing insights on child nutrition or a person sharing the coping experience with diabetes of their own or a known one’s. Such content will score a point from Google as they stand in line with its standard and specific criteria.
Authoritativeness: This factor relates to the credibility and image of the information provider in the industry. The term information provider has a broader meaning here because it includes the publisher, author, and review expert. Healthcare information falls under the category of YMYL. Such information has to be passed from several benchmarks. If it happens, then your content establishes your medical services or medical products as a credible name in the industry and people find your information as a reliable source. This gives you a thought leadership authority in the healthcare niche.
Trustworthiness: The above three factors collectively contribute to the trustworthiness of the information and source. But, Google Quality Raters also looks beyond the Main Content. Trustworthiness incorporates a site’s credibility based on its content quality, authoritativeness, citations, and links. For instance, talking of healthcare SEO, if you book online appointments or sell healthcare products, then the payment link must be secure to not hamper an individual’s sensitive details and records.
When these three factors are optimized, chances of your medical practice or products being discovered on Google escalate. Not just that, you also enjoy a distinctive and reliable reputation in your healthcare niche. To know more about Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines, click here.
6. Use Easy Language
Language barriers can dwindle your healthcare SEO effectiveness and ROI. If your prospects can’t understand the information you’re providing, there is no point in struggling hard to improve SEO strategy for doctors. Since healthcare terminologies are usually complex for people, the focus must be laid on how to make people understand the discussion around them easily. Otherwise, you’ll lose your prospects.
7. Acquire Genuine Links
Link building is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO for doctors. It not only elevates the chances of getting found but also establishes a credible image, which is very much needed in the medical line.
When we talk of healthcare SEO link building strategies, it is more than guest post submissions. You must answer your audiences’ queries on platforms like Quora to build a credible image and occasionally talk about your products/services there.
As a medical practitioner, you can acquire links through online publications, working with healthcare NGOs, educational forums, etc.
8. Ask Your Patients For Reviews & Ratings
The main objective of healthcare SEO is to publicize your medical services and/or products and generate higher ROI. Reviews affect the decision of 60% of online APAC searchers about a product or service. That’s why you must ensure building NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) listing over relevant local and prominent review sites.
If you provide quality healthcare services/products at reasonable fees, and prices, your patients will get motivated to leave positive reviews for that. This will enhance the online reputation of your medical services and products and that is a big deal.
9. Put Products Under Right Categories
For those who deal in ecommerce medical products and medicines, categorization is of utmost importance for boosting their healthcare SEO Strategy. As per a recent finding of WooCommerce, 75% of people don’t spend over 15 seconds on a site if they don’t find the product they are looking for. This shows the importance of product categorization. When it comes to the medical line, you can expect enormous web traffic if you’ve done the categorization correctly.
Your audience must be able to navigate easily on your website whether they are looking for skincare products, baby products, asthma medicines, or back support belts. Right product categorization will make navigation as easy as ABC for your prospects.
10. Optimization of Your Images/Videos
Whether you deal in medical services or products, you must not neglect image or video optimization. Let’s say you run a dental clinic, then as a part of your dental SEO Strategy, you must provide inside images of your clinic, staff, and equipments on your Google Business Profile Page, website, blogs and social handles. You can also provide a small virtual tour of your clinic, sanitization and healthcare facilities. Remember that you don’t just want to incorporate images/videos but you need to optimize them with Alt Text (keyword-enriched text) that helps search engines discover and rank them.
Not to even mention that healthcare ecommerce stores need to take their product image/video optimization even more seriously.
11. Maintain A Location Page
In case you’ve branches in several cities or your hospital serves in different localities or countries, a location page can level up your healthcare SEO Strategy. Many renowned medical centers maintain a separate location page on their site for different addresses. This page enlists your clinic/store/hospital address, region, email ID, and contact information. This makes it easy for your prospects to connect with the center/clinic nearby them.
12. Maintain A Separate Page For Every Medical Specialization
If you run a multi-specialty hospital, then one of the effective healthcare SEO techniques you can implement is creating a different service page for each specialization. It’ll help people discover the services they are looking for. And of course, search engines are always concerned about user experience. When you make their search experience easy and smooth, your medical SEO Strategy works efficiently.
13. Leverage Schema Markup
Schema Markup can help you influence your medical SEO Strategy to a whole another extent. It helps search engines in comprehending your site structure and content relevancy which ultimately escalates the chances of its indexation. Schema makeup and rich snippets also highlight your USPs be it about your medical practice, product, or information.
14. Optimize Your Results For Voice SEO
Voice search optimization is quite imperative in healthcare SEO. Over 20% of mobile searches are performed by voice search techniques. And a medical service can arise at any time which is why people tend to use voice search in case of emergencies. This indicates that as a healthcare professional, you can’t afford to ignore Voice SEO.
15. Give Your SEO Strategy A Social Media Dose
Social Media Optimization must not be ignored by healthcare professionals. In fact, a major part of web traffic and potential prospects can be acquired from social media.
So you need to maintain a well-organized healthcare professional profile on social media sites to name a few- Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. Not just a well-optimized account but you must maintain a well-organized content calendar for regularly engaging with your audience over these platforms.
Today people are more conscious about their health and prioritize it with utmost care. If your healthcare services/products have the quality they are looking for, healthcare SEO can help you discover quality prospects. The above-mentioned 15 medical SEO tips will generate higher ROI for you without costing an arm and a leg.
Mind Mingles Healthcare SEO Services Will Elevate Your ROI
So your site is not properly functioning, right? You think it is not attracting as much traffic and leads as it was once.
Well, your website just needs some SEO pills and we understand that you’re pretty busy to handle this all completely by yourself. We’re SEO professionals, who look after the online well-being of your site and its elements. In fact, we also provide complete SEO Packages to keep your business’s online health intact.
Mind Mingles is a professional Healthcare SEO services provider agency with over eight years of experience in handling on-page, off-page and technical SEO aspects including site auditing, keyword research, content creation and marketing, sitemap creation, and social and search promotions as well. Get in touch with us now to revamp your Medical SEO Strategy effectively.
Gurleen Kaur is a Content Writer at Mind Mingles. She has presented her work in International Conference On Guru Nanak Dev Ji: Life, Philosophy and Legacy held at Mata Sundri College For Women and was awarded by the title of “Best Paper Presenter” under College Student Category for the same (Dated: 27th and 28th September, 2019) Has a strong grip over creating interesting, unique and informative content pieces for a wide range of niches. Firm believer that words have an impact.
