Healthcare & Medical SEO - Things To Keep In Mind

Search engine optimization is an integral part of the marketing process regardless of the business type. However, each industry has its nuances so SEO efforts must cater to the specifics.

Healthcare and medical SEO requires a particular approach to keep the patients well informed and ready to convert. Today, we’ll talk about SEO methods when drafting your marketing campaign for the healthcare industry.

1. Look Deeper In What Your Competition Is Doing

When it comes to the healthcare sector, the competition is immense. Instead of constantly trying to outrun it by coming up with new strategies, you can start by digging deeper into theirs. Look at the medical offices and hospitals, who always end up on the first pages of the search engines.

• What are they doing right?
• What keywords are they using?
• What social media strategies work for them?
• How many social media resources are they taking advantage of?
• What type of content do they feature in their blogs?

Obviously, copying their actions is not a solid SEO strategy. However, learning from their example is vital to your success.

2. Mobile Responsiveness Is The Key

So much has been said about the utter importance of websites’ mobile friendliness. Unfortunately, not all healthcare companies are taking advantage of the advice. Making the website mobile friendly doesn’t just mean making it appear good on the smartphone’s display.

It’s essential to ensure that it has a quick loading time, easy search options, and simple access to the content. If one of your crucial content pieces is packed into a video, placing it on a landing page is a bad idea. It will reduce the loading time, leading to the visitors’ dissatisfaction.

This is especially important for cosmetic surgery marketing efforts. The before and after pictures are great, but they shouldn’t reduce the loading speed. Remember, Google rates the mobile responsiveness of the website to make it high.

3. Original Content Keeps You Ahead

When it comes to healthcare marketing, content is not just the king. It’s the queen and the parliament. Healthcare industry can enjoy an easy game when it comes to bringing their target audience to the website by simply posting the right content.

In the 21st century, when a person gets sick, he or she doesn’t pick up the phone to make an appointment but opens up a browser on the smartphone instead. When such a patient enters the query, your website should have an answer to it.

Providing high-quality, fresh, and original content can improve your healthcare SEO efforts tremendously. It’s up to the SEO experts to search for popular queries. It’s up to the content writer to provide extensive content on the matter.

4. Being Serious About The Content Is Important

While fresh and original content is vital, keeping it severe and useful is highly relevant as well. When it comes to health-related matters, people are likely to follow medical advice on the web rather than make an appointment. By giving such advice, you are taking a particular responsibility.

For healthcare providers, it makes sense to keep the website content limited to extensive descriptive text, rather than advice. Doctor-patients question and answer sessions can be arranged via social media channels as part of other marketing efforts.

5. Social Media Sharing Can Help

Search engines look closely at the social media sharing factor of your website. If your site is shared across different social networks, it’s likely to be indexed higher. By achieving numerous shares, you are showing that the website has important information, which is interesting to many people.

The key to getting as many shares as possible is, again, the content. Making information-filled posts on Facebook is vital to the success of a healthcare SEO campaign. Make the content you add to your website easy to share across social media networks by adding the sharing buttons.

6. Paying Special Attention To Image Descriptions Is Important

Medical websites are an excellent place to share various images. Be it a part of your blog content or services listing, make sure to use high-quality images with the right descriptions.

Google pays attention to how you describe your images. It’s an excellent opportunity to use keywords. For example, if you are using a photo of a broken tooth to show how well you can deal with the problem, describing it as “image1” is out of the question. A solid description is “damaged tooth repair.”

7. Creating Downloadable Content Can Attract Patients

People come to your website to get answers to their questions. It’s an excellent opportunity to get them to share their information in exchange for useful content. Free downloadable content doesn’t just improve your conversion rates and help you set up email lists, it boosts the social media sharing of your website.

Offering free brochures that feature the answers to patients’ questions while containing the right calls to action can be highly useful to your marketing campaign.

8. Local Presence Needs To Be Worked On

Since the healthcare business is based in brick-and-mortar buildings, it’s important to optimize the website for the local search and work on the local presence. More than 70 percent of online activity is related to local queries. The medical business heavily relies on patients, who live nearby.

Working with such services as Google My Business can improve your local presence efforts. You can add a page that features information about your services and contact details. Ranking in local search is highly important to the physical traffic.

You can also take advantage of Moz Local to create business listings where they are appropriate to bring more patients to your office.

Healthcare & Medical SEO: Final Thoughts

Healthcare and medical SEO efforts are often similar to those used for the rest of the industries. However, keeping the above tips in mind can help you cater to the specifics of the business and the target audience.

Paying special attention to the content, local presence, and website structure can help you get to the top pages of the search engines and enjoy higher patient traffic.