A successful healthcare system, hospital, practice, or medical organization website makes it easy to communicate with patients and helps you get more patients.
However, this only matters if you have a functional website where your patients can find you and gather more information about your services. Many successful healthcare organizations provide the best services, but are they easy to find on search engines?
Probably NO.
The biggest challenge these organizations face is that their website doesn’t rank on the top of the search engine result pages. To get on top of the SERPs for an organic search, you need a strong healthcare marketing SEO company, a solid website, an even stronger medical SEO strategy, and a tactical SEO team.
A solid healthcare SEO strategy requires time, money, or both to get your website on the first page of search engine results.
Healthcare SEO services can be very demanding, requiring a lot of effort by a healthcare-specific SEO agency.
Bringing your business to the top of the result pages requires proper techniques. Black hat organic marketing differs from black hat SEO techniques, which use trickery to get pages to the top of Google and other major search engines, which you should avoid at all costs.
This is a problem because Google's algorithms change constantly. Google has deployed techniques to defeat these black-hat SEO methods and punish websites that try implementing them.
If an SEO "organic marketing professional" ever promises "quick results" that seem too good to be true, you can hang on if they have a plan based on the metrics.
The best healthcare SEO is a long-term strategy involving three core SEO-specific techniques.
On-site or on-page technical healthcare SEO refers to the code, images, and words that make up your website. This includes the type of content you have on your health services website, how fast it loads (e.g., page load speed), and its mobile responsiveness. There are a variety of healthcare SEO services that impact your site performance.
Internal linking, good site architecture, and "siloing" are key to receiving a higher organic page rank on more of your desired keywords and phrases.
Siloing is an SEO technique where you group and interlink content about some topic. This creates "silos" or sections on your website that help you and search engines navigate easily.
Siloing also aids in better crawling, indexing, and ranking by search engines.
Healthcare is a highly competitive market. Knowing what words or phrases your target audience will search for (and their search intent) is a step towards winning a high organic page rank for your website.
Once you know the words and phrases your audience commonly uses, you can develop an effective content marketing strategy and produce content based on your findings.
Content is always the king in SEO. Now that you’ve researched the relevant keywords and phrases your target audience favors, you can create a siloed content strategy based on that data and research. This helps users and search engines better understand your content's structure and where to find it.
These HTML (coding) elements appear on your site's backend and specify the titles of your web pages. The titles are displayed on SERPs as clickable headlines for a given search result.
Page titles must accurately describe your page and include relevant keywords and phrases to help Google understand your content and rank your page.
Meta descriptions appear beneath the title tags in SERPs and summarize the web page’s content. These description tags are essential to the SEO puzzle because search engines use them to determine whether the content is on topic and relevant to the user's search intent.
Here are a few key factors to keep in mind when writing meta descriptions:
Like the title and meta description tags, keyword tags are found in a webpage’s HTML source code and aren’t visible to online visitors but to search engines. Your keywords determine what you want to be found for in SERPs.
Meta keywords give search engines additional information about your site’s content, allowing them to show the website in the appropriate search results.
Site speed, also called page speed, measures how fast your web pages load. This information helps Google determine where your page will appear in SERPs.
Google’s recommended page load speed is under two seconds—and they reward fast-loading sites over slower ones.
Your healthcare website SEO content should be highly mobile-friendly. With more customers going mobile and searching for hospitals and practices “near me,” this is vital to your SEO strategy.
H1 and H2 are HTML attributes in your site's source code. These header tags help search engines' algorithms understand the structure of your web page.
But they're also headings for your readers. Like the title of an article and subheadings throughout the post, header tags break up content blocks. It creates scannable text that helps readers instantly locate the information they need most.
Here are a few best practices:
Bold, Italic
Google bots love bold and italic formats since they draw attention to the most relevant and essential text.
Similarly, bold and italics enhance the readability of a web page so that readers can quickly scan it and get an idea of its central point.
However, too much bold or italic formatting on a webpage carries several negative impacts on both user experience and SEO performance, such as
Too much bold and italic formatting may penalize or even ban your website from search engines because it presents keyword stuffing, a black-hat SEO technique for manipulating search results.
Footer
How you optimize the footer menu of your website further identifies your site's relevance on SERPs.
For instance, placing internal links in strategic locations will enhance your user experience and help your internal linking strategy, while external links might harm your SEO.
XML Sitemaps
XML stands for extensible markup language and is related to HTML in context.
An XML sitemap is a file that lists the website's essential pages and invites search engines to crawl the URLs. It is highly recommended for large sites with frequently changing URLs.
In addition to having an XML sitemap in your site's source code, a visible sitemap—one that your visitors can see—is vital for strong SEO practices.
Changing Content
Google has more stringent requirements for the healthcare industry. Your health and medical SEO content must be reviewed and updated constantly to reflect the latest information.
Refreshing old content ensures that your website is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant. It also helps increase the effectiveness of your healthcare SEO efforts, boost search engine traffic, increase site visits, and improve conversions.
Grow Your Practice with SEO – Start Now!
Google views websites connected to other relevant healthcare-related sites as "more important" than sites that do not possess any of these backlinks.
Healthcare companies prefer highly relevant backlinks as they endow their web pages with credibility and authority when ranking high on the SERPs.
Look for backlinks that point toward your website from the following "off-site" sources:
Press releases are a fantastic means of letting journalists and top health publications know about significant events in your organization (such as winning an award or launching a new product or service).
They are also an effective link-building technique for driving referral traffic. How? When an online news site republishes your original press release, a new SEO backlink to your website is created, extending your reach and authority further.
Local directories support existing and new patients seeking your health business. They are also of significant importance to health companies. Ranking factors include whether and how often business and organization names appear within directories and accurate, consistent data across those directories (including location, hours of operation, etc.).
Be creative, and you can contact many reputable directories.
Blog content and online articles help hospitals and healthcare organizations by positioning their websites as relevant answers to customers' questions.
There is some debate about the extent to which social media impacts hospital SEO. Most healthcare SEO experts agree that the more likes and follows on your social media pages, especially Facebook, the more relevant your site is and the greater its chance of showing up on page #1 of Google.
Research says the average consumer reads seven reviews before trusting a business. You should try responding to negative and positive reviews, but avoid HIPAA compliance violations. Your responses must never disclose a patient's identity.
Local SEO is local search: optimizing your site to generate traffic from location-based searching. When you work with our Healthcare healthcare SEO experts, you'll learn about the Google Local Pack, also called a carousel.
This group of similar businesses will show near the top of Google's search page. For instance, if someone searched for "Women's Health in Los Angeles, CA," they would be shown a group of businesses that match that description within a mapped area.
Citations are online references to your healthcare organization's name, address, and phone number (NAP). Like a backlink to your website, Google and other search engines use citations when assessing the online authority of your business.
As mentioned above, we need to be precise and consistent with directories. In other words, having similar listings will not work, as they confuse search engines. For example, if our company is listed under "Healthcare Success" in many directories, we shouldn't list it as "Healthcare Success Strategies, LLC" in the others.
If you need to know what you're listed as or if there needs to be more consistency, many online tools can help update them for little cost.
Some of the more popular health-related content directories are:
Do you believe the most trusted consumer rating websites are Google Business Profile, Facebook, and Yelp? As part of your reputation management, you must keep a pulse on what's being said about your healthcare organization on these sites and respond accordingly. Other consumer rating websites include:
BBB.org
ZocDoc
One way Google can determine your webpage's objective is by using keywords for SEO. Hence, based on what specialization you or your office/hospital holds, that would determine what keywords you will use to spread within your content.
For example, suppose your medical healthcare is for seniors only. In that case, you can input keywords such as "senior care in [city name]," "medical care for seniors in [city name]," or other general terms to attract people seeking care for their parents or loved ones.
Even for a 25+ year-old business, the right time to begin implementing these healthcare SEO strategies is NOW. Though it takes more time for an SEO action to result, you'll immediately notice more inbound phone calls and form submissions filling your inboxes, putting your business into high readiness regarding increased volume.
The short answer is absolutely YES. One of the beauties of search engine optimization is that it is incredibly specialized and locally driven. You can tailor your site copy and keywords to specific areas, which helps each of your locations rank better locally.
Performing an in-depth analysis of your competitors is a fantastic way to help craft your SEO strategy. Even a search on Google to see where your competitors are ranking can help you get additional ideas of what you can do better. Here at Janbask Digital, we utilize tools to conduct in-depth competitor analysis.
Healthcare providers need effective SEO tactics to boost their online presence and attract more patients. Understanding healthcare challenges and opportunities is vital to creating focused content, mobile-friendly websites, improving UI/UX design, and seamless navigation for your end users. Once you understand your specific challenges and competitors, several tools will help you with keyword targeting, creating backlinks, and providing insights into high-performing blog titles to reach your end-users efficiently.
While SEO is an ongoing process that demands time and resources, the long-term benefits of better visibility, trust, and new patient acquisition make it worth it for healthcare providers who want to thrive in today's digital age. In fact, by staying up-to-date with current SEO trends and best practices, healthcare providers can set themselves up for tremendous success and better meet their patients' needs.
Interested in our Healthcare SEO Services?
A Specialized Team for custom web solutions for your business through Web Design, Web Development, Digital Marketing Services such as SEO, Social Media Marketing.
L
I never thought I could get good reach with such easy steps.
A
Nice strategies.
J
Healthcare segments benefit greatly with SEO. I second this.
J
You have explained it very well.
J
Thanks for sharing this article. I learnt a lot from it.
J
As a digital marketer, I have personally implemented these strategies for a client.
t
This blog has explained it so well. A lot of people will learn from it.
R
I love how your blog breaks down the writing process into manageable steps.