In the digital age, SEO for healthcare websites is more important than ever.
You want your healthcare website to rank high at the top of Google’s search results? But, wait, why is it essential?
When people look for health information, the foremost place they turn to is search engines like Google, MSN/Bing, or Yahoo. SEO for healthcare is vital to reach these users.
Let’s study some statistics to understand the importance of healthcare SEO better.
- 73% of patients research on search engines when finding a health practitioner.
- 89% of people turn to search engines when they have healthcare queries.
- 55% of searchers only click for one of the first three websites on SERP.
- 70% of healthcare queries are made on mobile devices.
Yes, SEO for doctors is essential in today’s times. Some abundant practitioners offer the same services. Without SEO usage, you do not stand a chance of being noticed online with ample competitors contending for the top spot in search engines.
We live in a digital world where more people are looking for services online, including healthcare services. Nearly 75% of patients are turning to find health-related information and practices to solve their health concerns.
In this blog, you shall read about the SEO strategies you can implement to generate more organic traffic for your website. Thus, you will gain a better understanding related to SEO for healthcare.
What is healthcare SEO?
A process of improving your healthcare website’s search engine rankings so that physicians, doctors, and treatment centers can reach more patients looking for their services.
Incorporate accurate techniques and ignore black hat organic marketing; this will help you to get higher search engine rankings for your healthcare practices.
Black Hat SEO uses clever tricks to get pages at the top of giant search engines, but Google’s algorithms are continually changing. So they have taken measures to eliminate these methods, penalizing healthcare practitioners who attempt them.
Let’s study the central part of the blog. The best SEO for healthcare is a long-term strategy that involves 3 core SEO specific techniques.
1. Techniques for On-Page SEO for Healthcare
Codes, images, and words that create your website is known as your on-site or on-page technical SEO for healthcare. The type of content that you have on your health services website, the loading speed of the site, and your sites’ mobile responsiveness are some of the factors that impact varied aspects of SEO.
-
Select the Right Keywords for healthcare SEO
77% of patients search on Google before booking an appointment. Hence, it’s necessary to select the right keywords from the healthcare industry.
The foremost strategy to improve the SEO for healthcare is selecting the right keywords, leading to increasing the chances of improvement in organic traffic.
Usually, people search for local healthcare services. You can build a primary foundation with the following SEO keywords (taking allergist as an example)
- Allergist + city
- Allergist + country
- Allergy specialist + city
- Allergy + doctor + city
- Seasonal allergy + country
- Allergy + treatment + city
And so on.
Google’s keyword planner is a great keyword planning tool.
-
For a healthcare website, optimize title tags and meta descriptions with medical schema.
The targeted keywords for your niche should be used in your content and be present in the metadata of each of those pages.
Moreover, if you have a WordPress healthcare website, you can install a plugin to edit your titles and meta descriptions.
The metadata includes HTML meta tags that lie between the open and closing head tags in a document’s HTML code. Meta tags help Google know about the page using the title tag, the meta description, and headers.
Title tag: It is present at the top of the browser in the blue-colored text in SERP. Naturally, incorporate the keywords in this 65 characters title tag.
Headers: The header tags will help further instruct the search engines as to what the content of the pages is about. These are added using h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 tags.
Meta description: It’s present below headers, black-colored text of no longer than 150 characters. It described the content.
You can also add schema for doctors; schema is a website code that gives Google more context and information about your page. A few things you can highlight with a schema for healthcare SEO:
- WebPage (a single-topic web page on health)
- Condition (information about a specific condition)
- ScholarlyArticle (a page with a record, abstract, or a full text of a scholarly publication)
- Healthcare Guidelines
-
Have a fast, secure, and mobile-friendly healthcare website
Nearly 70% of healthcare queries are searched on a mobile device. 82% of smartphone owners use a search engine when searching for a local treatment center.
If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, most web visitors will hit the “back” button.
Looking at the data, you must have realized how crucial speed and mobile-responsiveness are for a healthcare website.
How fast should your website be?
Google says 2 seconds is the benchmark, but they aim for under half a second. However, webpage speed isn’t the most critical ranking factor, security is also substantial. If your healthcare website isn’t HTTPS, then you have more significant problems with SEO.
Look at the data below to know more on having a mobile-friendly healthcare website:
With more customers going mobile and searching for hospitals and practices “near me,” this is a vital part of your SEO strategy.
-
Optimized Images and Healthcare videos
Image optimized websites are more likely to attract visitors and increase the website’s ranking on search engines.
39% of visitors will stop leave a website if images won’t load or take too long to load.
Nowadays, video marketing is one of the most favoured ways to consume content. As a result, web pages with videos generally experience a 157% growth in organic traffic from search engine results.
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.
-
Quality healthcare content for healthcare SEO
Quality content is a must!
Content posted that genuinely helps make your target audience’s lives more accessible or better is called quality content. In simple words, you require content driven by patients’ wants, demands, and needs.
Modernizing old healthcare content will help increase the effectiveness of your SEO for healthcare. With efforts, it will boost your overall search engine traffic.
Another reason to focus on high-quality content: Healthcare web pages are what Google calls Your Money Your Life (YMYL) pages.
Google differentiates these pages as the ones that could possibly have a tremendous impact on people. The standards are higher because low-quality pages could be dangerous and have unintended medical consequences.
2. Techniques for Off-Page SEO for Healthcare
One of the ranking factors for Google are offsite indicators. Websites linked to other healthcare-related websites are seen as more important to Google than sites without backlinks.
You would want these backlinks to be relevant as that gives credibility to your web pages.
The following offsite sources you should focus on for backlinks to your healthcare website:
-
Blogs
Blogs and articles are good for SEO for healthcare as they help position your website as a relevant answer to your customers’ health-related questions.
The relevant backlinks from such high-quality content improve SEO performance.
-
Press releases
Press releases serve as a way for your practice to let journalists and major healthcare publications know about big events, such as winning an award or launching a new product or service.
-
Healthcare Directories
Directories are how existing and new patients find your practice and play a role in SEO. Ranking factors include where and how often practices are listed in directories and consistency across those directories–more on that below!
-
Social Media
41% of consumers say that social media content will likely impact their choice of hospital or treatment center.
Most healthcare SEO experts claim that a higher number of likes and follows on social media pages, especially Facebook, increases your site’s relevancy and its opportunity to appear on page 1 of Google.
-
Google My Business (GMB) page
Usually, people search for healthcare facilities near their houses. However, you need to show up in Google my business listing for local patients to find you.
This contains information about your company’s categories, main phone number, company’s description, hours of operation, address or service areas, and reviews.
-
Reputation Management
The average consumer reads 7 reviews before deciding to trust a business. You should try to respond to both negative and positive reviews. However, your responses should and must never disclose a patient’s identity.
3. Techniques for Local SEO for Healthcare
The process of optimizing your site to generate traffic from location-based searching is known as local SEO.
Google Map Pack or carousel is the grouping of similar companies in the map that shows up near the top of the page in a Google search. For instance, when you search for “Allergy specialist” in Boston, it will show a group of healthcare facilities that match the description within a mapped area.
Citations are online references to your healthcare organization’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). Like links to your website, Google and other search engines use these when evaluating your business’s online authority.
Final Thoughts!
As a healthcare professional, how do you strategize to utilize SEO to increase traffic to your website?
There is no rocket science in figuring out that SEO is vital to get your healthcare business to top SERPs. However, to reach the acme of SEO for healthcare, you need to know a complete picture.
Thus, it is recommended to begin your SEO journey with an eminent SEO agency. Our team knows how to compare your web presence to the web presence of your top competitors.
We will figure out the opportunities you are missing and where your digital marketing priorities lie.
So what are you waiting for? The worst thing you can do is wait for one more day. Start implementing your search engine optimization practice now!
Get in touch with us, if you want us to transform your hospital or healthcare treatment center into a new industry leader!
