5 Actionable Healthcare SEO Expert Tips for Providers

July 25th, 2022 by Paula Keller French

Key Insights

• SEO is a critical component of any digital marketing strategy, but it can particularly help healthcare organizations expand their online reach.
• Investing in a strong SEO strategy for your healthcare organization can increase your website traffic, lead to a higher local search volume, and attract new patients.
• To really witness the results of your healthcare practice’s SEO efforts, you’ll need to take actionable steps, such as creating a mobile-friendly site, choosing the right targeted keywords and making efforts to rank locally.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the modern-day digital marketing pillar of an organization’s successful and compelling online presence. Today, countless businesses across industries use SEO efforts to rank higher in search engine results, with goals of driving traffic to their websites and giving their company’s name more word-of-mouth benefits.

Your healthcare organization should be no different.

By implementing robust healthcare SEO strategies, your medical business can expand its online reach, build brand awareness, improve user experience—and attract new, engaged patients. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits of medical SEO and how providers can utilize it effectively in their digital marketing strategy.

What Is Healthcare SEO?

The term healthcare SEO describes a range of search engine optimization strategies that providers and medical facilities use to enhance their online presence and organic reach, which includes strategically selecting keywords to craft high-quality, engaging content. Because search algorithms prioritize surfacing relevant, authoritative pages in order to provide users with an efficient search experience, a successful healthcare SEO strategy can make the difference in how high your pages rank in the search results. And the higher your pages rank, the higher the degree to which curious leads convert into patients.

We believe the myriad of benefits of a comprehensive SEO strategy is the most impactful for providers aiming to become more visible, valuable, and available to their patients.

What Are the Benefits of Healthcare SEO?

The primary goal of a healthcare SEO strategy is to draw more patients to a practice’s web presence, content, and, ultimately, products and services. By enhancing your practice’s brand awareness, healthcare SEO can help you acquire those patients who otherwise would opt for a competing provider—simply because of that provider’s accessibility and presence on the web. At Search Influence, we advocate for strategies that drive higher patient volumes and increase your website’s traffic.

Higher patient volumes

It’s a no-brainer: consumers are more likely to buy a product or pay for a service if they know about a business in the first place. Healthcare SEO helps to bring awareness to prospective patients about certain providers and inform them of the practice’s services, unique qualifications, and products. The more awareness the general public has about a medical facility, the more likely that practice will see new patient numbers rise.

Increase your website’s traffic

More traffic means more visibility, which, in healthcare, attracts new patients.

Improved search results increase website traffic while also organically enhancing a company’s brand identity. When more people visit a company’s website, the chances increase of that business’s name becoming a topic of conversation and users sharing its content across social media platforms.

If you want to be sure you get the maximum value from the targeted healthcare SEO services you’re paying for, be sure your provider gives you access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Actionable Healthcare SEO Tips

You can apply this SEO expert advice and best practices to all businesses, regardless of their specific products, services, or industries. However, with an action plan tailored to your distinct marketing goals, healthcare providers, in particular, can utilize these tried-and-true strategies to drive clinical success. To maximize the potential of your practice’s web presence, we recommend following these five effective and proven healthcare SEO tips:

Choose the correct keywords

Keywords play an essential role in every SEO strategy, no matter if you’re a start-up clinic or a reputable specialty hospital. Choosing the right keywords to target depends on several fundamental insights, such as:

• Knowing your audience and their unique needs
• Researching what potential patients plug into search engines
• Understanding the dynamics of how, when, where, and why people search for healthcare services on the Internet

Using keyword research tools, SEO experts can determine which keywords generate the most traffic, have the least competition, and drive the best results for a practice depending on their specific marketing goals.

Create and update listings to improve local search

When generating results, mobile devices, applications, and search engines often take the geographical location of the searcher into consideration. As a way to increase your reach and competitiveness in your target region, location-based SEO helps your content appear to audiences in a specific area. Without a website adequately optimized for location, your healthcare organization may get lost in the search engine shuffle, with potential patients opting to find services closer to where they live.

Practices can optimize for local search by creating and updating listings on the most important listing websites. Some practice types are more hyper-local than others. For instance, urgent care SEO experts will focus on local listings and presence across the local search ecosystem. Review the local search ecosystem for a dynamic overview of the listing websites.

Create unique, high-quality content for your website

Posting new, engaging content regularly keeps potential clients invested and clicking. Maintain steady traffic streams and provide useful information about your product and services through various content types, such as blog posts, white papers, videos, and podcasts.

Encourage your patients to leave online reviews

Healthcare providers and businesses should encourage patient feedback—especially if the reviews are enthusiastic and positive.

According to data from ReviewTrackers, a staggering 63.6% of consumers report that they prioritize checking Google reviews before visiting a business’s location. Aside from increasing your practice’s credibility, outside patient interaction also helps healthcare websites with search engine rankings. When patients review a company, that business’s online presence is effectively elevated in the search engine algorithms.

Make your website mobile-friendly

Mobile web traffic has gone up more than 200% in the last seven years, indicating that potential patients prefer to use their smartphones over desktop or laptop computers when searching for healthcare services. Poorly built and user-unfriendly websites come across as cold and act as red flags to prospective patients. Healthcare SEO can help your medical business present itself as more relatable while showcasing its professionalism, authority, and trustworthiness.

The Knowledgeable SEO Experts at Search Influence

If you want to increase organic traffic to your medical practice’s website, create engaging and original content, and ultimately draw more potential patients to your healthcare products and services, start with honing in on your healthcare SEO strategies. Search Influence’s team of SEO professionals have been developing SEO strategy for doctors since 2007, and we can help you take your practice’s search engine marketing to the next level and increase your online traffic and engagement.

Ready to attract new patients and improve your online presence? Contact our team today by filling out our online form. We’d love to help you get started.

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