Medical SEO

You want your medical website to appear at the top of Google search results. Why? Because 73% of patients use search engines when looking for health practitioners, and 89% of consumers use search engines when looking for solutions to healthcare problems. Since 55% of searchers click on one of the top three entries, your competitors lose patients. Likewise, your competitors will lose patients if your hospital or treatment center is not in the top three.

What is Medical SEO?

Medical SEO is improving the search engine ranking of your medical website so that your doctors and treatment centers can reach more patients seeking their services.

Why Invest in Medical SEO?

For a time, the old way of doing things did not work. However, due to the digitalization of consumer services, patients often find new hospitals, doctors, and treatment centers online via mobile devices. Since 55% of searchers don't exceed the top three organic search results, you lose traffic to your competitors if you don't invest in SEO.

Some doctors believe that getting rid of pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Ads is enough. However, if you're already time-constrained and don't have what it takes to create 1,000 pages of rich content, PPC ads are a great way to grab the searcher's attention.

That is the incorrect perspective. Getting rid of PPC ads instead of SEO is like putting a Band-Aid on a deep wound. It may temporarily resolve some issues, but you'll have to develop other ways to get sustainable results.

How to Use Medical SEO to Bring Your Healthcare Company to the Top of Google Search Results

Something appears at the top of Google search results for a reason. Google's search results are generated using an algorithm that prioritizes the most relevant links and responses to search queries. While the algorithm contains over 200 actual ranking factors, in general:

1. Your medical website must be quick, secure, and user-friendly on mobile devices

2. You'll require a large number of high-quality content pages optimized for medical SEO

3. You must select the appropriate medical keywords

4. Your web pages must include a medical schema, optimized title tags, and meta descriptions.

5. You need optimized images and videos

6. Offsite authority builders such as social signals, high-quality backlinks, and directory citations are required.

7. Your Google My Business profile must be fully operational.

Site speed, security, and mobile-friendliness contribute to a site's ranking. For instance, if it takes more than three seconds for your website to load, most web users will click the "back" button. Google is aware of this, and because its goal is to provide the best resource possible, they do not prioritize slow sites.

To begin, your website must be lightning fast. How quickly? Google states that the threshold is two seconds, but they aim for less than a half-second. While page speed is not the most critical ranking factor, it is related to security.

If you are a healthcare or medical company without a secure (HTTPS) website, you have bigger problems than SEO, and I suggest you read another article right away.

Your website also needs to be mobile-friendly.

More than 70% of those searches happen on mobile devices

Not only that, 62% of smartphone users use their devices to find health information, and 82% of smartphone users search to find a treatment center or medical facility in their area. According to Google, 77% of smartphone users have used their smartphone to find local medical services in the past six months, and 79% of them said they would be more likely to revisit and/or share a mobile site if it was easy to use the site.

You require high-quality healthcare content that has been optimized for medical SEO

Your website must be fast, secure, and responsive to mobile devices, but it also needs to place pages on high-quality content pages optimized for SEO.

What counts as premium content? Most importantly, premium content is content that helps make the life of your target audience easier. Therefore, you need to optimize content for each consumer's medical micro-moments (including blogs, landing pages, newsletters, email newsletters, eBooks, etc.), and you need a content distribution plan.

Here's Google's definition of quality content as outlined in its Search Quality Guidelines:

The fundamental principle

• Develop pages with the user, not the search engine, in mind.

• Don't trick your users.

• Consider what distinguishes your website as unique, valuable, or engaging. Then, make your healthcare website design stand out from the competition in your industry.

Specific Directions

Avoid the following techniques:

• content generated automatically

• Participate in the Link Program

• Create pages that contain little or no unique content

• Disguise

• Slippery redirect

• Hidden text or links

• Entrance page

• Plagiarized content

• Participating in an affiliate program without adding enough value

• Load pages with irrelevant keywords

• Create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other malware

• Abusing rich snippets tags

• Send automated queries to Google.

• Monitor your website for hacking attempts and immediately remove any hacked content that appears

• Prevent and delete user-generated spam on your website

You have one additional reason to focus on super-quality content: Medical pages are what Google calls your money your life (YMYL) pages. Google classifies these pages as those that "may affect a user's future well-being, health or financial stability." The bar is higher for you because low-quality pages can be dangerous and have unintended medical consequences.

1. You need to choose the right industry keywords.

To optimize your content for SEO, you must create content that is relevant to the healthcare industry.

Each specialty is unique, but given that the majority of patients are searching for local medical services, you can start with the following medical SEO keywords (I'll use an allergist as an example):

• Your City + Allergist

• Your County + Allergist

• Your City + Specialist in Allergies

• Allergies Seasonal + Your County

• Your City + Allergy and Asthma Center

• Treatment for Asthma + Your City

• allergy + doctor + your city

• Allergy + Treatment + City

However, keywords vary based on your specific practice. A great keyword planner tool is Google's Keyword Planner. Here are the Keyword Planner recommendations for four types of medical specialties/facilities: "hospital," "primary care physician," "cardiologist," and "allergist," along with the average monthly search volume for that term:

A big no-no is keyword stuffing (making every other word a keyword). Google will catch on, and you will be punished.

Your website needs medical mode and optimized title tags and meta descriptions

A major ranking signal is the title tag of a web page. While meta descriptions used to have more weight, it automatically generates meta descriptions based on content. Both sections still need to be filled out.

If your work on a WordPress medical website, you can edit the title and meta description using a plugin. We use SEO

We recommend that you include keywords in title tags and meta descriptions and add patterns for doctors. A schema is a type of site code we add to give Google more context and information about your page.

While simply using schema markup on your site doesn't mean your site will automatically get to the top of Google, it makes it easier for search engines to interpret, making it more likely to be included in search results.

Here are some things you can highlight using schemas:

• Medical Requirements (information about specific medical conditions)

• Drugs (knowledge about medical drugs)

• Medical Guideline

• Medical Web Page (single-topic web pages on health or medical topics)

• Medical Scholarly Article (pages containing records, abstracts, or full text of medical academic publications).

You'll need optimized images and videos about healthcare

Video marketing is rapidly growing in popularity as a means of consuming content. As a result, pages with video typically increase organic traffic by 157% from the SERPs. The video itself has a 50-fold greater chance of appearing on the Google homepage than a standard web page. Check out the search results for the following query "what happens during a heart attack":

The first search result under the Knowledge Graph is Video. However, for your images to boost your site's SEO and video rankings, they need to be optimized—39% of people will stop interacting with a site if the image doesn't load or takes too long to load.

You need to establish offsite permissions

One of Google's ranking factors is offsite metrics, such as links back to your site? Google treats any type of offsite authorization as an approval badge. These "badges" can be links to your website, directory listings, or even social media profiles (yes, social media does affect SEO).

Social media should be one of your SEO priorities: 41% of consumers say what they find on social media may influence their choice of hospital or treatment center, and 42% view health information on social media people paying attention to health-related consumer reviews.

You need a full Google My Business (GMB) page

While we're talking about offsite permissions, you'll need a full Google My Business page. Modern patients demand healthcare marketing agency close to home, and searches containing "near me" have doubled since 2015. However, you need to be present in Google's local pack for local patients to find you. What is a local package? This is a set of 4 to 5 business listings that appear above organic search results. On mobile, this is the only thing a searcher can see without scrolling down:

The information in Google Local comes from several places, but mainly from your Google My Business page. So the first thing you do immediately after reading this article is to check your own GMB listing to make sure you fill in the following:

• Your company's category (above, you can see "doctor" or "allergist" below the average review rating. This is a feature in GMB that helps searchers find specific needs)

• Your immediate phone number

• Definition of your company

• Your corporation hours

• Your discourse or service area

• Comment

Final Diagnosis: If You Want to Improve Your Google Rankings and Increase Your Patient Base, You Need a Strong Medical SEO Strategy

It's not hard for Einstein to discover that SEO is the key to getting your medical institution or healthcare business to the top of Google's search results. However, SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution. You need a full diagnosis to get the full picture. That's why I recommend starting your SEO journey with digital competitive analysis. It compares your online presence to that of your top competitors and finds out where you're missing opportunities and where your digital marketing priorities should be.