Complete Guide for Healthcare SEO

State-of-the-art facilities and equipment, the best-of-breed doctors and medical care staff may be the reason behind the successful running of your hospital, clinic or urgent care center. But this means little if they cannot even find you on their online search results. If a potential customer looking for more information on a cardiologist in California is unable to find your website in the first few online search results, then the conversation with a prospective customer has ended well before it has even begun.

What is SEO and why do you need it?

Online searches are the largest source of online traffic and SEO is a crucial strategy for tapping into it. It is a proven fact that the top 3 search results generated for a search query receive well over 75% of the website visits, which could then easily convert into potential business. As per Search Engine Journal, close to 15% of conversions happen due to a strong SEO strategy, while only approximately 2% of conversions occur due to other forms of advertising ^[1].

Techniques to boost the ranking on your healthcare organization

There are three golden rules when it comes to launching a successful SEO campaign:

• Understand who your customers are and analyze their search habits
  
  
• Spruce up the content on your website and optimize it
  
  
• Convert the visitors to your website into customers

A strong SEO team can create unshakeable strategies to boost your SEO ranking and thereby your customer conversions. Take a look at some important ones here:

1. Role of content and keywords – The first thing to do is to start thinking like a customer who is performing an online search. What are the likely keywords that he or she is going to use for a local or national search on healthcare? Then search these keywords to see which ones generate the most traffic on a monthly basis. These are the keywords that will have to become a crucial part of your web content.

With these keywords used at strategic points throughout your website, focus on building strong and informational content such as case studies, infographics, medical breakthroughs, testimonials, press releases, articles, citations, and healthcare directories on your website to build the important connection with all prospective customers. Unique and informational content gives your organization a figure of authority and credibility in the industry.

Also adding relevant Meta tags, URLs, keyword-rich tags, headings, anchor text links, usage of SEO tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console, and writing strong meta descriptions to promote the content are critical onsite healthcare SEO techniques.  

2. Optimization of user experience – Optimizing the experiencing of your users has a direct impact on retaining them. Fast search and site navigation speed, site security, website design, the ability to scale the functionality and content to a mobile search, readable and user-friendly content and the lack of broken links are some crucial aspects that define the connection that a user forms with your website and ultimately your brand. In fact, it is said that the speed of your website loading is one of the primary measures of user experience. First impressions are almost always the best ones!

3. Optimize your website with different search verticals – Apart from online searches that can boost traffic to your website, leveraging other SEO verticals such as SlideShare and Google Images can also create a long-term increase in highly-targeted traffic to your medical websites. You can also leverage social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to drive up your rankings as they are unbeatable when it comes to building an audience. 

4. Optimization for local search marketing – A mobile-friendly, local search experience for users is critical as their first step to visiting a local service provider is to find the accurate contact details and address online. Ensure that your contact details are accurately updated on the Google + Local Page as well as on your website as it directly affects your ranking on Google.  You can also consider optimizing the Google My Business listing for your healthcare organization can impact how you reflect as an option on local search results.   

Benefits of using healthcare SEO

If you are still wondering if you need healthcare SEO for your website, consider these statistics: over 58% of all Google searches are healthcare related (either for information of medical procedures or to find a local hospital/clinic to book an appointment) and well over 93% begin their interaction with a brand based on the seamlessness of their online search engine. So, if your website is listed on page 1 for any organic search across major search engines, well, the conclusion is an obvious one!

• Using medical SEO or search engine optimization campaigns – To get your healthcare company right at the top in the Google search results yield several benefits beyond the obvious ones of getting your website link on the first page of any search results resulting in an increase in traffic to your website and better brand exposure.
  
  
• Higher ROI – SEO guarantees a higher return on investment as well as a more sustained one as this strategy ensures that your presence is on media for a much longer period of time.
  
  
• Reduced costs of patient acquisition – Online marketing campaign costs are considerably lesser in comparison to all other forms of direct marketing. This translates into lower costs of the acquisition of patients.Every company with a website needs SEO and it is more so in the case of healthcare. If you do not use SEO to improve your online presence and ranking, your competition will soon be ahead of you. Visit www.profit-driven.com/ and we will help you stay at the top of the game.