Healthcare SEO Fundamentals to Grow Your Medical Practice
So, you have created a website for your medical practice, populated it with information about what you do, and outlined multiple ways for patients to reach you. However, nobody ever interacts with your website, and when you look it up on Google, it ranks nowhere in the top search results. What are you doing wrong?
Medical SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of increasing the number of visitors who end up on your website after using search engine sites like Google. Learning medical SEO is important if you want to know how to fine tune your marketing for healthcare businesses in 2021 and increase your website’s search engine ranking. How can you do this successfully?
1. Use Medical Keywords
Keywords are the terms users look up on search engines. When you use healthcare keywords on your website, search engines take note and raise your site’s ranking in search results so that users get the answers they are looking for easier and faster. There are many tools you can use to research appropriate keywords related to your medical practice. Most tools provide a breakdown of several keyword metrics. A keywords search volume (SV) is the number of people who have used that word in their searches for the past month. Keyword difficulty or SEO difficulty (KD or SD) refers to how hard it will be for your site to rank highly for the same keyword compared to similar sites with a higher domain authority. Paid difficulty (PD) is another common metric in paid healthcare marketing trends. If you want your site to appear as a Google ad, PD tells you how hard it will be for your site to rank compared to others for the same keyword.
2. Encourage Backlink Creation
It is easy to think that scattering keywords all over your site’s content will improve your website’s ranking. However, the Google medical search engine holds medical websites to a much higher standard of responsibility. Its goal is to return provide accurate information to medical search engines for physicians. Your site’s ranking will improve if high ranking websites link back to it. You can ensure this by creating quality, credible content that can be used as a source by reputable, top health websites.
3. Increase Visit Time
Search engines take note of the time users spend on a site and rank it highly so more searchers can access it. Clients are likely to spend more time on your website if you have visual elements like quality videos. A video of a medical procedure will make a web visitor who is considering the same procedure spend a lot of time on your site. An interactive, 3D tour of your practice will help future patients know what to expect when they visit your premises.
SEO is one of those healthcare marketing trends that is here to stay. It is one of the skills you need to learn if you want to know how to fine tune your marketing for healthcare businesses in 2021. Taking time to learn it is one of the best things you can do for your medical practice website.