Why would you focus on SEO for your medical website? Anticipating the reach, right?

Medical SEO can do more for you, join us in this post – Medial SEO guide, to explore the many perks & strategies you need to implement to grab those perks!

With the world going digital, patients opt-in for a healthcare website to look for Doctor’s information, hospital services, and others.

Whether you are running a small clinic, or a medical institution, if you fail to showcase your website on search results, then you are going to lose in the competition.

Here, we will show you a clear-cut picture of the importance of SEO for healthcare websites. To gain overall insights about healthcare SEO, advantages, and techniques to implement, keep reading.

Let’s build a healthy SEO website.

What is Healthcare SEO?

Healthcare SEO is the process of boosting your medical website rankings on the SERP for healthcare-related queries. By implementing persistent & strategic SEO efforts on your medical website and social media, you can outrank your competitors and capture more search engine users looking for medical assistance.

Engaging your site users, employing algorithms of search engines, and avoiding black-hat SEO techniques would narrow down the possibilities of your medical website to acquire better SEO.

Why Should You Invest in Healthcare/Medical Website SEO?

Today, everybody is conscious about maintaining their physical and mental health. To recover people from various health crises, the medical industry is experiencing reasonable growth across the world.

According to a report from Fortune Business Insights, the market size of global medical services was valued at $425.5 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $612.7 billion by 2025.

If you don’t want to be caught up in the vast competitive healthcare market, then effective visibility on search results pays it off. The below statistics are proof that medical SEO can drive potential patients to your sales pipeline.

• Google’s total daily health-related searches amount to 70,000 each minute
• Pew Research study shows that 72% of U.S. Internet users have gone online specifically for health-related information and 7% of them say their research started at Google, Bing, and other general search engines
• Online search drives 3x more visitors to hospital sites compared to non-search
• 73% of patients turn to search engines to find a health practitioner and 89% use search engines to get answers to healthcare queries
• 75% of patients use search engines prior to scheduling a visit

Advantages of Implementing Healthcare SEO

As you practice optimizing your website for SEO rankings, you can gradually experience all these benefits in the long run.

We live in a technology-driven era where ¾ of your patient-based look for healthcare information on the web. By applying the right SEO techniques, you can stand on the frontline of search results and raise your voice among the audience.

How to Optimize Healthcare/Medical SEO?

According to SearchEngineJournal, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate in converting patients, while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate. We share some of the best-working on-page and off-page SEO techniques that increase your patient acquisition rate and convert the leads into your followers.

Web designing, hosting, content creation, testing, and other operations contribute much to engaging your site visitors. However, before engagement, you have to pull patients to your website among the millions of websites available in the search results.

This can be accomplished with a healthy SEO practice. Optimizing your site for search engine rankings gives a professional look to your medical website and paves the way for creating awareness about your services in the online space.

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Effective Healthcare /Medical SEO Techniques

1. Improve Your Website Loading Speed

The total time a webpage takes to fully load in the browser once after the user makes a request is referred to as website load time. It’s always the case that when your webpage load time increases, then your website bounce will also increase.

Your website should load within a fraction of second because when loading time goes from 1s to 10s, the probability of bounce rises up by 123%. The average webpage load time recommended by Google is less than 3 seconds.

Effective Ways to Increase Your Page Speed

2. Optimize for Voice Search

With the advent of voice search, patients are now showing a lack of interest in typing. Voice search never disrupts any of the current activities of your patients, instead, this feature allows them to carry on with their work and browsing as well.

From the SEO perspective, it’s reported that 71% of respondents would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than physically type their queries. Owing to the convenience feature, patients prefer voice search functionality, particularly on hospital websites.

By keeping all these in mind, you will be able to acquire better positions on search engines for voice-based queries. You can also learn more about how to optimize your site for voice search.

3. Research for Hospital-related Keywords

While optimizing your content, you want to target the right keywords for your industry.
Your starting point should be the medical services you offer, as that’s what most searchers will be looking for.

Tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner help you identify the suitable keywords that can work wonders for your healthcare business.

As in all cases, avoid “stuffing” keywords into the content. When you do so, you will be easily caught by Google and there are chances for your website to be penalized. To avoid this, add specific, long-tail keywords into your content in a relevant, readable, and natural way.

Not only will this separate you from the WebMDs, but you’ll also begin to attract the patients you want those who live in your geographic area and are looking for the specialized expertise you offer.

4. Optimize the Title & Meta Tags

Page titles are the key to enhancing your page visibility. According to Databox, 36% of SEOs think the title tag is the most important SEO element. Also, a study conducted by HubSpot reveals that page titles containing 6-13 words generate the most traffic.

Here are a few standard norms that we suggest you follow for your page title

• Avoid duplicate content in the title tag
• Provide a unique title to every page
• Avoid stuffing keywords into your page titles

Some basic tricks for writing meta descriptions are

• Use researched and targeted keywords
• Communicate the benefits of the content to the readers
• Ensure that the meta tags are relevant to the content on the page
• Avoid using the same meta description across your whole site

An interesting statistic from Optinmonster says that 43% of people click on a given result, solely based on the meta description.

5. Optimize Local SEO for Healthcare

In this tech world, patients mostly rely on the internet to find nearby hospitality services which are easy to access. Optimizing your website for local SEO drives more local patients. 97% of online users use search engines for finding local stores/services.

Statistics prove that once a patient searches for a local service, there’s a 3/4 chance they will visit the clinic in-person within the span of a day. Schema markup is one of the powerful local SEO techniques that showcase your brand on the local SERPs.

Generally, search engines aim to understand the queries prompted by the searchers and provide relevant results.

Schema is a structured data markup code that, when added to the HTML code of your webpage, will help search engines to better understand the exact context behind your website content.

Moreover, webpages with schema markup will easily be identified by search engines and are displayed in the form of rich snippets.

6. Create E-A-T Content

Normally, when you want to describe a person, you talk about their stature, weight, color, and other aspects. This is the same in the case of content marketing, if you want people to talk about your content & services then you must provide expertise, authoritative and trustworthy content.

In 2015, Google introduced the Quality Rater Guidelines where E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) became mandatory in content creation.

Points to remember to create E-A-T content

• Links from authoritative websites with supporting stats, data, and facts
• Updating your site according to the changing trends
• Providing your bio on the About page

The quality rater, however, is not going to rank your content depending on the keywords and links. The sites or pages without purpose, content that is not helping users, harming content, misinforming and deceiving content would be given the lowest rating, whereas E-A-T content will be leading in the SERP.

Connect With an Active Healthcare SEO Agency

We hope now you have stopped questioning why you should apply medical SEO & digital for your website during the time of healthcare website development itself. Of course, you cannot experience the changes in your website rankings overnight.

As you are aware, the medical industry is vast and wide. Standing ahead in the competition is challenging. You will have to be aware of the ever-changing search engine algorithms and alter your SEO techniques, as well as keep track of your SEO performance.

Carrying out all these operations without the help of a professional would eat up your time and money. If you want to take a wise decision, then consider partnering with a skilled healthcare SEO agency.

ColorWhistle is a specialized medical SEO company in India with profound experience and knowledge in delivering out-of-the-box solutions to healthcare centers. Our healthcare SEO specialists aim to turn your website into an SEO-friendly site without any black-hat spamming techniques.

To know more about our SEO approach and services, give us a call at +1 (210) 787-3600 or send us a message at any time. We are ready to support you!

Do you still have any questions about investing in healthcare SEO? Let us know in the comments below. We can clear your doubts.