Get started with healthcare SEO (search engine optimization) to grow your medical practice, dermatology, or healthcare center. Medical SEO can attract patients, talent, investors, and more online. Learn how to do SEO for healthcare (or get professional help with medical SEO services) in this definitive guide!
What is Healthcare SEO?
Healthcare SEO is search engine optimization of a medical website to raise its ranking in natural search results. Typical tweaks include content development, keyword research, page speed improvement, and more.
Why is Healthcare SEO important?
Healthcare SEO services are important for a few reasons, including the following:
- Reach: Through search engine optimization for medical practices and health centers, you can directly reach the individuals seeking you, precisely to their needs. Keywords help SEO target several goals, like someone trying to find emergency services, change providers, or something else.
- Relevancy: Through keyword targeting, your center can concentrate on the people most vital to it. For instance, if you run an urgent care center, you probably want to target people in your neighborhood needing emergency treatment rather than those looking for an insurance provider.
- Research: Health is one of the most popular niches in search. Google alone receives over 70,000 health-related queries each minute! Building up your organization’s visibility in search will allow you to reach more people and provide more care.
- Results: Healthcare SEO delivers measurable results like other digital marketing strategies. Through its reach and relevancy, your organization can reach the most relevant and qualified users and convert them into patients, clients, or employees.
In our decades of experience as an SEO service provider, we’ve helped dozens of organizations in the healthcare sector, from medical practices to healthcare centers to insurance companies, use search engine optimization to achieve their goals, so we can speak first-hand to its importance.
How is Medical SEO different from SEO for other markets?
Medical SEO is a more controlled market than e-commerce, hence it differs from doing SEO in other markets. Your search engine optimization efforts, for instance, need your company to take healthcare laws including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) into account.
That’s why many providers in the healthcare sector benefit from partnering with an SEO service provider with extensive medical SEO experience. Their experience can ensure your organization doesn’t make any legal missteps while optimizing your site.
How to do SEO for healthcare companies
Learn how to get started with healthcare SEO below:
Step 1: Claim your local listings
Local listings like Google Business Profile and Bing Places provide users somewhere to learn more about your medical practice, healthcare center, or insurance company. They also give search engines valuable information about your organization, like its name, address, and phone number.
As a part of your medical SEO efforts, claim these listings and add the following information:
- Name
- Address
- Phone number
- About
- Website URL
- Photos
- Services [if applicable]
Ongoing, you’ll want to complete the following:
Update your hours, like for holidays or sudden closures
Share your updates, like a new wing opening or a new service being offered
Monitor your reviews, on a daily or weekly basis
If you want to grow your online reviews (which many organizations are), Google prohibits incentivizing reviews. Instead, you can inform users through business cards, physical signs, and other outlets that your organization is online and active on local listings like Google Business Profile.
Step 2: Focus your keyword research on long-tail keywords
People search the web with search queries, also known as keywords. As a part of SEO for your medical practice or healthcare center, you’ll research keywords to determine the most relevant ones to target on your site.
While you can target broad, short-tail keywords like “hospital near me,” we recommend targeting focused, long-tail keywords like “emergency hospital Los Angeles” since these have a more defined intent, which you can use to determine the keyword’s relevancy to your organization.
Keyword research tools like Keywords Everywhere, Ahrefs, and Semrush can help you discover long-tail keywords and evaluate their relevancy. For example, you can check a keyword’s monthly search volume and competitiveness to see if it receives enough searches to justify creating content.
Step 3: Make your content helpful with E-E-A-T
Content is critical in SEO for healthcare, especially with Google’s view of Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) topics. Because these topics can influence major life decisions, like opting for a medical procedure or choosing a specific health insurance plan, experts must write or review this content.
When you involve experts in your content process, you can amplify E-E-A-T or:
- Expertise
- Experience
- Authority
- Trustworthiness
For example, a medical practitioner can highlight their decades of first-hand experience treating a specific illness or performing a particular procedure. Alternatively, they could review the content before publishing it to verify its accuracy.
While this approach can make content creation take longer, it’s essential if you want to create helpful, unique, and trustworthy content for your organization. You’ll plan for your organization’s success with medical search engine optimization in the long term.
Step 4: Improve your website’s page experience
- Usability
- Accessibility
- Readability
With PageSpeed Insights (free from Google), you can get instant insights into these areas, like:
- Fixing mobile-friendly issues
- Improving color contrast between background and text colors
- Removing unused scripts
Usually, you will require a web developer to address these problems. Working with a full-service SEO agency (such as SEO.com), they will have in-house web developers to create the modifications for you, therefore sparing you the effort of locating the time internally.
Step 5: Secure your site with HTTPS
HTTPS isn’t unique to medical SEO — all markets should secure their site with HTTPS — but it’s imperative for healthcare providers that make patient information available online through a patient portal to use HTTPS.
Start with HTTPS by purchasing a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, which your developer can install. You’ll need to renew your SSL certificate annually, which won’t require your web developer’s time.
Step 6: Streamline your website architecture
Navigating a medical site, especially for a large healthcare network, can create user frustration quickly. That’s why building a logical, easy-to-use website architecture is important. Even if you have a small site now, plan for your website’s growth.
Besides users, search engines’ web crawlers use a website’s architecture to understand the relation between pages. That understanding can influence search rankings because of how search engines interpret the association.
Improve your Healthcare SEO with SEO experts
With healthcare SEO, your organization can achieve multiple goals, from serving more patients to attracting top talent. See our award-winning team of medical SEO experts if you need expert assistance planning, implementing, and managing your SEO plan.
Get further information about our healthcare SEO offerings by getting in touch with us right now online!
