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21 viewsIt’s quite obvious that you will be more cautious about the authenticity of the information while searching “how to control high blood pressure” than “best pizza near me.”
The same is true for the tech giant as well.
Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines set a very high standard for page quality of web pages that offer content that can significantly impact the readers’ health, financial stability, safety, welfare, and well-being.
They call them ‘YMYL’ (Your Money Your Life) topics. And today, we are going to discuss the importance of SEO in the healthcare industry, one of the major YMYL niches out there.
Like any other business, SEO is essential to make your online presence prominent in the healthcare industry as well.
But before that,
What Is Healthcare SEO?
Healthcare SEO is the optimization strategy for healthcare businesses to boost their online visibility to drive more patients who use search engines.
A solid healthcare SEO strategy can help you stay ahead of your competitors in a competitive market like the medical industry.
However, if you are a novice, you can review this SEO guide first.
How Is Medical SEO Marketing Different?
Though the goal of any SEO campaign is to drive more traffic and generate conversions, the road to achieving the same is different for various industries.
Medical SEO is no exception.
As medical SEO marketing targets both B2B and B2C audiences, the healthcare SEO strategy differs depending on the medical sector you are targeting.
For example, the healthcare SEO strategy for a medical practitioner will be different from an e-commerce site selling pharmaceutical products.
Why SEO Plays An Essential Role In Healthcare?
Before diving into the importance of SEO for medical practices, the first and foremost thing you must remember is implementing SEO in healthcare is the only way to earn online positive reviews from your existing patients.
Showcasing those positive reviews significantly increases the trustworthiness of your website to potential leads.
However, let’s dive into the other benefits of implementing healthcare SEO,
- Healthcare SEO helps you to retain old patients.
- SEO for healthcare generates conversions in the form of new patients.
- Search engine optimization for healthcare helps you build your brand image.
- Medical SEO helps you educate potential leads about what healthcare facilities you offer.
- Healthcare SEO helps you present crucial business information to searchers.
- Healthcare search engine optimization for mobile devices makes it more accessible to patients.
- A solid healthcare SEO strategy can help you stay ahead of your key competitors even after spending much less on advertising.
How To Implement SEO For Healthcare?
Now that you know the importance of SEO for healthcare, let’s see how you can implement healthcare SEO for your business.
Post Customer Reviews
If your healthcare facility can earn positive reviews from your old patients, posting them on your social media business page helps searchers feel more confident in your brand.
That, in turn, helps your business build a positive reputation and trustworthiness.
Your healthcare business must have a Google business profile where you can post patient reviews that will drive more new patients.
Create Valuable Content
No matter how much effort you put into healthcare search engine optimization, your website needs to offer readers valuable and high-quality content with accurate details to rank higher in search results, especially in the healthcare industry.
If you are not sure which pages of your website need to get optimized on priority, start with the following main pages,
- Home Page
- About Us
- Facilities & Services
- Contact Information
- Book An Appointment
- Billing
The first step towards optimizing the content of your main pages is to target the right keywords that you want your main pages to rank for.
You can select a free keyword research tool like RankWatch for this purpose.
Once you enter your parent keyword and hit enter, the tool suggests a list of related keywords.
It also shows each keyword’s search volume, cost-per-click, and difficulty level (competition).
If you still need to become a veteran in the healthcare industry, choose keywords with moderate competition and search volume to rank your main pages for those search terms.
If your website offers a separate page for healthcare blogs, make sure you offer topics on the latest treatment trends.
As Google sets a very high standard for medical practice SEO, you must ensure to provide authentic information to your readers as per Google’s EEAT guidelines.
Optimize HTML Header Tags
HTML header tags are the elements that provide a technical and visual structure for your website.
These tags help readers and search bots understand and digest your content. That’s why you should optimize your header tags by including targeted keywords in them.
For example, including your parent keyword at the initial part of your main header (h1) is a good SEO practice.
However, you need to conduct an on-page SEO analysis using a reliable tool like RankWatch to get valuable suggestions on optimizing your header tags.
The tool shows the usage of the exact keyword in the main header and provides suggestions based on its analysis.
Next, you must include the main keyword or related keywords that broadly match your primary keyword in other subheadings (h2,h3,h4, etc.) for better SEO.
The RankWatch on-page SEO checker helps you check both.
The tool shows the usage of the exact keyword in the h2 header and provides suggestions for further improvement.
Our SEO IQ also helps you check broad keyword usage in h2 headers and suggests further improvements.
It would also help if you optimize your meta description by incorporating the primary keyword in it.
You can check the same using the same RankWatch SEO IQ feature and optimize your meta description by following the suggestions.
Besides, optimizing your text content with the right keywords is not sufficient; you must also optimize your content images for a higher ranking.
You can optimize your content images by using the suggestions provided by the RankWatch on-page SEO checker.
However, make sure that you do not include these keywords forcefully or stuff your content with keywords for the sake of optimization. That can do more harm than good.
Build A Solid Interlinking Structure
When we talk about linking to enhance the SEO of your website, most website owners think about quality backlinks.
Yes, backlinks are essential.
However, building a solid interlinking structure is equally important to optimize your web pages.
Interlinking is linking your web page content with another web page of your website that drives a healthy amount of traffic.
However, that does not mean you can interlink all your web pages to a particular website page.
Instead, it would help if you targeted all your essential pages for internal linking purposes. It not only helps the SEO of your new web page content but also drives more traffic to the linked pages.
Moreover, it allows readers to gather more information on related topics without further searching.
For example, one of our blogs on ‘B2B content marketing strategy’ writes about creating content for all marketing funnel stages.
The blog also uses ‘content marketing funnel’ as an anchor text within the content. The anchor text takes you to another vital web page content that provides ten valuable tips on how to create your first content marketing funnel.
This process helps the linked page drive more traffic and guide the readers on how to create their first content marketing funnel.
Enlist Your Business In Local Listings
If you want to drive more local patients to your healthcare facility, you must implement local SEO for medical practices in that area.
The best way to target and rank for local keywords is to enlist your healthcare business in local directories like Google Business Profile, Bing Places For Business, etc.
However, you must ensure to provide the same name, address, and phone number (NAP) of your healthcare business in all the directories to avoid confusion for users and search engines.
Besides, it is essential to maintain the same NAP metrics throughout to gain maximum benefits from your local marketing strategy.
Check The SEO Health Of Your Site
Checking the SEO health of your site is the process of identifying if any technical SEO issue is creating a poor user experience.
If users face a poor experience, like a slow page loading speed while visiting your website, it may lead to losing potential patients.
The first step towards checking the SEO health of your website is to ensure that Google bots index your website. None of your web page content can rank unless your site is indexed.
You can check the same using the Google Search Console.
However, if you find a few of your existing web pages do not receive any traffic or are not ranking for any queries, chances are high that they were not indexed at all.
You can simply copy the URLs of those web pages and check their indexing status using a bulk index checker like the RankWatch Google Index checker tool.
Once you are assured about indexing, the next step is to perform a site audit using a reliable site auditor tool like RankWatch to identify the technical issues related to SEO for healthcare creating hindrances against your rankings.
After analyzing all the technical issues, the tool provides an overall site score for your website.
The site auditor tool also categorizes the technical SEO issues, considering their criticality, thus helping you understand which issues need immediate attention.
Improve Site Structure For Positive UX
User experience plays a key role in deciding whether a patient will choose to avail of medical facilities from your healthcare website or book an appointment using your competitor’s website.
A clear site architecture that offers easy navigation ensures a positive user experience.
Site architecture is how you place the folders and subfolders to design your website’s hierarchy.
An ideal site architecture ensures that searchers will only search up to three subfolders for the required information they are searching for.
Moreover, placing the content in a deep subfolder creates hindrances in crawling. As a result, search bots may opt not to crawl your content due to their limited bandwidth, which can seriously damage your medical SEO.
Earn High-Quality Backlinks
Even SEO beginners know the importance of backlinks in achieving a higher position on search results pages and the same is applicable for healthcare SEO as well.
Backlinks are hyperlinks that point from one page to another web page of a different website.
Acquiring high-quality backlinks from other authoritative healthcare websites that are key players in your industry will significantly enhance your medical SEO, it will boost the trustworthiness of your site to patients and search engines.
It is worth checking your website’s total number of backlinks and their sources using a free online backlink checker tool like RankWatch.
The tool shows the total number of your active and deleted backlinks.
You can also check the percentage of active backlinks providing link value (DoFollow backlinks) to your site from the backlink overview report.
The tool also provides the quality of your backlinks and their source domains.
It allows you to reconsider the inclusion of backlinks received from domains that are not that trustworthy.
Next, you need to take action for the deleted backlinks, at least on the ones that were from authoritative sources.
You can contact and follow up with those sources to know the reason and must resolve those issues immediately to earn those backlinks back.
Spying on your competitor’s backlink strategy is another way to earn high-quality backlinks. It allows you to know the sources they are earning their backlinks from.
You can also approach those sources to earn backlinks for your healthcare site as well, which can help you further optimize your healthcare SEO.
You only need to analyze your competitor’s domain using the RankWatch backlink analyzer to fetch those sources.
The tool not only shows the list of referring pages and domains your competitor is receiving backlinks from but also shows their level of authority.
Add Schema Markup To Your Business Details
The syntax added to a website’s theme to provide more site details while appearing on the search results is the Schema markup language.
How your healthcare website details appear on the search results plays a vital role in whether patients will click on it or not. Hence, Schema markup is an essential part of healthcare search engine optimization, like any other industry.
Following is an example of using the Schema structured data to enhance your healthcare SEO and make your site stand out in the crowd.
However, that is not the only way to code your Schema structured data to make your site’s appearance unique.
Following are a few details that you can include in your medical website theme to ensure a better appearance on the SERP and attract more patients,
- Specialized medical services provided
- Latest methods of treatment offered
- In-house medical test facilities
- List of accepted medical insurance
- Detailed address of the healthcare facility
- Multiple contact numbers
- Patient Reviews
You need to change the coding of your website to add schema-structured code to the website theme.
Unless you are technically sound enough, appointing a web developer for this task is safer.
However, your technical team may have a look at this Schema markup quick guide to achieve a better medical SEO, provided you have a small healthcare facility at a single location.
Monitor Your Ranking
Once you finish implementing all the above-mentioned techniques of SEO for healthcare websites, it is time to monitor the outcome of your efforts.
The best way to measure the results of your healthcare SEO efforts is to track how your web pages rank for the keywords you have targeted.
You can opt for an accurate rank-tracking tool like RankWatch to monitor the performance of your web pages.
The tool shows the total number of keywords targeted, ranking keywords, share of voice, and many other details.
One of the best parts of the ranking report is it provides valuable suggestions like potential keywords you can target for local SEO and low-hanging pages that can drive more traffic with minimal effort.
The tool provides you a list of your web page URLs ranking for the targeted keywords with exact rank, share of voice, search volume, and much more.
Conclusion
Most people are concerned about the health hazards they and their loved ones face. It is one of the most practical reasons behind search queries related to healthcare having a different weightage altogether.
Google and other search engines understand this and set a very high standard for SEO for medical practice. The primary goal is to ensure the ranking of the most authentic and accurate information on the search results.
Hence, implementing SEO for healthcare sites becomes a must if you are in the medical industry.
It is the only possible way to educate searchers about the facilities and services you offer and attract more potential leads (patients).
However, you must remember that SEO is a long-term game, and gaining success in a competitive industry like healthcare requires sufficient time.
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