Medical SEO is the process of making your website’s rankings in search engines go up, so when someone is looking for a new physician online, if you have good SEO you’ll appear closer to the top of the ratings. Without good SEO on your website, you can lose out on new patients.

Many people do not go beyond the first page in search engine results, so if your practice isn’t in that top 10, you can be losing tons of online referrals. When someone is looking for a new doctor, 73 percent of people will use a search engine to find them; another 55 percent of people will only click on the top three results, so you’re losing even more referrals if your site isn’t in the top three.

 

PAY PER CLICK ADS

You can take out pay per click (PPC) ads, but that alone just isn’t enough. Paying for ads can take significantly less time than making your website more SEO friendly, this isn’t a good option to replace having an SEO website.

The top ads on a search are often ignored by searchers, choosing to click on the organic results instead of the paid ones. Marketing your content through SEO can get you three times the leads per dollar than paid ads will.

 

HOW TO BOOST YOUR MEDICAL SEO

Google uses an algorithm that’s designed to find the most relevant answers and links to searches; there are over 200 factors that go into this algorithm, so here are some pointers on how to boost your SEO.

 

SPEED

The majority of visitors will leave your page if it takes more than three seconds for it to load, so this is important to keep in mind; since Google knows this, they won’t put a slow site in their top search results. It’s good to aim to have only half of a second as your load time, but up to two seconds is still good.

Google has a free tool that will analyze how fast your website is and give you suggestions for how to improve your page’s speed.

 

SECURITY

It’s especially important for a medical website to be secure since that protects your patient’s information.

 

MOBILE FRIENDLINESS

With smartphones being so common these days, more and more people are using their phones to look up anything, including health related services. According to Google, 77 percent of smartphone owners have searched for health services in the last six months.

Giving patients the option to schedule appointments online, request prescription refills, and even send their provider a message is also a big factor for a medical website. A prospective patient is more likely to select you for their healthcare needs if they don’t have to make a phone call, even if they’re browsing the website on their phone.

 

QUALITY CONTENT

Your site needs multiple pages of quality content to help get you up in the search rankings. The content on your page needs to be driven by the needs and wants of your patients. Part of Google’s ranking algorithm includes sites that have unique, interesting, and shareable content available.  Make sure you don’t overdo the keywords; Google will penalize sites who focus on packing their content with keywords instead of making quality content. Having optimized content is important, but it still needs to be easy to read by visitors on your page.

Often patients will look up their symptoms and may try to diagnose themselves before they look for a provider. Having quality information available about different conditions can help you bring in more patients since they will be right on your website when they finish looking up their symptoms.

Some of the content you may want to include on your website is blog posts, long-form articles, FAQs, medical explanations, videos, and more. This will give you more to put out there and work on optimizing.

It’s important to keep in mind that Google holds medical pages to a higher standard than other websites because lower quality pages could have serious consequences for the consumers.

 

VIDEOS

As the popularity of video marketing rises, it’s an important factor you need to consider when optimizing your page. Websites with videos tend to have higher traffic than pages without, and videos are more likely to appear in a Google search. It’s even more important to have a fast speed for your videos to load, people will also not stick around to wait for a video, no matter how helpful it may be.

YouTube is the second largest search engine for a reason. The possibilities for video marketing to help boost your SEO are endless! You can use your videos to explain different things, introduce different members of your staff, and more. Having videos that show you as knowledgeable in your field will also help boost your credibility for potential patients.

 

GOOGLE BUSINESS PAGE

A Google business page can bring you more business, especially if you have it completely filled out. Don’t leave an empty field unless it’s completely irrelevant to your practice, the more information available, the better business generation you’ll have.

 

TRUSTWORTHY

Having good reviews will help bring more patients to your website too. It has become common practice for people to read online reviews before they select a new doctor. Google also factors good reviews into their ranking algorithm, so it is especially important to have more good reviews than bad.

 

CONCLUSION

SEO can bring you more patients and referrals, but it takes a lot of time to keep your website optimal. Hiring someone to manage your website’s SEO is a good choice since it can really be a full-time job. You may also want to hire a writer to generate this quality content for you. An agency like Web Rocket Media can help with all of this, so you don’t have to hire multiple individuals. While it takes work to get your website optimized, the end result of more business is well worth it.