SEO Strategies for Healthcare Providers: What Works and What Doesn’t?
Healthcare is a fundamental service. Hence, many might question the relevance and need for SEO in healthcare. If you have been thinking along the same lines, you must look at the competition around you and revisit your thoughts.
With so many healthcare providers, many of which are global brands, how many amongst the 70,000 healthcare searches generated every minute are looking at you? Besides, 75-80 percent of patients utilize search engines to select hospitals.
Thus, with so much action happening across the search engine space, you need the correct SEO strategies for healthcare to help you increase your visibility and serve more patients. However, SEO in healthcare is as challenging as it is for other domains. So, you must know what works and what does not so that you do what is necessary to make things work for you. Let us focus on it in this blog.
Understanding Healthcare SEO
SEO in healthcare refers to optimizing the website of a hospital, clinic, or other healthcare provider to enhance its visibility for healthcare-related searches. It involves optimization through content creation, keyword research, web page speed optimization, and more. Healthcare SEO helps players in the realm broaden their outreach, and drive quality leads via relevant content and target keywords.
Given the competitive nature of healthcare, many providers face challenges in growing their business. Many of them succumb to the powerful competition, while several others continue struggling to find quality leads. As a result, they only keep spending on the market without garnering value. Healthcare SEO with the help of an expert is one of the answers to these challenges, including the following.
- Understanding SEO priorities and setting the right expectations
- Dealing with a diverse audience base
- Developing the right SEO strategy
- Attempting to run SEO in-house without an experienced expert
- Inability to generate unique, relevant, and immersive content
- Keeping up with SEO evolution and market dynamics
Now, what makes us say professional SEO assistance or strategies for SEO in the healthcare industry can help address all the above challenges? So, let us see what works and what healthcare providers should avoid doing.
Effective SEO Strategies for Healthcare Providers
Here’s what healthcare providers should consider doing while enhancing their virtual visibility via SEO.
Local SEO Optimization
Local SEO refers to using location-based keywords like a dentist in Pune or a pediatrician in Mumbai. You may also go for hyperlocal keywords like an orthopedic doctor in Hinjewadi, a dermatologist in Wakad, etc. Additionally, you must ensure complete, claim, and optimize your Google My Business listing for more visibility.
Importance of Local Citations and Reviews
Local reviews help you enhance local search engine prominence. Learning someone from a locality has already used your treatment can satisfy a user and drive them closer to your brand.
Quality Content Creation
Creating quality content is fundamental to every SEO strategy. Accordingly, you must consider creating content in diverse forms (text, video, and infographics) and ensure it is relevant, informative, authentic, and readable with local key phrases and keywords.
Blogging on Health Topics
This is part of content creation. Writing blogs and complementing them with videos or graphics can help enhance your brand’s visibility and also establish you as an authority in your domain.
Utilizing Video and Infographics
Relying merely on text doesn’t help. Google and other search engines value content that has much more to offer. Thus, while enhancing visibility, using video and infographics would also help you engage more meaningfully with your users.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile phones drive a significant amount of the search engine traffic. Hence, you must ensure your website has a responsive design, offering a consistent and delightful experience to your users when they view the site on their mobile phone, laptop, or tablet.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
AMP is an open-source project aiming to improve the mobile web by providing a framework to build content pages that load consistently and quickly. Doing so can contribute another point to your SEO strength and effectiveness.
Technical SEO
This involves various aspects and requires partnering with an experienced SEO company in India. Some include implementing a schema markup like medical organization, healthcare provider, multispecialty hospital, etc., to help search engines understand the content better.
Additionally, conducting regular audits to enhance website speed and performance can help maintain the website’s competence. Besides, implementing HTTPS helps secure the website, patient information and enhance search engine rankings.
Ineffective or Outdated SEO Tactics to Avoid
Knowing what not to do can help you invest your energies in the right direction. Here’s what you should not do or what does not work for SEO in healthcare.
- Keyword Stuffing
Stuffing keywords refers to using keywords everywhere and anywhere, even in places where they do not fit in relevantly. Doing so can disappoint the search engine. Websites with keywords stuffed into their content never rank. They worsen the website’s reputation and potentially result in penalties.
- Purchasing Backlinks
Buying backlinks is a turnoff. Google cannot know if a link is paid for or not. However, if it does not like the site linked to yours, you might get penalized.
- Understanding Black Hat SEO Risks
Black Hat SEO includes buying links, using private blog networks, and more. Avoid indulging in these practices as search engines do not like them. SEO is organic and takes time. Keep it that way and engage in ethical SEO practices to achieve results steadily.
- Ignoring User Experience
Search engines prioritize websites with a consistent and rich user experience. It involves addressing user needs like content, navigation, visual appeal, information, website speed, etc. Ignoring them can let all your effort go down the drain. Users would bounce off, reflecting badly on the website and deterring search engines from ranking it.
- Duplicate Content
This is a complete NO-NO! Plagiarized content is not just disappointing for the search engine but unethical. Accordingly, you must insist on creating authentic content for your website.
Measuring SEO Success
One of the factors making digital marketing useful is its ability to measure success. Unlike conventional marketing, you can measure results and determine the success of a particular strategy. SEO is not an exception. Gauging SEO results and success is a crucial aspect of healthcare SEO. Some KPIs include the following.
- Ranking promotion or improvement
- Number of leads received
- Sales and lead conversions
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
- Return on Investment (RoI)
- Bounce rate
- Branded and non-branded traffic
- Keyword ranking
- User Engagement
Implementing SEO strategies for healthcare through experts and monitoring them can help you achieve the desired results. You can leverage various tools to monitor SEO performance, including Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Moz, Raven, Yoast, and BuzzSumo.
Best Practices and Recommendations
In a nutshell, here’s what you must generally adhere to while working out SEO for your healthcare organization.
- Extensive keyword research
- Optimizing local SEO
- Ensuring mobile optimization
- Working on on-page and off-page SEO
- Devising the right content strategy and executing it
- Performing technical SEO
- Regularly monitoring the site and SEO results
- Staying updated with SEO trends
- Integrating SEO with the overall marketing strategy for optimal results
Conclusion
When it comes to SEO, it is clear what works and what does not. You must focus on user experience and value with your content, SEO practices, and strategy. Indulging in Black Hat SEO practices can help you achieve results. However, they will not stay for long, returning you to where you had started. Let alone the penalties.
SEO is an organic results strategy that takes time to work. Hence, you must focus on accomplishing sustainable outcomes while ensuring continuous improvement to keep up with the evolving landscape.
Do you want to know more about SEO in the healthcare industry and know how things can work in your case? Please email us at info@brainminetech.com.
