What is Healthcare SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your website to draw more of the individuals you wish to target via natural search results. Practically, this means making sure your website shows Google and other search engines your site so patients looking for your kind of services may find it.
Google claims that patients most often find healthcare providers online; online searches produce three times as much traffic to hospital websites as from other sources. Any medical office, clinic, or hospital should engage in SEO since your website must be optimized to show up at the top of the search engine results page and draw fresh patients.
How can the healthcare industry benefit from search engine optimization?
Grow your patient base
One study found that 80% of US adults conducted a healthcare-related search in the last year.
Online search is the main way patients research new healthcare providers, book appointments, see provider reviews, and find valuable information. To provide the best possible digital experience to your patients, you need to invest in healthcare SEO, so your site appears at the top of their search results—ultimately growing your number of patients.
Show up for local searches
Another benefit of a healthcare SEO strategy is showing up in local searches. Many patients search for terms that are specific to where they’re located, like “physical therapist in Nashville.”
To show up for those geographic-specific searches, your site needs to be correctly optimized. Once it is, you can tap into highly relevant, local searches from potential patients looking for services just like yours.
Rise above the competition
Healthcare is a competitive space, which makes investing in SEO all the more important. If a patient is searching for a hospital in their area and your main competitor shows up as the first or second search results, while your hospital isn’t even on page one, you’re going to lose valuable growth opportunities.
Investing in SEO is a great way to differentiate yourself from your competition, and if you follow that up with a high-quality website experience and online services, you’ll be well ahead in offering a digital experience patients will want to come back to.
Start by Checking Your SEO Score
You should start working on your SEO, so you must have a strong awareness of the present state of performance of your website.
Use Siteimprove’s free website SEO checker first to scan your page for 14 typical problems with SEO and classify them into four technical, content, user experience, and mobile SEO categories.
From there, you may begin to probe issue areas and concentrate on the ones most likely to have an impact.
11 Actionable Tips For Your Healthcare SEO Strategy
Now that you have an overview of how your site is currently performing, you can start to create a healthcare SEO strategy that will help your site move to the top of search results. Get started with the 11 actionable tips below.
1. Focus on quality content
Excellent content is, all things considered, the most crucial component of a great SEO plan. Your site will display in search results only if you have material search engines that could show users. Furthermore, search engines give your content great weight as the reason visitors visit your website is the content. Verify that your material is accurate, exhaustive, and of good quality.
Content can also be used to draw more visitors to your website. You increase the potential searches you could show up for by building a blog on your healthcare website where you can post useful materials for patients (you won’t show up for a search if you don’t have any material covering that issue!).
Look at what your rivals are writing about if you are not sure what to write about—then improve on it. Either produce more in-depth material or approach things differently than your rivals.
A keyword research tool will also help you find the most often searched-for keywords. Prioritize writing about relevant medical terms people search the most for, as this increases your chances of capturing more traffic.
2 Make sure your website can be crawled and indexed by search engines.
You now have excellent, original, and comprehensive material relevant to your healthcare company that needs to be sure search engines can index.
Beginning with the fundamentals, let Search engines save and arrange the material they come onto as they crawl your website. Once your page is indexed, that indicates that a search engine understands what it is about and can show users (essentially, by indexing information search engines are establishing the library they can pull from when a user searches for something).
Your healthcare material must therefore be easily indexed by search engines. One successful approach to accomplish this is with a sitemap. A sitemap is an inventory of every URL on your website that you wish search engines to find and display to visitors. Starting with a sitemap created exactly as Google advises and then sending it to Google Search Console is a great place to start.
3. Monitor your SEO progress
If you’re going to run a successful healthcare SEO program, it’s important to monitor your progress so you can report on ROI.
Here are a few SEO metrics to keep track of over time:
- Average position in search results
- Click through rates from search results on your website
- Search engine impressions
- Total organic traffic to your site
- Conversions
To look at all of these metrics, you’ll need to use a website analytics tool. Make sure your analytics tool is set up to monitor these metrics and align with your healthcare SEO strategy. You should also use an SEO tool that automatically monitors some of these metrics and shows your SEO performance over time.
4. Benchmark your Healthcare SEO and Compare Performance to Your Competitors
Tracking and reporting on your SEO efforts is a critical step in proving the ROI of your SEO efforts.
However, keep in mind that SEO performance is always relative to your competition. Your organic traffic might have increased by 50% in the last year, but if you’re still on page two of search results while your competition is in position one for high-priority keywords that attract the right kind of patients, then you’re most likely not capturing the right traffic.
To figure out how you stack up to the competition, use an enterprise SEO platform that benchmarks your SEO score against 1) an industry average, and 2) your specific competitors. This will give you insights into how much work you need to do overall when it comes to improving your SEO score, as well as specific insights into ways to optimize for your most important keywords.
5. Improve the patient experience on your website
As previously mentioned, a great healthcare SEO strategy will get you far in attracting new patients, but you need to provide an outstanding digital experience to keep them.
A high-quality website experience is also something search engines take into ranking consideration. When thinking about your overall website experience, keep the following in mind:
- Site speed: Does your website load quickly? The average consumer will leave a site after 2-3 seconds of load time, so make sure your site loads fast.
- Straightforward navigation: For both search engines and users, a straightforward menu will go far in making your site easy to use and index.
- Clean, universal design: Especially when it comes to healthcare websites, design should follow universal design principles that make your site easy to navigate.
- Quality assurance: Make sure to test your website quality assurance for broken links, broken media files, 404s, or broken buttons anywhere on your site, as they lead to a very frustrating experience for users.
- Simple user journey: Don’t make it complicated for users to complete an action. When consumers choose to schedule an appointment online, fewer steps are required and the procedure is made transparent and simple.
Healthcare websites should be easy for elderly persons or those with disabilities to use. Keep typeface readable, and color contrast strong, and make sure your website is easily navigable for those with visual, cognitive, physical, or hearing problems.
By providing a smooth, engaging website experience, you’ll not only retain patients but also send search engines signals that your site is worth visiting.
6. Build Your Website Authority
Another way to improve your healthcare SEO strategy is by building up the authority of your website. The best way to do that is through something called backlinks, which is when another website links to yours.
Backlinks are seen as a vote of confidence to search engines—, if another site is willing to send their users to your site, then they must trust your organization and your content.
Not all backlinks are created equal, however. You want high-quality, authoritative sites linking to yours—not spammy or untrustworthy ones.
If your hospital or clinic has been mentioned for interesting research, good outcomes, community work, etc. on another website, reach out to that website owner and ask if they wouldn’t mind including a link to your website when they mention you.
Get your organization in front of trustworthy third parties as much as possible and request that they link to your site when using your content, mentioning you, or interviewing a member of staff.
7. Focus On EAT Requirements For Healthcare SEO
Known as EAT, a major Google algorithm upgrade in 2018 impacted medical websites. This upgrade was an attempt by Google to persuade medical websites to follow EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness), and better standards.
Being a healthcare company, search engines and patients must regard you as a reliable company with accurate information. Work on your site’s EAT keeping the following in mind:
- Create high-quality, informative About Us and Contact Us pages with plenty of information
- Make sure to include author information for all your in-depth content, including author bios with information about their expertise or accreditation
- Make it easy for patients to contact your organization
- Include a privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc.
- Add an easily identifiable address and phone number to your site
8. Prioritize Local Healthcare SEO with Google My Business
Local SEO is critical for your healthcare organization. Patients search for local providers more often than not. To start working on your local healthcare SEO, start by creating a Google My Business account and claim your business listing.
From there, create a detailed business profile with photos, your website, opening hours, and an updated address and phone number. You can also build patient trust by responding to customer reviews.
Doing all of this will create a robust local profile that Google will reward by showing in local searches and maps.
9. Make Sure Your Website is Accessible To All Users
Healthcare websites need to pay attention to accessibility compliance. All healthcare websites should be usable for the elderly and disabled. Doing this not only provides a better digital experience for your patients, but search engines also include it in their SEO ranking factors.
A good place to start is checking your site’s accessibility standing. Use Siteimprove’s free website accessibility checker to get an overview of problem areas you need to work on. From there, you should check accessibility regulations in your area to see which level of compliance you should aim for. A good place to start is WCAG 2 Level AA.
10. Look Into Your Site’s Speed and Mobile Usability
Website speed and mobile usability are now factors in Google’s SEO ranking algorithm, making it an important player in your SEO performance.
Mobile usability
Statista claims that mobile devices account for around half of all global website traffic. Given that the figure in the US is roughly 60–65%, your healthcare website must be mobile-friendly. Here are some ideas to keep in mind for mobile SEO and usability:
- Use responsive web design. Make sure the design of your website adopts and responds to the type of device users are on
- Make sure all content, including video, images, etc. is viewable on a mobile device
Avoid pop-ups or other overlays, as they take up a huge amount of screen space on mobile devices - Don’t use very small or thin fonts that force users to zoom in all the time on their mobile devices
- Make sure the elements on your site that are touch-responsive are easy to tap on a mobile device by spacing them out
Site Speed
If a website loads more than two to three seconds, most consumers will leave it—a difficult bar to meet! But you have to make investments in a speedy website if you want to offer the finest patient experience and raise your SEO results. Working on your site speed requires some consideration of the following:
- Downloading a page’s components takes most of its loading time, and most of them call for an HTTP request. By cutting the components on your page, you will speed up your website and lower the HTTP requests.
- Cut the number of redirects your website runs since they slow down your site and generate extra HTTP requests.
- Although broken links damage user experience, they can also cause latency on your site.
- Cut the image file sizes in your work. Big file images will add to your website’s overall size; so, the longer your page takes to load the more this is true. Use a free online image optimizer to best enhance your picture files.
- Uploading video files straight to your web page is not advised since they are considerably bigger than picture files. Host your video using a video hosting service; then, embed it on your website to conserve space and expedite load times.
- It’s not something to be overlooked as investing in both a speedier site and a more mobile-friendly site will improve the digital experience for possible patients, help your company seem more trustworthy, and raise your SEO results.
11. Don’t forget about Bing in your healthcare SEO strategy
Yes, Google has the market share of searches (especially in the US). But 10% of search traffic still comes from Bing and Yahoo! Luckily, you don’t need to do anything different to optimize your site for Bing searches. For both search engines, focus on providing a high-quality, accurate, and trustworthy digital experience.
However, you should still configure Bing’s webmaster tool, so you can monitor your site’s Bing performance and optimize for easy wins.
IndeedSEO is an all-in-one SEO Tool That Can Improve Your Healthcare SEO
To improve your SEO rankings across the board, it’s critical to use a collaborative platform that marketing and web teams can use to create better website experiences.
With IndeedSEO, you can maximize organic growth and get your site seen by more potential patients. Our all-in-one platform helps you create a competitive website through keyword research, competitive analysis, and content optimization.
Over 15% of US hospitals and clinics already use IndeedSEO to drive growth, optimize their SEO strategy, and provide a better digital experience. IndeedSEO has also been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave SEO Platforms and has been consistently chosen as an SEO leader with an intuitive user experience by G2.