What is Healthcare SEO?
Healthcare SEO is the process of optimizing your healthcare facilities’ online index to enhance its visibility and attract more traffic from search engines. By adjusting various internal and external factors, healthcare SEO can enhance the site’s ranking and attract even more consumers – in this case, patients.
Why is SEO Important in Healthcare?
SEO is crucial in the healthcare industry for several reasons, including:
- Increased Patient Acquisition
- Enhanced Trust
- Competitive Edge
- Top-of-Mind Awareness.
Step 1: Use Social Media & Google Business Profile for Reviews
The use of online reviews in establishing credibility and trust is therefore a potent weapon in the digital healthcare environment. Here’s why:
- 71% of patients consider online reviews as a decision making tool in choosing a physician.
- 43% of patients would choose an out-of-network provider if their reviews are positive.
To maximize the impact of reviews, healthcare providers should:
- Encourage patients to leave a review through follow-up emails or text messages.
- Make the reviewing process as simple as possible by linking directly to the review pages.
Step 2: Create Helpful Content Based on Keywords
Content speaks volumes about your SEO strategy. Start by identifying the main pages of your site, such as:
- Homepage
- Services
- About Us
- Contact Information
Focusing the website’s content to answer questions asked by potential patients and target specific healthcare keywords is paramount to achieve healthcare SEO success.
Step 3: Optimize Your Site’s HTML Tags
Html tags assist search engines in identifying the layout of your website. Properly optimized tags in the following components of website content can greatly affect its rank:
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Alt Tags
Step 4: Interlink Your Webpages
Linking webpages is important in the distribution of traffic within the site and boosts the SEO ranking of the site. This way, all popular pages are set up to link to other content to ensure that all top content receives the exposure it needs.
Step 5: Build Listings for Local SEO
Local SEO is beneficial for hospitals that have branches in various locations. The NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number) information of your healthcare facility has to be similar in all the online directories you use. Presence of conflicting data online is detrimental to your local SEO rankings and warrants the use Listing Management tools to ensure regular update of NAP data across the internet.
Step 6: Check Your Site’s Technical Health
A technologically sound website is mandatory for the success of SEO efforts. It is important to avoid any problems, including slow loading, broken links or bad design that may affect the website by preventing potential patients from accessing and seamlessly interact with the site, leading to a push down in SEO rankings. Healthcare providers should consider utilizing the following tools to regularly monitor and address any technical challenges:
- Google Search Console (GSC)
- Site Audit Tools
Step 7: Improve User experience (UX) with Site Architecture
A well-structured site positively contributes to its associated user experiences and ensure that it is SEO friendly. Ensure the site’s hierarchy and structure allows seamless navigation between and across the homepage and other key pages by ensuring and adopting best practices that ensure all pages are no more than three subfolders deep to ensure relevant content is never more than two or three clicks away.
Step 8: Build Backlinks
Back links are like recommendations from other similar websites. They can really enhance the authority and the SEO ranking of the healthcare website. Healthcare providers can build backlinks by ensuring that:
- Website Content Worth is Linking To: Produce content that other sites will want to link to — this would be either fresh medical findings or interesting and extraordinary cases.
- Competitor Analysis: Utilize available tools, such as Backlink Gap, to identify the sites which link to your competitors and consider the appropriate actions to attract similar links.
Improve Your Website’s Healthcare SEO and Capture Patients Searching for Your Services with RehabMarketing.io.
Are you ready to improve on Your Healthcare SEO? At RehabMarketing.io, we leverage our core strengths and competencies in digital marketing and web design for healthcare facilities. Our healthcare SEO services focus on making healthcare institutions visible and easily accessible on the internet. Contact RehabMarketing.io right now and discover how we can assist you to gain more customers and outcompete your competitors.