What is SEO for Healthcare and Medical Websites?
Medical SEO is the same thing as SEO (search engine optimization). However, it's specialized around the focus of healthcare and medical websites. Medical SEO involves the process of improving your medical website's rankings in search engines for targeted keywords and search queries organically without paying for traffic or ads. In other words, it means putting together an SEO strategy for your medical website to appear higher in search engine rankings.
The objective of SEO for medical practices is to show up on page one for as many relevant search term variables as possible. Along with SEO, there can be local and national SEO strategies to consider for your healthcare and medical website.
When it comes to local SEO, users will typically add a location term into their search query to help find medical clinics around them. It's common for users to pick from the first three results in the map pack that appears from the search result. With this in mind, it's important to create a Google My Business account (recently renamed to Google Business Profile) to help your medical website appear in these map packs locally. Adding local SEO services to your lineup can help customers in your area find you. For national SEO, that focuses on your medical clinic reaching broader audiences than just your local area. National SEO services help increase your brand recognition, target a vast and qualified customer market, and create sustainable growth for your business.
Why is SEO important for Healthcare and Medical Practices?
People tend to lean toward online resources these days to find information, and patients searching for doctors or health information are not the exception. This is why a thorough healthcare SEO strategy is crucial for a medical practice to attract new patients and to keep its website ranking high on search engines in order to maintain high visibility.
Google's infamous “Local Pack” is where any business wants to be in a competitive local market. The Local 3-Pack is a list of three local businesses based on a user's search that are located at or near the top of Google's search engine results page (SERP). Ranking high in SEO for medical practices on SERPs are determined by the relevance, distance, and prominence of the medical or healthcare website. In other words, strategic healthcare marketing and SEO is vital for a medical practice to increase its online presence and gain clientele.
Healthcare is a YMYL Industry
Your Money Your Life (YMYL) industries are ones that have the means to majorly impact a person's money or life. Because of this, content on websites for these types of industries are held to a much higher standard in terms of quality. Google states in its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, “We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL pages because low-quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact a person's happiness, health, financial stability or safety.” For a healthcare website's SEO strategy, this means making any and all website content as high-quality as possible to ensure that search engines are translating your content as being a reputable source.
SEO Offers Sustainable Growth
SEO for healthcare is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies because it targets people who are already searching for the type of service your healthcare or medical practice offers. What's important is making sure the keywords and keyphrases used to describe your niche market are being continually optimized online across your entire website. SEO for healthcare compounds in value over time as all facets of marketing relate back to a comprehensive healthcare SEO strategy. The demand for SEO continues to grow in this industry and is evershifting, so consistent time and effort put into it is crucial for evolving with new healthcare marketing and SEO methods.
SEO is Not Based on Ad Spend
Page one of search results typically have a mix of paid and organic results. Organic results are unpaid and, if popping up on page one, are the websites with a great healthcare SEO strategy. SEO for medical practices can save you money by not having to pay to place on page one of search results. Having a solid campaign ensures that potential customers are receiving the most accurate information from your website based on their search intent rather than seeing your content because it's been paid to be seen more.
Find More Patients to Help Improve Their Healths
Having an online presence with high visibility will ultimately lead your medical practice to more potential patients. A part of having great SEO for medical practices is the creation of content that naturally aligns with what your target audience is searching for, which results in your website standing out in a saturated market. Ultimately, high exposure online for your medical practice will get you the clientele and help you better serve your community.
Healthcare SEO Strategies
Find Relevant Medical Keywords
With a healthcare SEO strategy, it's important to find the right keywords that help match the user's intent and your industry. You could start by finding keywords that highlight the medical services your clinic offers. This typically is what your customers are searching for or are interested in most, so it's important to find keywords that help match the services you offer.
When you find these keywords, be sure not to overstuff your content with them. Having a focus keyword placed in multiple areas of your website can be less effective than placing them in the areas that matter most (such as your title tag, headers, URLs, image alt text, etc.). Your medical website can place specific long-tail keywords into your content to help make it more relevant, readable, and natural. It helps separate your website from other medical websites, such as WebMD, and make your medical clinic more professional and credible for customers.
Match Keywords with the Right Intent
The first step in learning how to do SEO for a medical practice is finding relevant medical keywords. From there, it's important to see how you can match those keywords with the right user intent. You can match this intent by creating content that matches with what the searcher is intending to find. There are four types of intent your content could be focused around:
Informational: Lots of searchers typically go to search engines to find and learn more information about something specific. Individuals with informational intent usually have a specific question or want to know more about a specific topic.
Navigational: This type of direct intent is when searchers go to find a desired page or website they already know about or know exists.
Transactional: People sometimes like to search online to find a specific product or service to purchase. Individuals with transactional intent have the purpose to buy something at that moment. Often this can mean that they already know exactly what they want to buy and they're trying to get to that desired page to buy it.
Commercial: This type of intent usually combines informational and transactional intent. Individuals with commercial intent might be thinking about purchasing a product or service, but want to see all the options, details, and information that helps them make a decision on which is best to purchase.
Creating and framing your optimized content with one of these intents in mind, will help make your website content more effective and successful overtime.
Optimize for Local Search
Local search simply means the act of searching for products or services based on a location. According to a recent survey, the majority of people still preferred receiving in-person healthcare in comparison to Telehealth. This means that the majority of people will search local when looking for medical care. A local SEO company can help your healthcare SEO strategy by optimizing for local search.
For example, let's say you run a healthcare practice in El Paso, Texas. If you want to get found for keywords like “medical clinic el paso tx” or “healthcare near me”, optimizing for local search can get the job done. Adding keywords and locations within key areas of the website is fundamental for local SEO, including the meta title, H1 tag, and URL. If needed, create an “areas served” or “location” page if you have multiple locations or services. If you offer any sort of local services, make local search optimization a top priority.
Create Authoritative Content
Authoritative content proves your credibility, trust, and reliability to speak on a specific topic. Focus on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) as you create your content to improve your sitewide rankings. Google (and other search engines) want to show the best possible results to its users. Authoritative content helps show search engines that your site can be a trusted source for information.
Using author bios will help establish trust and credibility, especially within the healthcare industry. Readers and potential patients want to trust a healthcare provider. Add credentials and a background for any writer that contributes to your blog or web pages. If for some reason the blog or web page was not written by a credible source or physician, make sure to gain approval from one. Leaving a breadcrumb (link path) trail on the website can help prove your credibility, trust, and authority to speak on a certain topic.
Enhance Quality of Website Content
When your content is out-of-date, it's important for your medical website to keep it relevant and up-to-date for your customers. Having high quality content comes with the intention that you're giving your customers the most relevant and credible information on your medical website. If something is false and from the past, they won't find your healthcare or medical practice as trustworthy as other competitors in your field. It's important to clean up your website content and enhance it to make it higher quality overall.
There are lots of ways in which you can enhance the quality of your website's content. Here a few examples:
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Make your content up-to-date and accurate. If you have any outdated or false information on your website, no customer will want to invest, visit, or trust your medical or healthcare clinic. Especially in the medical field, most individuals are precautious in who they can trust with their health.
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Answer all possible questions a site visitor might have. Answering your client's questions before they visit your site can be extremely valuable to your medical clinic. It helps recognize that your clinic has the answers or resources to help clients with what they may be experiencing. It can also show that you're a valuable resource to their issues or questions they may have over time.
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Back up claims and statements with scientific evidence. It's one thing to post information on your website that might seem true, but having the statistics and scientific evidence to back up your claims helps add value to them. It not only adds value to your website, but it adds credibility and trust with search engines to showcase your information is trustworthy and credible. Including this type of scientific evidence can help be the key to helping your search rankings increase over time.
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Include internal links to other valuable resources on your website. When people finish reading content on your site, it can be a good idea to direct them to another part of your website that might interest them. Adding internal links, with the right anchor text, can help keep people on your site longer while also improving your keyword performance.
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Analyze competitor pages to see how they structure content. If you're wanting to stand out against your competitors, start by looking at what your competitors are doing. Ask yourself these questions:
- What are the images / visual assets being used?
- Are there videos?
- Is the content detailed and long or a shorter piece?
- How is their content structured, organized, or laid out on the page?
Take a look at what they're doing and see how you can do it better. Look at what's working and not working to take note of how your healthcare or medical clinic can take your own approach on it.
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Include a table of contents or jump links. Sometimes with longer form pieces of content including a table of contents or jump links can help improve the user experience. By guiding site visitors to what they're wanting to see, it helps them find their information easily and doesn't require them to constantly scroll and read the entire page.
Remove or Update Poor Quality Content
When you're looking at updating content on your medical or healthcare website, it's also equally important to update existing content that's poor quality to enhance its quality and value. While there may be some information that's needed on your website, sometimes that information doesn't need to be indexed for search engines.
If content is blatantly unrelated to your medical and healthcare practice, or is spam or misleading, it should either be marked as noindex/nofollow so it doesn't show up on Google SERPs (search engine results page) or be removed and redirected to a better page. This type of content and pages most of the time do not add any value. Because of this, it helps to clean up a website to better explain to search engines, and the individuals that visit your site, what your medical website's intent and goals are for your practice. To avoid making your content outdated, be sure NOT to add the following into your page's URL:
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Dates and months
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Numbers (Example: 6 Tips, 5 Ways, etc.)
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Anything that can limit a page from being evergreen (Evergreen content is the type of content that never becomes outdated and continually stays relevant. It is always a great resource to have on your website.)
Account for Necessary Pages
While your medical website should be focused on attracting new clients, it should also be a valuable resource for your current clients. There are a variety of necessary pages your medical clinic needs to include on your website for it to comply with rules and regulations:
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Privacy Policy: It's important to update your clinic's privacy policy on your website. You want your patients to know you will keep their information safe and confidential. Updating and publishing your privacy policy (and terms and conditions if you have it) helps you appear more professional and transparent.
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About Us: This is your healthcare and medical chance to share with your patients how long you've been in the healthcare industry, your history, successes, etc. It helps build a bond and trust with them.
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Contact Us: Make sure you make your hours of operation and contact information visible and accessible for your patients to find. Creating this page helps people understand when they're able to utilize your services.
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Physician Team Directory: If your practice has several physicians and doctors with different specialties and medical fields, it's important to highlight them through a directory. You can highlight their medical background, specialties, where they received their education, include a headshot, and a short biography to help show what they do in their free time and make them more relatable.
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Patient Resources: Most healthcare and medical offices provide a patient resource area on their website for current clients. Most of the time patient resources include basic appointment procedures, patient forms and instructions, and accepted health insurance.
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Urgent Care Information: Sometimes health concerns may be more severe and might need more immediate attention. Be sure to include urgent care information for those who have urgent issues your clinic isn't able to attend to right away.
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HIPAA: A HIPAA compliant website is only required if the website is used to collect, display, store, process, or transmit PHI (protected health information). If your website simply showcases your company, provides contact information, and lists the services you provide, then there are no HIPAA requirements for your website.
Start Blogging and Creating Additional Assets
Including the addition of a blog can be important to share valuable and insightful information for your clients. Especially for patients who might seek additional information on a condition or current medical information, your healthcare and medical clinic can provide your insight and information through a blog. Providing new content on your blog is not only beneficial to your clients, but also search engines that like to see fresh content. Search engines notice when you're posting valuable content that brings in organic traffic and value. This in return, can result in higher rankings.
Content can also be expanded past your blog by including frequently asked questions (FAQs) from clients, defining medical terms by adding a glossary, creating ultimate guides on common medical conditions, and through visuals such as infographics and informational images. Adding all of these forms of content help your clinic target specific specialties in the healthcare industry that's appropriate for your practice. For example, Manta has an Ultimate Guide for SEO for Dentists that helps assist dental practices who may need SEO assistance. Your healthcare and medical clinic can get specific as well.
Create a Seamless User Experience
A user's experience is important to keep in mind when it comes to optimizing your online content because it creates the first impression for the viewer. Having a quality user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) set up for your website will generate more conversions by improving overall user satisfaction. Here are some important UX/UI aspects to remember for optimizing your online presence.
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Mobile Responsiveness: Creating the best user experience includes optimizing interfaces to adjust to a person's device. The design and experience a user has with your website should be seamless across any device being used. Many people will search for information using their smartphones, so it's crucial for your business to optimize mobile versions of the site to take advantage of potential customers searching the web on their mobile device.
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Design Quality: Non-text elements are a great way to optimize on a website. However, it can hinder your site unless done correctly. Fonts and sizes chosen for the site should be easily readable for your online visitors. The standard is no less than 16px for both mobile and desktop experiences. There should also be plenty of room for the body copy on a webpage. It's important to make sure your web pages aren't overly-crowded with non-text elements as it can make it difficult for a reader to easily maneuver around your site.
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Visual Asset Quality: Visual assets included on a website can provide more opportunity for giving people valuable information with a simpler execution. Visual assets differ from things like typical infographics. Visual assets include photos of relevant and interesting people, places, and concepts that relate to the content on a web page. Visual assets also include illustrations, charts, graphs, screenshots with notes, explanations, and examples. The visual assets you decide to add to your website should be high quality and relevant to the content on the page. Ways to increase visual asset quality is to optimize your alt tags, accompany the visual with text, and make sure your file images are the right size for your web page.
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Site Speed: Google rewards faster sites as it's a direct ranking factor for SEO. A page speed for good SEO should be three seconds or less, and this includes mobile version site speed.
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Core Web Vitals: Google's core web vitals are measurable SEO performance metrics that indicate a user's experience on your website. When looking at the core web vitals metrics, it's important to watch for last minute content shifts, slow loading pages, and images that are too large.
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Set Up Your Website Navigation to Follow an SEO-friendly Hierarchy: Site navigation can greatly impact the amount of time and traffic on your site. The three-click rule is something to consider when organizing your website. It shouldn't take a user more than three clicks to get back to the homepage or to make the desired conversion (like scheduling an appointment). Mega menus are another way to keep your site organized and user-friendly. Mega menus on the main page can have and look like: Home, Products, Services, About Us, and Contact pages.
Generate Positive Reviews
While your medical practice will likely generate reviews naturally, you can generate more reviews by taking advantage of email marketing techniques to ask clients to submit a positive review on places like Facebook or Yelp. It's important to keep track of your reviews and stay on top of interacting online with your reviewers.
Positive reviews have a direct impact on your local pack rankings, especially 4 and 5 star reviews. It's also important to interact in a timely manner for potential negative reviews your medical practice may get. A quick response time, specifically toward a negative review, will show your concern and care for an unhappy client and showcase how your business is ready and willing to resolve any issue.
Focus on a Positive Reputation
As you generate beneficial reviews, focus on building an overall positive reputation for your business. Along with reviews, aim to be listed in other reputable online areas such as:
Positive social signals point back to your website to boost your in-person and online reputation. This helps increase trust with both search engines and potential customers. Brand reputation management plays a crucial role within the success of your business and can help your SEO healthcare strategy.
Strive for Authoritative Backlinks
Link Building (or the process of building backlinks) play a critical role in effective SEO for healthcare professionals. As a direct ranking factor, search engines heavily rely on the number of authoritative backlinks when determining which sites to rank on the first page. An authoritative backlink is created when another trustworthy, reliable website adds a link that points back to your site. Here is where options for how to start on your link-building strategy:
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Online Business Directories: This is an easy, cost-effective way to build authoritative backlinks to your site. Many business directories provide a way to add a website link to your site's home page. There is only a certain number of high quality business directories out there, so this shouldn't be your only strategy.
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Hire a Link Building Agency: Link building services are delivered by dedicated agencies or SEO companies to help build backlinks to your website. Although there is cost involved, link building agencies have extensive experience in obtaining quality backlinks. Agencies often have resources and connections to build high-quality links more efficiently.
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Create Backlink Worthy Content: The most natural, organic way to build authoritative backlinks is through creating “backlink worthy” content. Essentially, when you create a page of content that people find valuable, the more likely that other websites will link to your site as a reference. The process of creating quality content can take time but pays off in the long run.
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Submit Quality Guest Posts: If you have the ability to create quality blog posts, submit those blogs to other authoritative healthcare websites within the industry. When you submit the post, follow their writer guidelines and don't forget to add a link within the article that points back to your site.
Overall, you should seek out other reliable medical websites online or within your area and find out how you can collaborate. The process of authoritative link-building takes time but can play a significant role in boosting your online rankings.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in a Healthcare SEO Strategy
Yes, search engines look for ways a website is optimized but they also look for weaknesses and flaws as well. Whether your website is outdated or wasn't designed with SEO in mind initially, finding and fixing these mistakes is crucial. With search engine algorithms constantly updating, it's easy to make mistakes. As you work on creating new content for your site, it's important to know what to stay away from. Here are the most common mistakes to avoid when working on SEO for healthcare:
Duplicate Content
As a medical practice, it may tempt you to copy and paste content from online healthcare resources like WebMD, Healthline, or Mayo Clinic. If content is copied and pasted from one website to another, search engines will flag the copied content. Rankings could drop and the duplicate content could hurt your SEO efforts. Create fresh, new content anytime you add a page to your website. If you need to use information from an existing website, make sure to paraphrase as much as possible and cite the source with a hyperlink.
Missing Meta Titles & Descriptions
Each page on your site should include an optimized meta title and meta description. These snippets of content show search engines what the site is all about and is the first thing users see when searching a keyword. When the title or description is missing, it makes it difficult for search engines to see what the page is relevant for. It also doesn't appear as well on the SERPs as Google would likely fill in the content for you. It's best SEO practice to include the target keyword within both the meta title and description for the best results.
Slow Site Speed
Have you ever visited a web page and the site loaded very slowly? Frustrating, right? To combat this, search engines have included site speed as a ranking factor to provide the best user experience. In terms of numbers, slow site speed is considered to be a page that takes more than 3-4 seconds to load. Between 0-2 seconds to load is best, but this is tricky if you have many elements such as images or videos. Generally, make sure you only have about 1 video per page and all the images have a file size less than 100KB. If you run into site speed issues, your web developer could be a great resource to help optimize your site for faster loading times.
Poor Mobile Usability
Google (and other search engines) now perform what's called “mobile-first indexing”. This essentially means that search engines will index the mobile version of your site first before the desktop version. If the mobile usability is poor (clickable elements don't work, font sizes too large, etc), then you will likely see your rankings drop. Use Google Search Console to find and fix mobile usability mistakes or errors.
Missing XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is essentially a map for search engines to use when indexing (searching) your site pages. If you don't have an XML sitemap (or if it's outdated), search engines will likely skip or miss important pages on your site. In turn, those pages will have a hard time rising to the top of SERPs. Most of the time, you should be able to create an updated sitemap using your CMS (content management system) or web builder. Once created or updated, make sure to submit it to Google Search Console to help Google crawlers better understand how your website is structured and find important pages.
Non-Secure Website (HTTP vs HTTPS)
A non-secure website means your website is not protected with an SSL (secure socket layer) certificate. This type of certificate filters information headed in or out of your site to prevent hacking and loss of crucial information. Yes, it is a common issue within most industries but luckily, the fix is simple. Reach out to your website hosting provider and ask them about an SSL certificate. Most providers make this very easy and will implement it for your website.
Misuse of URLs
Although not a direct ranking factor, the improper use of URLs is a common SEO issue. When you create subpages and new URLs on your website, create a clean URL structure. This means that numbers or characters (other than dashes) should be very rarely used. When a page or URL is no longer live on a site, make use of a 301, 302, or 307 redirect to consolidate authority. Any URLs that are bad (spam) or have not generated any value should be removed and 410 redirected to create a better user experience. The proper use of URLs will help stabilize and boost your SEO efforts.
Avoiding these common mistakes will help the SEO for healthcare professionals and medical websites. If you need more information on common technical SEO issues, our team or professionals can help!
Tips for choosing an SEO Agency for Medical Websites
With so many SEO companies out there, you want to make sure you find the right one that knows how to service your type of business and industry. As a small business, you want to ensure the partnership between your company and another agency is built on trust and common goals. As you consider how to choose a medical practice SEO company, keep these ideas in mind:
1. Get to Know the Company
Before you hire a healthcare marketing and SEO company, do some research! Perform a Google search to explore the company's reputation online. Do they have quality reviews? How long have they been in business? Are they listed in other reputable business directories? Look at these different areas to find out more about the company and their experience. From looking at their website or business listings, you should get a feel for the quality and trustworthiness of the company.
2. Find Their Areas of Expertise
Choosing a team of experts for search engine optimization for medical websites is critical because of the many technical aspects that you may not understand. It's important that you do your research to make sure the company has the skills, experience, and capabilities to meet the needs of your medical practice.
3. Be Cautious of False Promises
Some SEO and digital marketing agencies will often promise results and first page rankings once you sign up for their services. Be cautious of any company that promises these types of results. First page rankings do not depend on how much money is spent—it depends on many factors. This includes how well the company follows best healthcare marketing and SEO practices, the frequency and quality of updates being made to websites, how well a website is providing value to visitors, and the impact following an algorithm update.
It takes time to see results from SEO for healthcare services, typically anywhere from 6 months to a year to see results and traction. Yes, it depends on the competitiveness of the target keyword and area, but results do not come immediately. That is the case with any SEO campaign, but especially in healthcare industries where the competition is strong.
Ask the Right Questions for a Medical Practice SEO Company Before Signing Up
Along with having a background knowledge after researching medical practice SEO companies, some specific questions may also help narrow down your search. Depending on the company's responses, determine how their work will help provide solutions to your small businesses' needs. When hiring an SEO company, consider asking the following questions to ensure the partnership will work harmoniously:
How Long Does it Take for SEO for Medical Websites to Work?
Understanding the timeframe behind SEO helps set expectations right from the start. If an SEO company promises results within weeks or a month, this should raise a red flag. Depending on the competition, it generally takes an average of six to nine months for websites to start seeing ranking improvements on search engines.
A key component to SEO is building relevance, expertise, and trust for a website, which can be a time consuming process. And while there are medical practices that start to see improvements within the first couple of months in their SEO campaigns, it's important to establish the right expectations and understand that it's a long-term strategy that can provide sustainable growth for a business.
Does the Company Have Experience Within the Healthcare Industry?
SEO strategies can vary with different industries—using a company with prior medical practice SEO knowledge could make all the difference. Companies with more years of experience typically will have a more diverse clientele background consisting of clients from a range of industries. Asking about their experience with other medical practices could provide valuable insights during your decision making process.
Is the Company Flexible and Customizable?
Some digital marketing companies have more of a “one-size-fits-all” type of approach, designed to save time and money for the agency. It's important to note that there are best practices that apply to every industry and are necessary in SEO campaigns. Keep a look out for an agency that will offer an adaptable approach to your medical practice SEO campaign. Your medical practice is unique from any other practice out there! Partner with an agency that will provide flexibility and customization to reach your goals and fit in with your business needs.
What Types of Strategies Do You Have in Mind For My Medical Practice?
This question should give a sneak peak of what the SEO agency could offer and work on for your medical practice SEO campaign. Are local SEO services the best option? Is a national SEO campaign the better route for a healthcare facility with offices all over the country? How do they plan to create and implement optimized content? What does their backlink strategy include? Do they plan on helping with business listings? As you learn more about their target strategies, consider whether they would fit into your medical practice's marketing plans.
Manta's Approach to SEO for Healthcare and Medical Practices
Growing your medical practice can take some time, so having the right approach can make all the difference. If you're searching for better rankings on Google SERPs, while also attracting new clients, it's time to ensure you have a strong medical SEO strategy in place. For more than 20 years, Manta has championed the small business by not only helping customers find them, but by helping businesses better connect with their customers.
Whether you have 5 employees or 500, our mission is to empower small and mid-sized businesses to achieve their full potential and reach new customers by claiming their business online, implementing effective SEO, and by building and strengthening your brand. Learn more about growing your healthcare and medical clinic's online presence with small business SEO services.
Manta SEO Gets a Website in the Top 10 Results of Google Every 5 Minutes
We're here to help you grow your search presence and help you find more people to improve their well being! Get in touch with Manta today to learn more about our services.
