Medical SEO: Connecting Patients to Doctors Quickly
SEO is an acronym that gets thrown around like candy, tempting every blogger, marketer, and business owner to investigate its meaning and use it to their advantage.
You might be wondering, “What’s this Medical SEO business?” Medical SEO is simply the business of optimizing a website for search engine visibility specific to a medical practice, clinic, or hospital.
Imagine if a patient could find their perfect healthcare provider with just a few clicks. That’s the magic of proper SEO. It’s like a digital GPS, guiding potential patients straight to the doctor’s virtual doorstep.
But, wait, there’s more.😊
Stay with me as we explore the nitty-gritty of SEO in the medical field, making connections quicker, smoother, and as efficient as a well-conducted surgery. But, fear not, there’s no anesthesia required for this deep dive! I promise it’ll be more enlightening than intimidating.
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What Is Medical SEO?
Medical SEO, or Healthcare SEO, is about strengthening a healthcare center’s online presence. It is like a digital bridge, enhancing a healthcare center’s online presence to connect patients with providers.
You climb higher on search engine lists by tweaking your website and promoting positive mentions from other sites. A smart Medical SEO strategy can consistently guide interested folks—potential patients—straight to your healthcare services.
How to get Search Engine Optimization in Healthcare?
Any practitioner wants to land high on search engine results pages as a patient is searching for someone to help heal their ailment, but it can be difficult for their medical practice to be visible.
Medical SEO strategy services are one way to approach the challenge of being seen by potential clients, but many need help understanding the process.
Questions start to surface.
Is SEO good for new patient marketing?
Yeah. However, developing medical SEO doesn’t guarantee your ability to acquire and market your patients in healthcare clinics. A high ranking on Google helps patients get a better look at you.
Patients are looking, but what are they finding?
What is medical search engine optimization (SEO)?
About 95% of people search Google for health information, and proper medical SEO is a technique for marketing a website on Google. Unfortunately, it’s complicated and takes time, which is why most medical professionals have resisted for so long.
Many factors go into medical SEO, from on-page optimization (such as using keywords throughout your website) to off-page optimization (such as building backlinks to your website from other high-quality websites). A successful medical SEO strategy will consider all of these factors to achieve the best results.
Google uses a variety of criteria to assess how relevant a website is to a specific search. The more relevant you are, the higher you rank. Isn’t it simple?
Key benefit
There are several reasons healthcare professionals should prioritize medical SEO, but the primary benefit is most likely an increase in visitors via online traffic. In addition, you’re more likely to get new patients if your SEO is good.
When potential patients search for doctors or medical facilities online, they are likely to use specific keywords or phrases. Medical SEO involves optimizing website content and other online materials using these keywords so that they appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
This makes it more likely that potential patients will find and click on your website, resulting in more appointments booked.
Why invest in medical SEO?
Let’s face it you will need to invest time and money to accomplish this, so why?
This should be obvious, bring more patients into the office. But first, ask yourself 2 questions:
- What are the patients looking for? A positive health experience with 4 essential factors: Emotional support, Digital adoption, Trust, and Access to you.
- What SEO campaign makes sense for me to implement to deliver that message?
I’m not going to lie. It has been some years since it has worked.
Due to the digitalization of consumer services, patients are often tempted into acquiring specialized healthcare services online — often from a phone or tablet, but the fact is that SEO is very much alive.
75% of search queries will never go beyond the first or second result, and only 7% browse past the first page.
Medical SEO Guide
Why do medical professionals need to understand SEO?
The SEO concept can easily be explained using the correct terminology. SEO is the process by which a site’s search visibility can improve. A search engine uses several factors to estimate the relevance of the medical website page.
The higher your relevance, the better your ranking. Simple?
Back to the patients
What are they looking for? What comments and questions have you constantly encountered? Can you answer them through an SEO campaign?
Medical SEO is often an attractive marketing strategy and is geared to increase sales for incoming patients through web traffic. The more SEO a site offers a new patient, the more chances it gets.
You are what you EAT
Google cares what you EAT, or now officially EEAT. Are you the Expert in your area? Does the search see you as an authority? Are you trustworthy?
Make it Easy
Patients want access to their medical professionals. They want to be heard and get answers to their problems.
What media forms are you using to show them you have the answers? What is your unique proposition?
Search engine rankings consider many inputs and may seem daunting at first:
- Web design
- Web development
- Headlines and metatags
- Content quality and freshness
- Local search engine optimization
But make it easy for patients, and give them easy answers with access to all forms of media
- Video
- Social media engagement
- Articles/ Blogs
Content is still King! Quality content is what Google Search wants, and it’s what your patients want.
What about ads?
In short, maybe not.
Search engines have been driven hard by paid ads and can have an immediate direct response to a focused campaign and be highly effective. If you had a monthly ad, spend budget of $2-5k a month that brought you 20-30x that, wouldn’t you want to know more?
Then, what is your CTR (click-through rate)? A better position will drive a higher CTR (46.9% for #1).
But 72% would instead click the organic results. So it makes sense to consider both.
Have you figured out your focus? What resources are at your disposal?
What are people saying?
What are other patients saying if you tell someone to “google my business”? Take advantage of Google Reviews.
Patients want to know that other patients had the experience they are seeking. Again, this builds trust!
Medical practice positioned for converting
After a patient has arrived at the website, you must still “convert”. The website must also be wise to convert visitors to customers and be responsive to the latest trends.
Are you set up to handle email and phone calls to finish this process of booking appointments? Is there an automated process in place?
Still trying to figure out where to start?
There are medical SEO services companies that specialize in SEO for medical. They can set up a focused digital marketing campaign to speed up the process with the experience to execute.
MD Connect has worked with hundreds of leading hospitals, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies and national practices to produce significant performance improvements in their digital campaigns. We look forward to doing the same for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Bottom Line
If you are a medical professional looking to attract more patients, medical SEO is a great way to do it.
By investing time and money into medical SEO, you can improve your online visibility and reach more people who need your services.
Medical SEO can also help you build trust with potential patients by creating quality content that answers their questions and concerns. When it comes to medical SEO, content is still king. So make sure your website has plenty of high-quality, relevant content that potential patients will find useful.
Lastly, this may be daunting but necessary in today’s world. Patients are looking and they need to find you.
