Climb To The Top of The Search Results
If you’re the owner or marketing manager of a medical practice, then you know how important it is to have a website where patients can easily schedule appointments. But if potential new patients can’t find your website in the first place, that can pose a major hurdle in terms of growing your clinic. In fact, it can easily stagnate your business.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website in order to rank it higher on search engines, like Google and Bing, for certain keywords and phrases. SEO is an organic digital marketing strategy, which means there’s no advertising involved.
Ranking in the top positions for priority medical keywords can result in a big increase in organic traffic, resulting in more leads for your medical clinic. If you don’t think your website is currently working as hard as it could be to acquire more patients, then you should consider SEO.
How SEO for Medical Clinics Works
In order to understand how SEO works and why it’s beneficial for medical clinics, you need to have an understanding of how search engines work.
Search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, have massive databases full of websites that their bots have crawled. A bot is a program that analyzes every page of a website — which in turn allows a search engine to index those pages within its system. Indexing simply means that a web page has been successfully crawled and cached. If a page is indexed, that means it’s able to show up on the search results page.
When bots crawl websites, they scan them for certain components: mobile performance, page load speed, quality of content, meaning of content, depth of information, and more. The better these qualities are, the higher the likelihood that a website will rank for relevant keywords.
SEO works by improving the important aspects that search engines typically look for so that a website has a higher chance of ranking better. If a website is able to rank on the first page for its most valuable keywords, then it can easily turn into a revenue-generating machine that can grow your medical clinic for years.
The 4 Components of a Successful Medical SEO Strategy
The medical SEO strategy that we run at OppGen analyzes your website and content through four different components of SEO.
1. Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on your website — not so much its design (though having a clean, well-designed website certainly can help it rank higher), but the “back end” of things, like its code structure and page load times.
If you want your clinic website to rank high on the search results page, you need to have a fast website that’s optimized for all devices.
It’s not enough to have a mobile-friendly website at this point in time; Google has started to implement a “mobile-first” approach to ranking websites. This means it will rank based on the speed of your website’s mobile version. If your website doesn’t yet have a mobile-friendly option, your first priority should be to find a web development agency that can build this for you. It will be essential to the success of your clinic.
In terms of site structure, your medical clinic website should have the following pages:
- Home
- Service and procedure pages
- Patient testimonials
- Location and contact pages
- Blog
These pages answer the basic who, what, when, where, why, and how questions for patients, who will be seeking answers and researching medical services on a search engine.
2. Local SEO
Modern search engines can find a user’s location, which is why adding the phrase “near me” to a search shows results nearby. If your website doesn’t rank on the first or second page for local searches, then it’s time to make sure it does.
Getting your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) listed in local directories, such as Yellow Pages, Yelp, Healthgrades, Doximity, and Google My Business, is important, because it can bring your clinic’s website to the forefront of search results for prospective patients in your area.
3. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO might as well be synonymous with content marketing, the practice of creating powerful informational content to get people to buy your products or utilize your services.
The days of keyword stuffing for SEO are long gone. Bots — particularly Google’s bots — are advanced enough that they are able to comprehend information closely to how we do. You want to create content that’s written in a conversational voice — nothing too complex for your prospective patients but also doesn’t dumb things down too much.
4. Off-Page SEO
After you create powerful, robust content for prospects, you need to get the word out through social media shares, five-star reviews, and link building.
Social media sharing can be done easily once you’ve set up your clinic’s social media pages. Five-star reviews are fairly easy as well — provide excellent service and request patients to leave a review on Google or Yelp. Link building, which refers to links on other websites that point back to your clinic’s website, is a bit trickier and will take more time and effort.
Social media shares, link building, and five-star reviews tell search engines that your website’s content is informative and worth sharing, making it more likely to rank higher on search engines.
Why it’s a Good Idea to Invest in a Medical SEO Strategy
Cost-Efficient & Compounds Over Time
SEO does take time and patience, but it’s well worth the effort. The more time you spend refining a strategy, the better your website will perform over the coming months and years. Since SEO has a cumulative effect, the work you put into it is compounded. Since the cost of SEO is just a recurring monthly expense, you can actually get more out of your strategy the longer you run it. This results in a larger return on investment in the long run.
Increases Your Practice’s Visibility & Credibility
The more informative and useful your content is, the more likely you’ll start to have people sharing your content and building links back to your website and its content. As the number of backlinks rises, your clinic website will have an increased chance of ranking better since search engines use backlinks as a way to determine content quality.
71% of Google searches resulted in an organic click on the first page — not a search ad click. It’s incredibly rare for anyone to click past the first or second page these days. Why? Prospects trust Google to find them the best possible matches to their search, and many of them tend to prefer clicking on organic search results rather than paid ads. If a site is at the top of the SERPs, it’s there for a reason. Google’s bots found that site because of its credible content.
In the world of SEO, credibility is awarded with higher visibility.
Encourages the Creation of Robust, Informational Content
With SEO, you only have control over a handful of factors. You cannot control who links back to your website or leaves reviews, and there are some limitations on website speed and design, depending on your domain and server. But you are in complete control of the content you create for your clinic’s website and the keywords you aim to rank for.
Start Acquiring More Patients with Medical SEO
SEO takes a while before you start to see the results pay off — and that doesn’t take the constant adjustments you’ll have to make to your site and its content into account. The search results page can change at the drop of a hat. As a medical professional, you don’t have the luxury to focus on your SEO strategy and create content on a regular basis — your patients are your top priority.
At OppGen, we want your patients to remain your top priority. Our medical SEO strategy goes above and beyond what most other medical SEO agencies offer. We can build you a lightning-fast website, track keywords and help boost your SERP position, and create high-quality content with our in-house content writers.
Contact us today for more information or fill out our free digital audit.