5 Healthcare SEO Best Practices to Get More Patients

Did you know there are over 100 billion searches for healthcare-related topics on Google alone each year? Whether people seek out a provider, look for information about a treatment, or are symptom-checking, search engines are the go-to place for information. 

That’s why healthcare search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for reaching these prospective patients when they’re searching.

To help you get started, we’ve compiled five best practices to follow to nail your healthcare SEO strategy!

How to do healthcare SEO to get more patients

Investing in SEO for healthcare is the key to increasing visibility, building trust, and earning new patients. Here’s how you can do it to get more patients:

1. Build your local presence to attract patients in your area

As a healthcare provider, you typically provide care for people in your local area. As a result, you want your practice to be visible in search results when someone in your area searches for medical help.

Building your local profile helps you reach these people as they’re searching for a healthcare provider near them. 

So, how do you build your local presence?

📍Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is what appears when people conduct searches for practices in their local area. It’s important that you claim and optimize this profile, so people can find your practice first.

Create the best Google Business Profile by:

• Verifying your name, address, and phone number are correct
• Adding photos of your practice and staff to enhance your listing
• Including a short description about your practice
• Linking to your website to drive traffic back to your site

📍 Target local keywords

Local keywords play a crucial role in telling people and search engines that your practice is relevant to a local search.

For example, if someone had an endocrinology practice in New York City, they’d want to target a keyword like “Endocrinologist New York City” or “NYC Endocrinologist.”

Targeting local keywords, like in the example above, tells search engines about your location and when you should appear in local searches. So, if you’re based in New York City and targeting local keywords with that location in them, it signals to Google that you’re relevant for appearing in search results for that city.

You’ll want to integrate these local keywords throughout your website to show relevancy. You can target keywords like

• [city] [practice type]
• [practice type] [city]
• [practice type] [city, state]

If you were a pediatrician in Dallas, your keywords might look like

• Dallas pediatrics
• Dallas pediatrician
• Pediatrician Dallas
• Pediatrician in Dallas, TX

Targeting these keywords will help you reach locals searching for a provider in your area.

📍 Manage organization listings across directories

Your practice appears across directories on the web, from Yelp and Bing Places to MedlinePlus and ZocDoc. It’s important to keep your information accurate across the web, no matter where you appear. 

You’ll want to check your listings across the web to ensure your name, contact information, hours of operation, and location is accurate. That ensure people can easily find the right information for your practice, no matter where they’re looking.

2. Create content to educates your prospective patients

Did you know that 90% of adults in the U.S. struggle with health literacy? Health and medical information is difficult for the average American to understand — but that provides a golden opportunity for you to make it understandable.

Creating content that explains complex medical topics, in understandable language, is a great way to help your audience understand challenging medical topics. This sets a great impression with prospective patients — they know you’re willing to take the time to make complicated medical topics understandable.

Additionally, your content is good for E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is a standard Google uses to determine the credibility and quality of content, which influences your content’s ability to rank.

So, if you create high-quality, informative medical content for your audience, it’ll likely rank well in search.

You can write about any number of topics that fit within your area of practice. Here are some examples:

• How to Combat Seasonal Allergies (Personal Care Physicians)
• How to Administer Medicine to Children (Pediatrics)
• The Causes of Acne and How to Treat and Prevent It (Dermatology)
• How to Prevent Heart Disease (Cardiology)
• What to Expect After a Joint Replacement Surgery (Orthopedics)
• How to Cope with Anxiety (Psychiatry)
• How to Prevent Cavities (Dentistry)

Writing about topics in your niche will help establish your practice as an authoritative resource in your area, while helping you rank in crucial healthcare search results.

3. Make sure your technical SEO is sound to ensure a positive experience

One of the most important parts of healthcare SEO isn’t on the surface of your website — it’s on the back-end. Your website’s technical SEO is crucial to ensuring website visitors have a positive experience on the front-end of your website, so they stay engaged with your practice.

The longer they engage with your website, the more relevant your pages appear to Google.

Technical SEO encompasses tasks like:

• Ensuring your website loads quickly
• Integrating responsive design for easy mobile usage
• Creating a simple navigation that makes it easy to find information
• Integrating schema markup to help search engines understand your pages
• Securing your website to protect patient information

When people are sick or in pain, they don’t want to deal with a website that takes forever to load or is difficult to use. By addressing the technical aspects of your website, you’ll help deliver a positive experience for prospective patients and keep them on your website to book an appointment.

4. Acquire links from reputable healthcare resources to build trust

A key part of healthcare SEO is building your practice’s trust and authority. One of the best ways to do that is to build your backlink profile.

Backlinks are links to your healthcare website from other reputable websites. These links help transfer some “link juice” to your website, which ultimately improves your trust and credibility. Basically, they serve as an endorsement that your website is reputable and authoritative.

You can try earning backlinks by:

• Creating high-quality, linkable content
• Guest blogging on valuable industry websites
• Analyzing competitor backlinks to see where they get theirs (and identify opportunities you have to get links)

You can try to target healthcare directories, like Healthgrades or WebMD, or popular health blogs, like Well or Everyday Health.

Earning backlinks from reputable healthcare industry websites will help boost your trust and authority signals to Google, which ultimately helps you rank better in search results.

5. Build your reputation online to earn patient trust

As a healthcare provider, your reputation is everything. Earning trust is a huge step in getting patients to choose your practice. That’s why a core part of healthcare SEO is building your online reputation.

That starts with earning reviews on your local profiles, like your Google Business Profile. In fact, 73% of patients say reviews heavily influence them when choosing a provider. That means your practice needs to spend the time getting reviews for your profile, so you can attract future patients.

You can obtain reviews by:

• Inviting people to review your practice when they visit in-office
• Sending a follow-up email post-appointment inviting them to review their experience
• Sending an SMS text inviting them to review after an appointment

Once you get the reviews, your job isn’t done yet. You must take time to respond to your patients, whether they give positive or negative feedback. It shows you’re attentive and listen to them — it shows prospective patients that, too, which sets a good impression.

Increase patient volume with help from WebFX

If you’re looking to keep your practice booked with patients, WebFX can help you do it. We’ve driven over 9.8M leads for healthcare practices just like yours. We know what it takes to help you reach prospective patients and drive them to select you for their care.

Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our SEO services!