Medical SEO: 3+ Reasons to Invest in SEO for Medical Practices
Boost your medical practice with SEO services. Medical SEO improves site ranking, drives more traffic, and increases patient numbers. Get started with keyword selection, page load time improvement, and link building.
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insights from 98,500+ hours of health & wellness marketing experience
Did you know that 89% of marketers say search engine optimization (SEO) is successful? If you haven’t invested in medical SEO, you’re missing an excellent opportunity to drive more interested traffic and patients to your practice.
On this page, we’ll discuss what medical SEO is, five reasons to invest in it, and three tips for getting started with SEO for medical practices. Keep reading to learn more and call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our SEO services.
What is medical SEO?
Medical SEO is the process of improving your medical site’s ranking in search results to help more patients find your practice. It involves numerous techniques, such as including relevant keywords in your copy, earning links to your website, and improving your page speed. Medical SEO is an integral part of digital marketing for medical practices.
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Why should I invest in medical SEO?
Medical SEO services offer numerous benefits.
Let’s take a look at a few reasons to invest in SEO for your medical practice.
1. You continually drive traffic to your practice’s site
Medical SEO is essential because it helps you continuously drive qualified traffic to your website. Google fields more than 3.5 billion searches each day. People regularly conduct searches looking for information.
With so many people searching, you have a larger pool of people potentially looking for your medical practice. When you invest in SEO for medical practices, you help more people find your office in search results.
When users conduct searches, 75% don’t go past the first page of results. Without SEO, people may never find your medical practice. With SEO, however, you can optimize your site to get to the first page of results and drive more appointments.
2. You reach people already searching for your practice
People are already searching for medical offices like yours. They’re using Google to find the practice that best fits their needs. When you invest in SEO, you help those users find your practice first and drive them to your website.
Approximately 93% of online sessions begin with search engines. Some of these sessions will involve searching for medical services your office offers. If you want these leads to choose your practice over someone else, you must invest in SEO.
3. You remain competitive with other practices
One of the most important reasons to invest in SEO for medical practices is that you stay in competition.
There are dozens of other medical offices competing to drive traffic to their website. If they’re investing in SEO and you aren’t, they’re going to outrank you in search results.
SEO levels the playing ground for medical practices of varying sizes too.
Whether you work for a healthcare network or have a private practice, you’ll rank in search results based on your relevancy to a user’s search. So, if you have a small practice, you’ll be able to compete with bigger health networks and even outrank them!
4. Increase brand awareness
When you invest in SEO, you help increase brand awareness for your practice.
If people never heard of your medical office, SEO will help them get familiar with it. As you optimize your pages and rank higher in search results, more people will see your practice’s name and click on your website.
If more people see your practice’s name and visit your site, you’ll create more potential patients for your practice. They’ll become familiar with your office and learn about what you offer.
When it comes time to choose a medical office, your audience will be more likely to select your practice because they’re familiar with you.
5. You drive results you can measure
You want to invest in SEO because it drives results for your practice. SEO leads have a 14% close rate compared to a close rate of 1% for leads from traditional strategies. SEO drives more traffic and patients to your practice.
Additionally, you can easily measure the results of your campaign. With traditional marketing, it’s difficult to know who comes into your practice because of your radio spot or your billboard ad.
Unless you ask every patient (and they remember), you won’t know if you’re getting a good return on investment (ROI).
With SEO, you can monitor your campaign and track your results. You’ll see metrics like clicks, dwell time, and conversions. This data lets you track the ROI of SEO and improve your campaign to drive better results for your practice.
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3 tips for using medical SEO effectively
Medical SEO will help you drive more traffic, leads, and conversions for your office.
If you’re ready to take advantage of SEO, check out these three tips for getting started.
1. Choose the right keywords
If you want to drive the right traffic to your practice, start by choosing the right keywords. Keywords help your website appear in relevant search results. You want to select keywords that your audience uses to help guide them towards your practice.
To help you find the right keywords for your medical practice, start by conducting keyword research. You can use keyword research tools, like KeywordsFX and Buzzsumo, to help you find relevant keywords for your website.
As you research keywords, focus on long-tail keywords, which contain three or more words. Long-tail keywords that are location-specific are especially useful. These keywords work better for your campaign because they drive more qualified leads.
An example of a long-tail, location-specific keyword is “family physician in Los Angeles.”
This keyword is specific, so only people looking for a family physician in that area will search with those terms. By using long-tail keywords, you’ll attract leads genuinely interested in your practice and drive them to your website.
Once you have your keyword selected, you must integrate them into your site. Incorporating keywords into your website helps you rank in search results. You’ll want to include keywords in your title tag, meta description, and body text.
Your title tag is the title your audience sees in the search results.
Your meta description is the small blurb in your listing that provides searchers with a sneak peek of your page.
By finding the right keywords and integrating them into your text, you’ll help your business rank in the right search results and reach more interested patients.
2. Improve page load time
An essential part of SEO for the healthcare industry is page load time. Users conduct searches to get information and answers fast. If your site takes too long to load, users will leave your site and visit another page instead.
To keep leads on your page, check your site’s load time. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to see your site’s load time. By using this tool, you can input your business’s URL to gain insight into how fast your page loads.
From this point, you can look at opportunities to improve your site. You must make these changes on your own, as Google won’t do it for you, though Google will tell you what you can do to improve your page speed.
If you don’t have experience with altering the backend of your site, which is what page speed improvements will often require, you can invest in page speed services from a digital marketing company like WebFX.
3. Build links
If you want to see success with SEO for medical practices, you must pay attention to links.
There are two types of links to focus on for SEO:
- Backlinks: Backlinks are links from other sites that link back to your medical practice’s page. These links benefit your business because they build your site’s trust and authority with search engines. Backlinks also improve your domain score, which serves as a predictor for how well you’ll rank in the search results.
- Internal links: Internal links are links on your page to other pages on your site. These links benefit your practice because they keep leads on your page longer, which increases dwell time and sends a positive signal to Google about your page’s relevance. Internal links also help Google crawl and index your pages so they can appear in search results.
Linking plays a fundamental part in helping your site rank better in search results. Whether it’s building your domain authority score or helping Google index your pages, links will help improve your ranking in search results.
A fundamental part of building links is creating content.
When you create content, you share your knowledge and expertise with your audience. It’s an excellent opportunity for you to establish yourself as an authority in your field and share your experience with your audience.
Your content can also earn your practice valuable links. You can share your content with industry authorities and invite them to check it out. If they like what they see, they may link to it in their content, creating a backlink.
As for internal links, content creation gives you opportunities to link to other pages on your site.
When you create content, you can link to other pages to help people find more information. Also, publishing that initial page of content becomes a page you can link to on different pages, like your homepage or service pages.
Want to speak with an expert? Call us at 888-601-5359
Invest in medical SEO services for your practice today
Healthcare SEO is crucial if you want your practice to grow online. By investing in medical SEO, you’ll help your site rank better in search results and drive more traffic to your website and more patients to your practice.
If you want help making the most of your SEO, consider working with an experienced medical SEO company like WebFX.
At WebFX, we have a team of over 500+ digital marketing experts who know how to drive results for our clients. In the past five years, we’ve driven over $6 billion in sales and over 24 million leads for our clients.
Are you ready to start driving results with SEO for medical practices?
Request a free quote online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to learn more about how our medical SEO services can help you grow your practice.
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