Today we will discuss Medical Website Optimization: How to Make Your Website a Standout.
Why do most medical organizations want their medical websites to appear at the top of search results?
Because 73% of patients ask a search engine first when they go to the hospital, and 55% of searchers will only click on one of the first three entries (the first three may all be auction ads), if your site is not in the top three names, you will lose patients.
What is Medical SEO?
Simply put, medical SEO is the process of improving your medical website's search engine rankings so your medical facility can reach more patients seeking services.
Why Invest in Medical SEO?
Due to the digitalization of consumer services, patients often find new hospitals, doctors, and treatment centers online via mobile devices. Since 55% of searchers will only click on the top three organic results, if you don't invest in SEO or bid advertising, patients will click on a competitor's site.
Some medical organizations believe that using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is sufficient. Although PPC advertising is a good way to get the attention of searchers, medical bidding is too expensive.
Compared to SEO, SEO can help Cheaper way to get this user (I took a look at the current rankings of medical websites, most of the search rankings have been occupied by large medical Q&A agencies, and small hospitals hardly see any living space, if you still want to do medical SEO, please Read on, and I'll go into detail about each of these ranking methods).
1. The website needs to be fast, secure, and mobile friendly
Site opening speed, security, and mobile friendliness are all ranking factors. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load, most web visitors will hit the "back" button. Site speed acts as a secondary ranking factor for search engines, so search engines will never put a slow website in the first place.
Security is a no-brainer, and if you're a healthcare or medical company without a secure (HTTPS) website, you're having a bigger problem than SEO, and I recommend reading my other articles right now.
The website also needs to be suitable for mobile devices. Think about it, if a patient has a toothache, stomachache, or headache, will he use a desktop computer to search for nothing? Instead, mobile devices are a better choice.
2. Optimize healthcare content for healthcare
High-quality content is the content that really helps make your target audience’s life easier or better. In layman's terms, the content you need is driven by the needs and wants of your patients.
You need to optimize content for each consumer's medical micro-moment (including blogs, landing pages, newsletters, email newsletters, ebooks, etc.), and you need a content distribution plan.
For a definition of high-quality content, check out the Search Engine Quality White Paper, or check out my previous articles.
3. Choose the right industry keywords
To boost your SEO rankings, you need to create content around the right industry keywords.
Each specialty is different, but given that most patients are looking for local medical services, you can build a basic keyword list (I use allergies as an example):
- Allergies + Your City
- Allergist + Your County
- Allergy Expert + Your City
- Seasonal Allergies + Your County
- Allergy and Asthma Center + Your City
- Asthma Treatment + Your City
- Allergy + Doctor + Your City
- Allergy + Treatment + City
(Please analyze the specific keyword list by yourself). Keywords vary by industry. If you find it troublesome, you can use 5118, Google Keyword Planner, and other tools to find it.
4. Title tag and meta description optimization for website architecture optimization
The main ranking signal is still the title tag of a web page. Although the description has not participated in the ranking, after a large amount of data testing, including keywords in the description, can still assist the core keywords of the title to rank to a certain extent.
For website structure optimization, title tag, and description optimization, please refer to the following articles.
5. Image optimization and video optimization
Video marketing is gradually becoming one of the most popular contents for consumers. As a result, web pages with videos typically receive 57% more traffic than regular web pages.
Not only that, but the video itself is 5 times more likely to appear on the first page of a search engine than a traditional web page.
Conclusion: Optimizing a Medical Website
If you want better rankings and more patients, you need a healthy medical SEO strategy, although SEO is key to getting your medical facility or healthcare business into search results. However, SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution.