Plastic surgery is already an optional procedure. There is a huge, competitive market out there and many practices have already gone through the work of optimizing their websites for SEO, improving their business listings, and making sure that their off-page content was up to par. If you have yet to do this, you need to get started as soon as possible.
Of course, before you can get into SEO and develop your strategy, you have to understand what it is and how it can help your plastic surgery practice.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the basics of search engine optimization, what it can do for plastic surgeons specifically, and how you can capitalize on the best elements to improve your rankings and generate more traffic that is better-targeted toward your services.
We’ll also talk about one of the latest hot trends in healthcare marketing– local optimization. Today’s patients are on the go and always looking for the next thing that they need. More than half of all Google searches start on a mobile device. If you’re not optimized to reach your local market, how do you expect to find new clients?
Finally, we’ll explore the perks of choosing professional SEO management services to handle everything so that you know your plastic surgery practice has the best strategy in place for all of your optimization needs.
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization is basically just what it sounds like– it is a process that involves performing various tasks and optimizing content to make it more easily discovered by search engines.
However, it’s a bit misleading because this process also needs to be optimized to be discovered by the target customer.
Essentially, you want to rank higher in the search engines so that more people will find your practice. You want to make sure that you’re in the right results for the right reasons.
That’s where SEO comes in. Although many people think this is a process that is all about keywords, they’re really only a small part of the battle at this point in Internet marketing. It used to be commonplace to cram as many keywords as possible into a page of content to get it to rank.
Search engines wised up to this practice and decided they wanted sites that offered genuine, useful information. Therefore, they created a set of guidelines limiting the use of keywords and penalizing sites for “keyword stuffing”, or using keywords for the sake of rankings, often to the detriment of the content.
Search engine optimization involves:
- Keyword research
- Creating optimized, authoritative, value-added content
- Creating an effective website navigation that is easy to follow
- Optimizing all page titles, tags, and other small parts of the website that are often overlooked
- Optimizing off-page content like social media accounts and directory listings
- Improving local SEO and increasing local visibility
- Monitoring all campaigns and activities and making changes as needed
This might sound like a lot of work, but it is not work that you have to do alone. With the help of professional SEO management solutions, you can ensure that your practice has the best SEO strategies in place without having to do the work yourself. We’ll discuss that more towards the end, though. For now, let’s dig into why plastic surgeons, specifically, need search engine optimization.
Why do plastic surgeons need it?
The average Google user is performing a search for local healthcare services from their mobile device while actively seeking a solution. They need a quick answer and a local facility that they can trust, and they need to know that you exist.
The simple answer to why you need SEO is because your competitors already have it. Still not convinced? Perform a search for yourself, on any search engine, for plastic surgeons in your city. See what comes up on the first page of results.
Those are the practices that are optimized for search and utilizing keywords effectively. If you don’t see yourself among their ranks, then you absolutely need SEO to assist you in improving your search ranking.
When you have a higher search ranking, you’re going to get more traffic. Those users mentioned above– they’re in a hurry. They aren’t going to scroll far for local services. Most will even stop at the map that includes a list of three local options and use that to find their chosen facility.
We’ll go over it more in detail below, but the basic purpose of SEO, when done properly, is effective. Good SEO for plastic surgeons can increase website and off-page traffic (such as to social media sites). This traffic means you are getting more targeted leads because people actually searched for the service that you offer. Then, it increases the likelihood of conversion once they do arrive at your website or business listing page because all of your online presences are optimized, professional-looking, and targeted toward the right audience.
Speaking of professionalism, here’s a big reason that plastic surgeons and other healthcare providers need SEO — Google holds these providers to a higher standard. Google and other search engines are going to pay far more attention to the reputability and authority of a plastic surgery practice than a website that’s reviewing books, after all.
What they might be able to get away with, you shouldn’t even consider. And when it comes to optimization, that’s where you have your chance to prove your authority and give them a reason to give you a better organic ranking.
SEO can increase traffic for plastic surgery practices
How are you currently getting traffic to your plastic surgery website? Do you know how much traffic you have every day? What about each month? Regardless of the answer, SEO can help improve your results. Search engine optimization focuses on improving your organic content in a way that makes your pages more easily indexed and gives a better impression to the search engines and the users alike.
It’s not just about keywords– it’s an entire overhaul of your on-page and off-page content to maximize traffic, improve search rankings, and capitalize on every opportunity to make sure that people know you exist and know that you’re the best at what you do.
Did you know that over 80% of all online users have searched for some kind of health-related topic online at some point? It’s likely that a decent number of those people were searching for something related to plastic surgery, and had your content been optimized, you might have benefited from this sooner.
It’s never too late, though. Increasing traffic with SEO is something you can do at any point and it will always garner good results so long as you implement it effectively. When you optimize your off-page content, specifically, you can drive a lot more traffic to your site.
Of course, your website is going to be as perfect and professional as possible– people expect that. But what about your business directory listings? Your social media pages? Are these elements optimized? Do you even know how to do it?
Offsite directory listings and social media accounts are two of the most popular places that generate traffic for many healthcare and personal care businesses. Taking advantage of these resources will allow you to drive more traffic to your own website just by optimizing things and taking the time to verify that all the information is accurate, relevant, and gives people the answers that they need.
Of course, the best part here is that the traffic that is generated is far more targeted and interested in what you have to offer. That means they’re more likely to become qualified leads and might even make a quick and easy sale. If all you have to do is a little optimization, what are you waiting for?
More traffic brings in more leads
If your website is getting more traffic, both from search rankings and other offsite sources, you’re naturally going to get more leads. The best part about this is that those leads are automatically far more qualified than any lead you’ve had before.
Because they came from a place where the content was optimized, included relevant keywords, and had local SEO in place, they are exactly where they need to be and they are aware of that. Here’s a quick example of how it works:
- Jane has a specific need for plastic surgery. She is considering a nose job and lives in the Chicago area. She’s probably going to start with Google.
- When Jane searches “Chicago plastic surgery” or “nose job plastic surgeon Chicago”, she’s going to immediately see the top half of the first search results page.
- Since these are local business listings, Jane will likely click on the map, or one of the three options under the map, right in the middle of the page.
- Jane may also go to the first three or four websites that are returned directly to investigate her options.
- If she wants more information from third parties, she might even consider Google or other directory reviews before actually coming to your website.
This example includes a handful of places where SEO could help your practice by helping give Jane the information she needs to make a decision. From optimizing your content for local search to making sure that your third-party listings are accurate and reputable, you have a lot of opportunities to drive traffic and improve the quality of your leads.
When you choose to optimize properly, the traffic will always be more highly-qualified leads than what you’d get from blanket marketing or no optimization at all.
When your site is optimized properly, Jane will have no choice but to go there because she’ll stumble upon it somehow. Then, when she arrives, she’ll see that you have exactly what she needs and that your practice is one of the best in the city.
Which is how it will go with every lead once your content is optimized. After all, increased traffic is only good if it also includes increased leads–otherwise, you’re just padding your bounce rate and that’s the opposite of what you want.
5 SEO keywords plastic surgeons should focus on
Now that you understand the importance of SEO and its role in marketing your practice online, it’s time to start thinking about your strategy. You don’t have to come up with the whole thing on your own, of course, but you should have an idea of where you’re heading when you meet with professionals to discuss your options.
One of the best ways to get started with optimization is to get to know the industry keywords that are trending, find out which ones are searched most often, and see if you can identify any smaller target keywords that can generate small amounts of traffic but might be overlooked by others.
To help you out, here are five of the most popular SEO keywords that you need to focus on:
- Plastic surgery
- Breast implants
- Plastic surgeon near me
- Cosmetic surgery
- Nose job
According to analytics, these are the top five of the list of 30 best AdWords keywords related to plastic surgery.
You can also add your location to any of them to create a local keyword, and remember that you’re allowed to pluralize or use connecting words to make things flow better. Connecting words are those like “in” and “the”.
Essentially, they’re words that don’t affect the content and need to be used to make sense of the keyword or phrase, so search engines allow them.
Thus, you can make a sentence sound much better by saying you are a “plastic surgeon in Austin” rather than telling people to check out your “plastic surgery Austin” office. Some other leading keywords that you can add to your list for plastic surgery SEO rankings include things like:
- Plastic surgery before and after
- Cosmetic surgery near me
- Bad plastic surgery
- Laser liposuction
- Plastic surgery cost
- Plastic surgery financing
- Plastic surgery center
You can kind of see a trend here. You can also get an idea of where local keywords would work and where they would just be awkward. For example, you wouldn’t want to use “plastic surgery near me in Austin” because it sounds redundant. That is, of course, unless it comes up as a performing keyword during your research.
If you want greater success, target local
As a plastic surgery clinic, you’re not going to seek out clients from across the country or around the world. You might, for specialty services or if you have a situation where your practice may provide some special benefit.
Generally speaking, your practice will be marketing to your local audience who can physically come to the office for the procedures that they want or need. We’ve already discussed briefly the value of local search, but now it’s time to discuss it further.
People are searching for local businesses all the time. Being in the healthcare industry, local is the only option that you have for success. Again, unless you have a specialty service, you can’t treat patients online so you’ll need them to be nearby.
Of course, you can’t just throw keywords and your location together and call it local optimization– this may be effective but if it affects the quality of the content, it’s going to get you in trouble with the search engines.
One of the best tools in local optimization is your Google My Business page. It is critical that you register and verify your business with Google through this page. You should also fill out all of the descriptions, categories, and other details so that there is as much information as possible for both Google and potential clients or patients.
Make sure that you use keywords here, and check your business listing for the contact information– in the industry, it’s called the NAP protocol– your name, address, and phone number need to be complete, accurate, and consistent in every single listing.
Use data-driven practices to refine your efforts
Of course, you can’t implement a new strategy without a way to track how it’s doing. To truly succeed with SEO (or any marketing efforts, for that matter), you have to track and manage your campaigns at all times. You can’t just rely on how things “look better” or assume that you’ve done things right so they will improve regardless of what happens. You have to know.
Tools like Google Analytics and customized platforms are designed to help track campaigns, keyword research and usage, search result rankings, and other aspects of your online efforts to help you see how your efforts are taking hold.
You will even be able to see how much traffic has increased and what your conversion rates are like for the new campaigns, including for both those who are on-site and off-site conversions. It’s like having an inside look at your practice and its online presence, and it’s something that you should never take for granted.
Monitoring your campaigns will also allow you to identify when things aren’t working and make the necessary changes. You will be able to see which keywords aren’t producing results, whether a certain combination isn’t performing, and more. Basically, you can get just about any report that you want if you know how to look for it and have access to the right platform.
The great thing about analytics and data is that you don’t have to assume or guess. You know what works. You know what doesn’t. You can take advantage of that to consistently improve your efforts and ensure that your plastic surgery office is always on top of its marketing.
And, as we’ll go over in the next section, it’s another benefit included when you work with professional SEO services– they’ll take care of it all.
Get expert SEO and blog management
At the end of the day, you’re an expert in plastic surgery. You have a lot on your plate, and whether you’re the owner or the practice manager, the last thing you need is to have to be a marketing professional too. When you choose to rely on our expert SEO and blog management solutions at Ranq, you’ll guarantee that you get the best optimization strategy and increase your chances of success in every way.
With professional SEO and blog management solutions, you will be able to:
- Attract the right visitors at the right time
- Create instant solutions for people seeking plastic surgery in your location
- Offer valuable insight and a sense of brand authority to your audience
- Get an optimized online presence, both on your website and off
- Enjoy all the benefits of a fully-optimized online presence without having to do the work yourself
- Rely on industry professionals who understand best practices and current trends
We understand what it takes to create a reputable online presence for your plastic surgery practice that also caters to the local audience. We know how to handle keyword research and use analytics to measure results, and we’ll be able to track and monitor your campaigns every step of the way.
Plus, since we only ever work with four clients at a time, you can trust that you’ll get all the attention that you deserve during your optimization process and beyond.
Call us today to discuss your needs for plastic surgery SEO services, including optimization, blog management, and more. We’ll help you set up a customized solution that works for you so that you can get back to taking care of your patients while we take care of your local and online visibility.
Resources
https://www.outerboxdesign.com/search-marketing/search-engine-optimization/plastic-surgery-seo/
https://www.theedigital.com/plastic-surgeons/seo
https://www.mainstreetroi.com/local-seo-for-plastic-surgeons/
https://doctorlogic.com/blog/seo-plastic-surgeons
https://www.operationtechnology.com/markets/medical-health/plastic-surgery-seo/
https://serpwars.com/top-30-best-plastic-surgery-adwords-ppc-keywords/