SEO can benefit any business in any industry that relies on search. However, with the number of healthcare-related searches nearing 70,000 per minute, businesses in the healthcare industry are poised especially well to gain from it.
If you’re a newer or smaller business in the healthcare industry, leveraging SEO can be the most efficient strategy for capitalizing on your marketing budget.
Let’s understand why healthcare SEO marketing is essential for businesses in the healthcare industry and how to get the most from SEO for your business.
The importance of healthcare marketing and SEO
The considerations for marketing a B2B healthcare business differ from when you’re marketing a B2C business. However, if you have a website, which is a non-negotiable today, SEO is necessary due to the following reasons:
Online visibility is key to survival
No matter the kind of practice you offer or how long you’ve been in business, you must understand how patients choose their healthcare practitioners to survive and thrive. This aspect has undergone a significant transformation.
36% of patients rely on websites when choosing their next healthcare practitioner. This isn’t surprising, considering your website is your online presence. With the digital space getting considerably more crowded and competitive, SEO can help your website be found and stand out.
Effective SEO strategies, some of which we’ll cover below, enhance your website’s ranking on search engines, making it easier for potential patients to find you. As your website becomes more visible, you open another channel for clients to find you, i.e., organic traffic.
Organic traffic leads to higher revenue
Organic traffic is the number of people who land on your website from a Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). These are potential clients if you’re in the B2B industry or patients if you’re a practitioner.
SEO is, by definition, designed to increase organic traffic to your website. With SEO, your website can attract visitors who are actively seeking medical information and services, leading to increased patient acquisition and retention.
Organic traffic is just a number, though. What needs to be appreciated is that this number is closely related to revenue. Nearly 45% of a business’s revenue can be attributed solely to the organic traffic that it receives.
Strong websites foster credibility with patients
It’s given that the digital revolution has drastically altered the manner in which patients find healthcare practitioners and the models of healthcare marketing. What remains unaltered is the fact that patients need to trust their healthcare practitioners, and doctors know this.
Your website needs to inspire and foster trust and credibility for the success of your healthcare marketing. This is where SEO shines. When your website shows up for a patient’s health-related search queries, it instantly generates trust.
Furthermore, a strong website reflects your commitment to patient care. When your website is easily discoverable, with SEO, you signal your practice’s legitimacy and authority.
When your website sends the right signals, it builds trust and confidence, making patients more likely to choose your services over competitors. The key lies in selecting the right healthcare SEO service, like Ranq, that’s well acquainted with the regulated and competitive world of healthcare marketing.
How to improve the health of your healthcare website
Given all the benefits of an SEO-optimized website, here are actionable steps you can take to ensure that your healthcare website is working as hard as your marketing team:
Perform an SEO audit of your website
An SEO audit is like a diagnostic test. It helps identify areas where your site can be optimized to show up higher in the SERPs. It involves a comprehensive evaluation of various elements of your website that indicate whether it is easy to use for users and search engines.
This includes checks for technical issues like broken links, slow page speeds, and mobile compatibility, as well as on-page SEO factors such as title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and keyword usage.
Given their long-lasting effects on your website, SEO audits are best performed by an SEO agency. Owing to their technical nature, they also tend to be overpriced. If you’re looking for a reliable yet cost-effective solution, Ranq offers a comprehensive free SEO audit that covers all the bases.
Check up on your site’s technical health
If you’ve done the audit, you now have a complete picture of your website’s health status. If you have a technical team, you can now go about fixing the most common technical problems, such as broken links, redirects, and errors with canonical tags.
These fixes are usually implemented once, but they show tangible results in your website’s performance immediately. Considering that technical glitches can also get you penalized by search engines, you should consider these critical for your website’s longevity.
Establish a clear SEO strategy for your goals
SEO includes many things. However, your objective, budget, and time frame will determine what you tackle first. Your SEO marketing strategy will also need to address your immediate objectives and navigate industry-related regulations like HIPPA.
Start by defining your objectives, which could range from increasing organic traffic and improving local search visibility to boosting patient engagement. With these goals in mind, conduct thorough keyword research to identify terms and phrases your target audience uses when searching for healthcare services.
A strategy involves more than just keyword research, though. You’ll also need to keep in mind your KPIs and the correct and realistic understanding of the time frame in which you should expect results from SEO.
Create SEO-friendly content relevant to your audience
Content is paramount for SEO, so the next step revolves around creating SEO-friendly content relevant to your audience. Begin by understanding your target audience’s needs, concerns, and search behaviors.
The healthcare industry lends itself very well to educational and informational content. Craft high-quality, informative content that provides valuable insights and solutions to your audience’s health-related questions.
Incorporate those keywords naturally throughout your content, including in headings, subheadings, and meta descriptions. Ensure your content is well-organized, easy to read, and includes relevant images, infographics, or videos to enhance engagement.
Healthcare content must also adhere to Google’s rigorous scrutiny specific to YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) pages while abiding by EEAT guidelines. This is why ensuring partnering with a content agency that specializes in SEO content marketing can help.
Look into local SEO
Local searches have been on the rise for a while now. It makes logical sense that a practitioner needs to have a local online presence to be visible to patients looking for health practitioners within a specific geographical area.
Begin by optimizing your Google My Business profile, ensuring all information is accurate and up-to-date. This includes your practice name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and a detailed description of your services.
Doing at least this is critical as 50% of patients looking online for a practitioner consider incomplete information in listings as a red flag, as shown by a doctors.com customer experience trends report.
Doing more is obviously better, like ensuring your website includes location-specific keywords, such as the name of your city or neighborhood, in your content, meta tags, and URLs. You could also create dedicated pages for each practice location if you have multiple offices.
Establish online credibility with backlinks
Social proof is marketers’ go-to method to establish trust with potential customers. However, this standard practice falls flat when it comes to marketing businesses or practices in the healthcare industry due to HIPPA compliance considerations.
Another powerful way to establish online credibility is through backlinks. Backlinks, or inbound links from other reputable websites, signal to search engines that your site is a trusted source of information.
There are many ways to start a backlinking campaign. One is creating high-quality, valuable content that other healthcare providers, blogs, and industry publications want to link to. Discovering suitable backlinking sites is critical here. Another great option is to contact authoritative websites within the healthcare industry and propose guest posts or collaborations.
Still, it’s essential to know that a backlinking campaign can be tedious, requiring significant time, effort, and persistence, as it involves extensive research to identify reputable websites and relevant industry contacts. This is why working with an SEO marketing team can be the most effective strategy for a healthcare practice.
Work with an SEO marketing team
Working with an SEO marketing team is a strategic move for a business in the healthcare industry. With the demanding level of attention that patient care requires, devising and implementing a well-rounded SEO campaign can be challenging.
SEO professionals bring expertise and experience. They stay updated with the latest SEO trends and algorithm changes, ensuring your strategy remains effective.
Relying on their established systems of keyword research and SEO-friendly content creation will help you see results faster and help ensure your marketing budget gets utilized more efficiently.
Your very own healthcare SEO marketing team: Ranq
If you’re in the healthcare industry, we’re Ranq. We specialize in providing SEO and content marketing services for businesses looking to increase their leads, boost their organic traffic, or even create an online presence from scratch.
We’re a team of dedicated SEO and content professionals with decades of combined experience. If you’re looking for your very own healthcare SEO marketing team, we can help. Our professionals have a deep understanding of the healthcare industry’s unique challenges. Further, we provide custom SEO strategies to meet your business’s specific needs. Contact us to leverage our specialized expertise to boost your healthcare website’s performance and patient reach.