Are you happy with the number of patients your medical practice has been able to find online? Do you wish people looking for local medical care online could find you more easily and quickly?
There is a technique to get in front of your potential clients by appearing in search engine results. SEO for medical practices can help you increase exposure, drive traffic to your website, and increase the number of visitors to your office.
Before performing search engine optimisation on your medical practice website, it’s important to understand what SEO for medical practice is, its best practices and how to target your local market successfully.
What is SEO for Medical Practices?
With SEO, you can make your medical practice appear at the top of search results on Google and other search engines. The goal isn’t just to do well in search engine rankings, though. You want the visibility you’ve built up organically to attract more targeted visitors to your website. More patients who visit your website through search engines will be truly interested in your healthcare services or information if you have excellent website traffic.
Why Use SEO for Your Medical Practice?
Today’s patients frequently use search engines to locate doctors and medical research topics. Thus SEO makes perfect sense. Without it, you’d pass up significant chances to attract clients looking for your services. Although patients increasingly use online resources twice as much as they do referrals, this is not to argue that referrals are no longer necessary. You need a high SERP ranking to market your practice to these potential patients.
The majority of search engine users only pay attention to the first few organic results on Google. Therefore high rankings are necessary. In fact, 68% of all clicks go to the top five organic listings.
Aside from what was stated above, medical professionals need SEO for the following reasons:
< class="h3-alt-font">Changing Patient Online Behaviour
Do you recall using the large paper directories you used to keep next to your phone? As you may have noticed, no one uses them anymore.
Nowadays, a growing number of patients look for their next doctor online. For instance, individuals looking for an orthopaedic surgeon in Melbourne are likely to Google “orthopaedic surgeon Melbourne.” They will then probably give a call to one of the practices on the first page of the results.
The role of medical SEO in this is clear. For relevant searches, doctors must ensure that their website ranks on the first page of Google’s search results.
Therefore, if your practice wants to be successful in the current healthcare landscape, it must put its website at the top of Google’s search results for key phrases like “your speciality + your city.”
Helps Increase Private Pay Patients
Patients who pay privately are not constrained by their Managed Care Organization (MCO). They can choose any doctor they desire. Due to this, they are likely to utilise Google to find a doctor rather than their MCO’s website.
Google’s top-ranked doctors are more likely to draw in new patients. To put it another way, successful doctors must position the website for their practice at the top of Google.
Attracts High-Quality Patients
SEO produces high-quality leads since it enables you to target a particular demographic of patients interested in your medical services. For instance, if your relevant business pages are appropriately optimised for the target keyword “primary care near me,” they may show up on the SERP when a user searches for this keyword on Google. Therefore, it is likely that the majority of people who locate your medical practice on SERPs require your medical services. When these prospects see your clinic’s website, there is a significant chance that they will interact with it and make an appointment.
Boost Brand Awareness
People may not click the links on your practice’s website whenever they appear on the first page of search engine results. However, consistently holding one of the few top SERP positions is still advantageous because it raises brand awareness. For your practice to stay firmly implanted in the minds of potential patients, you need consistent exposure.
Helps Build Brand Authority
Building brand authority through SEO is important for achieving success for healthcare businesses. Google prioritises user experiences, so it notes when more users arrive at your website from relevant search results. If your website has high patient engagement levels, Google determines that you are a domain expert who offers valuable healthcare products or services to your online visitors. It is how you establish brand authority through SEO and win the confidence of potential clients.
Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy
Medical professionals do have the option of paid advertising, although it is often more expensive overall than SEO. You might initially have to pay for SEO to gain significant organic traffic, but that’s about it. You may count on it to increase organic traffic and continue to bring in new patients for a considerable amount of time if you’ve produced properly optimised content. Even after accounting for the costs associated with maintaining your medical content, SEO is still cost-effective because you are not charged for each click.
Provides Good Return on Investment (ROI)
Consider this: How much money does the typical patient bring into your practice? Your response will vary depending on your area of expertise. One thing holds right across almost all specialisations: A cost-effective SEO campaign may be funded with just a few new monthly patients.
Profit for your practice is any increased patient revenue, which nearly always occurs. One of the most affordable medical practices marketing techniques is putting your website at the top of Google for relevant keywords.
What are the Factors Involved with SEO for Medical Practices?
A medical practice’s website can perform better in search engine rankings by using a variety of strategies known as SEO or search engine optimisation. There are three main parts to SEO for medical practices:
On-Page SEO
On-page optimisation is a collection of methods that aid search engines in understanding a website’s content.
Off-Page SEO
The process of off-site SEO entails creating links pointing to the website.
Technical SEO
Technical optimisation fixes any problems with the website that might be preventing search engines from fully indexing its pages.
When done correctly, SEO can boost a medical practice’s website up the SERPs (search engine results pages) and attract more visits, which may increase patients.
Top 8 Effective SEO Tips for Medical Practices
You can start by implementing the following top (no.) effective SEO tips for medical practices to start ranking higher on SERPs:
Website Design That Is Both SEO- and Mobile-Friendly
Making sure your site architecture is accessible to crawlers is the first step towards a highly optimised website. It involves ensuring no obstacles on your website for the web-crawling search engine bots. A weak internal link structure or an unfriendly URL architecture are examples of impediments.
You should evaluate how well your medical practice’s website performs on desktop and mobile devices, as 68% of searches for health-related information are made on them.
Gauge the Competitive Landscape
How well do your competitors’ websites rank in searches? In order to assess the level of competition, you should conduct several searches using terms relevant to your website. Remember that your offline competitors are frequently not the same as your online competitors (although some will be). When considering the optimisation of your website, click over to those sites to get a sense of what they do well.
Conduct Research on Search Results
Look up important keywords in searches and then review the results. What’s showing up there? Do you have access to a lot of educational resources? If this is the case, the search engines may have determined that the user is only looking for information, not a healthcare practitioner. By analysing search intent, determine the terms that make sense for your medical practice.
Use All Content Formats
Don’t limit yourself to writing content like blogs alone. For instance, using video to distinguish your medical practice from the competition can be very effective. Describe the experience of visiting your practice. Provide video responses to frequent medical queries if you’re the doctor. Your YouTube videos should be optimised and have a link to your website.
Implement Local SEO
To appear in local searches, you must first establish yourself locally. When people search for “eye doctors in [your city],” you want your medical practice to come up higher. Include local place names in your list of keyword phrases and use them in your website’s content, title tags, and meta descriptions. (But don’t go overboard.)
Claim and Optimise Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (GBP), formerly Google My Business, is the key focus of local SEO. Your Google Business Page (GBP) is a local listing of your website that can be displayed above the organic search engine results on Google’s first page. It is a valuable, free resource for local SEO. Ensure all your important information is current, including contact information and business hours. It will perform better if you update your listing frequently and include images of your medical practice. The effectiveness of your listing also depends heavily on reviews.
Encourage Patients to Provide Reviews
Positive reviews are also a fantastic method to market your practice. While some will come spontaneously, you can also ask your patients to leave favourable reviews. Make careful monitoring and communication with your reviewers, especially when they leave bad reviews (even though you treat every patient well and provide positive experiences with every visit, negative reviews are inevitable). That will demonstrate your concern for your patients.
Gather Backlinks
Backlinks, or links from other websites to your website, are crucial to your success online. The search engines first interpret them as a recommendation for your medical practice website. Higher domain ratings are associated with trusted websites, which can transfer some of that equity to your website via links.
There are many ways to gain links, and you can start with simple methods like getting local sponsorships that link to your website before moving on to trickier methods like guest posting on medical blogs.
Let’s Plan Your Medical Practice SEO Strategy Today!
Publishing relevant, keyword-optimized content on your primary web pages, blogs, and landing pages is critical to an effective SEO strategy for medical practices. If your plan is solid, you can improve website engagement and online visibility for your practice, which will aid in attracting more new patients.
Suppose all of this is a little daunting to you, or you want a professional to handle the SEO for your medical practice website. In that case, TopRankings is a top SEO agency for medical practices Melbourne. We can assist you in conducting an audit to determine where the practice is and how to increase website traffic and your ranking.
We employ a range of methods and strategies to produce striking, quantifiable outcomes. We are ready to help you. Call us at 1300 881 911 or complete our enquiry form today!
