How Healthcare SEO Can Help Your Practice + How to Do It

As a medical practice, you manage a lot of moving parts. From patient acquisition to employee retention, you’re trying to treat more patients with fewer resources.

To make things more challenging, you’re also competing with other local practices and, if you do telehealth, national providers. What’s a healthcare professional to do?

If you need an edge against other healthcare providers, it’s time to go all-in on medical SEO. Medical SEO is a smart digital marketing strategy that leverages your online presence to bring more patients through the door. Learn why medical SEO is so important, and seven steps to kickstart your healthcare SEO strategy.

What Is Healthcare SEO?

The ultimate goal of SEO for healthcare is to get on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP) when searchers enter a specific question or keyword. There are no guarantees in SEO, but landing on the first page of Google can significantly boost your organic traffic.

It isn’t easy, but investing in healthcare SEO can increase your business’s visibility, website traffic, and even the quality of your leads.

That’s the good news. The tricky part is that medical SEO comes with more rules. Google’s Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Rules apply higher standards to medical content. Since healthcare marketing content can affect people’s lives, it needs to be factual, trustworthy, and high-quality.

YMYL rules can come back to bite you if you don’t proceed with caution. While you’re free to DIY your healthcare marketing strategies, sometimes it’s best to work with an experienced content marketing agency that can help you make the most of medical SEO while following Google’s YMYL rules.

The Benefits of Investing in Healthcare SEO

SEO is a component of digital marketing that gets the word out about your medical practice. Plenty of healthcare professionals invest in SEO for these big benefits:

Connect with new patients: Your patients are looking for medical information online. But you need to earn their trust and prove you’re a competent provider before they’ll give you their business. Fortunately, SEO and content marketing strategies position you as a trusted healthcare professional, which can make it easier to acquire new patients.
Bring in more qualified leads and referrals: SEO increases organic traffic to your web pages, but it can also bring more qualified leads to your landing pages, too. That’s because SEO leverages content marketing and targeted keywords to bring in people who are actually interested in becoming a patient.
Increase awareness: Brand awareness is never a bad thing. SEO can’t get you on the top of Google search overnight, but over time, it can increase your visibility online to boost your practice’s trustworthiness.
Save money: Sure, you’ll probably need to hire a marketing team or SEO agency to help with SEO, but it’s still much more affordable in the long run than other types of digital marketing, like pay-per-click (PPC) ads. It’s hard to beat organic SEO results, too, so even your better-funded competitors will have a hard time toppling your investment in SEO.

7 Tips for Medical SEO

Search engines use several factors to rank your website. Following these seven tips can help you nail the most common ranking factors for healthcare websites.

1. Partner With an SEO Agency or Content Marketing Agency

If you have an internal marketing team, you might be able to handle SEO yourself. But if the thought of managing technical SEO on your website fills you with dread, go with a team of SEO experts.

They’re familiar with what does and doesn’t work for the healthcare industry. An SEO agency deals with search engines every day, so they can help you stay on top of any algorithm changes — which will help you pivot more quickly while your competitors lag behind.

There’s also the issue of capacity. You might have a team member willing to spend their spare time on SEO in addition to their other tasks, but to see real movement in your rankings, you need to publish consistent, well-optimized articles every week that follow E-A-T guidelines. We produce a minimum of 1-2 articles per week for our clients, and sometimes up to 5 per week or more.

They’re not just simple company updates or client testimonials, either — they’re educational, science-backed articles written by experts that are at least 1,200 words with images, links, a strategic headline and title, and a lot more.

Take a realistic look at if your team has an extra 10+ hours a week for SEO content management, and if not, let an expert team take it on.

2. Choose High-Intent Keywords

What do patients want to know when they’re searching for an oncologist, pediatrician, or primary care provider? Think about the questions they ask when they look for medical expertise.

As a medical practice, you need to target high-intent keywords for your healthcare SEO strategy. You can then use these keywords in your content, website, social media pages, and more to appeal to your target audience.

Choose keywords related to questions or concerns patients have when they’re looking for medical information or treatment. For example, you might target the keyword “how often should I get a colonoscopy” if you’re a men’s health clinic.

You can check your website’s Google Analytics to see which terms people search for before arriving at your site. You can also do keyword research with tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.

3. Invest in Content Marketing

Once you have your list of target keywords, you’ll need to create content with those keywords. Create blog posts on your website, videos on YouTube, and even social media posts with your target keywords.

Search engine crawlers look for new content on your site, so the more high-quality content you create, the better your chances of showing up in organic search results.

But you shouldn’t create content sporadically. For SEO, you need to do so on a consistent schedule. That’s because search engines want to route their users to websites that share up-to-date, fresh content. Post at least one 1,000-word blog a week to make your medical practice more competitive in local search.

4. Overhaul Your On-Site SEO

On-site SEO encompasses every feature on your healthcare website. On-page optimization is the low-hanging fruit of SEO that can give you quicker wins, so optimize on-page first.

Aside from creating content, you can overhaul your SEO by optimizing your metadata. This is information on the back end of your site that search engines like Google and Bing will display in their search results. It includes:

Title tags: This is the headline that displays in the search engine, so add relevant keywords here, plus your practice’s name. Something like, “Mole Removal in Birmingham | ABC Dermatology.”
Meta description: You have 140 to 160 characters to describe the content of your page. The search engines will display this underneath the title tag on the SERP.
Image alt tags: This text doesn’t show up in search, but it’s a great way to boost your keyword rankings. Image alt tags provide alternative descriptions of images for people who use screen readers. However, search engine crawlers also use this data to rank image content, which makes it an easy keyword ranking opportunity.

Internal linking is also a great way to boost on-site SEO. Using relevant keywords as your anchor text can improve both SEO and the user experience by providing timely content to website visitors.

When it comes to SEO, what’s good for website users is also good for search engine rankings. Make sure your site is easy to use on mobile devices. Work with your IT folks or web developer to boost your healthcare site’s speed, too.

5. Optimize Off-Page SEO

Once you’ve optimized your medical website, it’s time to direct more traffic to your domain with off-page strategies.

An easy way to boost off-page SEO is by earning backlinks. Search engines trust you when other websites trust you. If a website links to yours, it likely means it trusts you and wants to refer traffic to you. The more backlinks you have from high-quality websites, the more SEO power you’ll earn.

You can also do linkbuilding by:

Creating business profiles, like Google My Business or Yelp
Applying to healthcare directories
Submitting press releases about your practice, employees, or charitable initiatives
Applying for local and national awards
Doing podcast interviews
Encouraging patients to leave reviews

6. Don’t Forget About Local SEO

If you’re trying to get more patients at your practice, local SEO will bring more people to your door. With local SEO, you take steps to optimize your website for patients in your area. After all, if you’re in Cleveland, it doesn’t make sense to market yourself to patients in Nebraska.

Optimize for local keywords that include your city or state. For example, instead of “best dermatologist for acne,” go with keywords like “best acne dermatologist Austin.”

You can also invest in local SEO by:

Gaining local news coverage
Sponsoring local events or sports teams
Listing your business and phone number in local directories, like your chamber of commerce

7. Track Your Metrics

Improved SEO doesn’t happen quickly. It can take six months to see a change in your SEO rankings. The best way to know if your SEO efforts are working is to track your metrics as you go.

Check your SEO performance on a monthly basis. You need to look at metrics like organic traffic, conversions, and any other KPIs that affect patient acquisition or retention.

You can usually pull this information from Google Analytics, but if you’re working with an SEO agency, they will pull the data and send you a regular report. We do weekly reports for our clients and provide them with a dashboard they can monitor as much as they want.

Boost Traffic to Your Healthcare Business

Medical SEO connects you with more potential patients and boosts your practice’s reputation. It will take some time and a little elbow grease, but you can boost your patient roster with the power of SEO.

But it isn’t easy doing all of this on your own. You have patients to care for, after all. If you want the benefits of healthcare SEO but don’t have the time to implement the necessary strategies, chat with Growth Machine.

We help healthcare practices maximize their SEO presence through the power of content marketing. Growth Machine has created and executed healthcare SEO strategies for doctor’s offices, online therapy services, mental health apps, a sleep app, and more.