Sometimes in medical SEO, even a carefully planned and painstakingly executed SEO strategy can fail. You don’t get the links and traffic you expected, and then despair sets in as you think of how much time and energy you spent on this and how much more effort would be needed to achieve your goals.
Results falling way too short of expectations is nothing new in SEO. But you don’t need to let that bring you down. All you need to do is analyze your strategy with a cool head, objectively measure what went wrong, learn from it, and plan your next strategy accordingly. The experience will make you wiser.
Aiming Sky High Works, But Not in SEO
There can be many reasons why SEO practices fail. What we will are talking about here is the most common reasons for the failure of SEO strategies – failing to understand the scope of SEO and, as a result, aiming for unrealistic targets. This often leads to disappointment since SEO is a gradual process and not an instant reaction.
One Keyword at a Time
The best way to move ahead is to begin optimizing for a single keyword, because you are not going to get top ranking for multiple keywords overnight or even in one or two months. First choose one keyword that most appropriately describes the products or services you offer and is also what your potential patients are likely to search for. Keyword research tools can help you here. You need to see how much success you attain with that keyword before you build on that success and branch out to other keywords. This step-by-step process can help you attain real progress.
Ensuring Google Ranking Factors
With your first keyword, it may take nearly a month to begin witnessing an SEO boost.
- Make sure you keep updating your web content – keep it relevant and highly informative.
- Do some social media marketing as well by posting informative content on the major social networks related to that keyword you are focusing on.
- Post informative and striking blogs and articles focusing on that keyword on quality sites.
These will help bring in targeted traffic. Remember that backlinks need to be from quality sources. And it’s really important that your site loads well on mobile phones as well. With mobile searches accounting for a significant percentage of health searches, your website should have a responsive web design that makes it load faster on any device – desktop, laptop, mobile or tablet. All these are factors that Google takes into consideration while ranking your page.
While you’ll begin seeing improvements starting in around a month, it could take up to six months for all the aforementioned ranking factors to take effect and give your site the #1 ranking for that keyword. It could happen faster if you keep working on the aforementioned social media factors, particularly YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. But you need to be prepared to wait longer. Keep refreshing your content all the time and ensure that your webpage has exhaustive and informative data arranged in a user-friendly manner. Users visiting your website should want to stay on your site.
Conversational Search and Local Optimization
When you select keywords, make sure you take into consideration conversational search. Conversational search is quite important these days for Google since that’s how people like to search. People sometimes perform consecutive searches regarding various aspects of a particular topic. So your webpage must contain information dealing with all those aspects of the keyword you’re optimizing for. And make sure you focus on geo-targeted search for local optimization. If your keyword is “laparoscopy”, make it “laparoscopy in NYC”, “laparoscopy in LA”, etc. depending on where your practice is based.
As your medical SEO keeps improving, you can keep working on the other relevant keywords and keyword phrases. Gradually, you’ll see success with your campaign.
