Medical SEO is a series of tactics aimed at increasing the visibility of your website in search engine results and improves your chances of being found when prospective patients are searching for treatments and services. It is the process by which your website is improved to enable search engines like Google, Bing etc to rank your site high in the search results. But SEO does not happen overnight. Good SEO takes time as there are various factors that should come together for the success of a medical marketing project.
Why Is SEO Complicated?
Google being the top search engine has more than 200 ranking signals and a website should satisfy all the ranking signals to rank well in Google’s search engine results page. Google keeps changing its algorithm every now and then and therefore it is virtually impossible to stay on top of SERP all the time. When a new algorithm is released, SEO specialists gather data from the changes in ranking from various websites and this helps them to determine what changes need to be done to improve ranking visibility.
Your expectations regarding SEO should be realistic. Here are the major things to understand.
SEO is a long term investment and it works best when it is rooted in long term goals. Link your SEO pursuits to goals like driving more people to your website or making more sales by the third quarter of a financial year. SEO works best when you maintain your expectations in keeping with the particular site you are trying to optimize.
SEO is a great investment, not only of resources but also of time. When you invest more time, effort and resources into your SEO you will get good returns from it gradually.
SEO keeps changing so you cannot stick to the same plan and strategies for a long period of time. You will always have to re-evaluate your SEO on a yearly basis to obtain effective results. The ideal way is to set up solid SEO goals and at the outset of your campaign hold meetings with your SEO teams to re-evaluate these objectives as you move through the strategy.
Providers of reliable medical SEO services will not guarantee that SEO can happen overnight. Maintain an open line of communication regarding expectations and paths to achieve these; and this will assure that you can work together to create a consistent and effective SEO strategy.
SEO is process of learning to rank well consistently and it involves a significant amount of study and hard work like running audits and creating Google-friendly sites. These factors make SEO complex and challenging. Another important fact that should be kept in mind is that your competitors will also re-evaluate their SEO strategies according to the changes in Google’s algorithm. Therefore there is no guarantee for any website when it comes to ranking. SEO is not an overnight game. It requires investment, time and effort and provides compounding results.
Optimizing a website is important for any healthcare organization if the website is to be found by search engines. This is what a medical website marketing company can assist you with by providing effective SEO strategies for better traffic and ranking.Today more and more people use the internet to search for medical and healthcare related information before they actually make an appointment with a doctor or healthcare facility. You need to rank high in Google and other search engines to make sure that your targeted audience group finds you. So what does SEO for medical business involve? Here are some of the major strategies to use.
Using the right keywords: Using apt keywords in your website will improve search ranking. Create a list of relevant keywords that people would use while looking for your services, and use them in your website. Once the list of keywords are ready, these keywords have to be searched in Google’s Keyword Planner to identify which keywords and phrases earn a decent amount of local monthly search traffic and have the least competition from other website owners or advertisers.
Use the apt keywords in your meta descriptions and title tags: The chosen keywords should be included in the content on your website and also in the Metadata of each of the pages. The Metadata consists of HTML meta tags that lie between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document. Meta data helps search engines to crawl through page and know what the page is about using the meta description, headers and title tags. The title tags act as the title of the page at the top of the browser and in the blue text in the search engine results. A title tag should not be more than 65 characters, and the meta description should not be longer than 150 characters and will appear in black text below the title tags. To further tell the search engines what the content of a page is all about, headers can be added throughout the content using h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 header tags.
Develop original content: The content of your medical website should stand out among your online competitors, especially in the search engines. By providing quality content you can gain better ranking and also highlight your expertise and value over time. To drive more value and ranking to your website, publish contents such as case studies, blog posts, videos, photos, patient testimonials, medical breakthroughs, infographics, and conversations including relevant keywords. Identify the questions patients commonly ask and create a write-up that answers all these questions. This will add quality to your content and help earn more search traffic to your website. This will also improve the credibility of your organization.
Include a sitemap on your website: Developing a sitemap for the website is often overlooked by webmasters but it is one of the important tactics for indexing the website with the search engines. The sitemap helps search engines have an idea about how your website is laid out and connected and also enables users to access your website easily. Creating a sitemap is not an easy task but can be achieved with the help of medical SEO services.
Rank high for other search verticals: You need to rank highly for search related verticals such as videos, slideshows, local, mobile, images and others apart from ranking high for your website.
Local search marketing: According to Yext, 50% of all local searches come through mobile devices so it is important to make your website mobile optimized.Local search optimization is also essential. Local is one of the important search verticals for healthcare organizations. This is because it helps patients to know about what services and expertise are available locally, and also find the nearest healthcare unit in their locality. The ultimate aim of every medical practice is to appear on the first page when a patient searches for medical practices in their locality. So, it is important to mention the name and address of your organization accurately and it should be updated in a timely manner on Google+, Local Page, Foursquare Page and on your website’s footer across the entire website. Updating and listing the contact information correctly will help Google to associate with the location of your organization. Since the Google+ Local Page is important for every medical website, make sure to monitor the reviews posted to your page to ensure they are not affecting your ranking. The amount of reviews impacts your ranking overtime and it is very crucial to stay ahead of incoming recommendations and monitor the impact.
Utilize social media for better ranking: Social media is one of the best platforms for online marketing and better ranking. It helps in two way communication between the organization and users. Use of social media also helps in targeting a larger audience. If your website is shared across social media it can attract more audience. Social media’s impact is a kind of link building and so quality content is also important so that it can be shared across social channels. Focusing on the quality of the content helps in earning more traffic and better ranking.
Medical SEO involves a series of tactics aimed at increasing your website’s visibility in search engine results so that there is an improved likelihood of being found when patients are searching for the treatments and services your healthcare unit offers. A medical website marketing company would utilize SEO and social media optimization tactics to increase targeted traffic to your website and ensure more conversions.
You may have created many testimonial videos for various marketing purposes for your healthcare services or products. Have you ever thought about repurposing this video content? Best practices would always help you keep ahead of your competitors.
According to a study by Pew Research, 80 % of internet users browse online for health related topics, and 25 % watch online videos of medical issues. Studies show that a good percentage of people watch only what they like and trust. Video content marketing is now creating a great surge in the marketing industry as it has the ability to provide strong evidence to impress the audience. Uploading videos of interviews with physicians, testimonials on healthcare services or products are the common techniques that healthcare professionals try out to convince their online followers.
Whatever be the video content you have developed, here are some great ways in which you can reuse these videos. This would help you extend the life and reach of your marketing efforts:
Two Simple Steps to Follow
Prior to initiating the repurposing task, follow these two simple steps:
Transcribe it!
The first and foremost task you should do with your medical video is – transcription. Transcribe each piece of video content you post. This will make it more engaging and interactive for your audience. Another benefit of this is, your video becomes more search engine friendly and gets easily indexed. The Meta tags added to the transcribed video serve the purpose.
Does that sound as a tedious job? If yes, don’t get frustrated. Fortunately, speech-recognition software is now available in the market. This would be of great help for your transcription tasks.
Make it Short!
If you wish to have regular followers for your posted videos, shorter videos would be a great option. Cut your videos into shorter clips that it may grab the audience’s attention quickly and ensure more engagement rates. Followers of your shorter videos would naturally spend time to watch the longer ones too. All you have to ensure is to make those shorter clips customized for the various social media platforms you use. To be precise, the video length restriction for Twitter and Instagram is much shorter than that for Facebook and YouTube. Hence, personalize your videos accordingly.
How to Repurpose Your Content
Once you are ready with the above mentioned tasks, your video repurposing job becomes much easier. Here is how you can do it:
Publish the transcripts so that your customers can easily go through it if they are in a hurry and don’t want to watch the entire video. For instance, if your video content is about back pain and its treatment, users can quickly search for a key term within the transcript and navigate to the most relevant section.
You can turn your transcribed healthcare videos into a blog or article content, which is a great means of content marketing.
Educational or informative videos on certain health conditions or illnesses can be converted into podcasts. Upload these in iTunes.
Clips of your healthcare center’s videos can be used as a means to showcase ‘Tour behind the scenes’ so as to impress your patients or customers
Take quotes from the videos of your management team to create an About Us or Our Story page
Interview videos with doctors or other healthcare professionals can be repurposed for FAQ or Q &A pages
Create webinars for your patients or customers online
As part of social media optimization, you can share the video clips in various social media platforms and popularize your content in a different way.
Take impressive parts of your medical video clips and create trailer videos out of them for more visibility
Develop E-books or Whitepapers out of videos which give in-detail content
Wondering what you benefit from doing so? Well, be assured that you will gain better and wider online exposure, reach your target audience more quickly, and improve your SEO to a great extent just by repurposing your healthcare video content. So, why wait?
Your medical website may need to be refurbished for better rankings. It has to serve the health information needs of your customers ultimately and bring in the visitors and conversions, depending on what your goals are. You could encounter the need for a totally new website platform, and that’s where healthcare website design services come in.
A new website platform presents significant challenges since it is the cyber equivalent of building a mansion from the ground up, by breaking down the old foundations and building them anew. It isn’t merely redesigning a site but totally shaking down its skeleton.
This isn’t to discourage your efforts, but just to get the point across that there are many things to set right here, to remember. You need expert hands to deal with this.
Why Expertise Is Needed Here
It is important to remember that, often,people involved in selecting an enterprise platform with the good intention of ensuring their website serves the world aren’t quite abreast with the current search engine optimization requirements. Project managers with an IT focus often concentrate on systems indexation and integration. The decision making process would often revolve around Content Management System (CMS) features. Platform requirements could often be left out. Make sure that you have the right people involved while you choose your platform.
Important Aspects to Add in Your Platform
Here are some requirements that you absolutely need to check out when you are examining new website platforms, since ignoring any of these could lead to your site being represented poorly in the search engine indices. You don’t want that to happen after all that effort:
Your website must have hosted IP dedicated for it. It isn’t quite ideal to have a major website hosted with hundreds or at least dozens of other websites. This would be detrimental to the performance of your site. Performance is probably the first thing you need to ensure your site is good at.
Here’s another basic requirement for your website. It almost goes without saying that your website must support the basic mobile-friendly viewport. In this age of Pokemon Go, your website absolutely needs to be mobile-friendly to make even the slightest impact. A responsive design platform offers many advantages such as the pages specifying the viewport that matches the size of the accessing device. The pages’ content then perfectly fits inside the viewport.
JavaScript and CSS also need to be indexed. It is important to know that if you disallow CSS or JavaScript files in your robots.txt,it would directly cause an adverse effect on how Google’s algorithms index your content. That would result in poor rankings, as Google itself has said.
Canonical tags must be supported on all pages. There are many aspects to this,such as how easily the platform integrates some of the more advanced canonical tag rules. Does it work as per Google’s advice with regard to pagination? You might be aware why canonical tags are important. They enable duplicate and low quality content which is produced by many platforms to be eliminated. They also enable the site owner to direct the SEO capabilities of those pages.
An XML sitemap helps search engines to discover site pages, but even if you may argue that a well-structured site does not need it, remember that is the standard manner in which your website can interact with the search engines using what they have as webmaster tools utilities. Site owners can immediately let search engines know of new URLs.
Customizable navigation subcategories are essential. You must have the capability to decide whether to include subcategories or not in the top navigation. This customization capability is essential to provide a better user experience since it decides how the navigation is able to link to the categories and subcategories in your site. You can also perfect your internal links.
If you want your website to reach out to audiences in multiple countries, ensure that your platform supports a country or language selector that overrides any kind of automated geo-location. Make sure that you have automated href lang tagging within the XML sitemaps or at page level.
When you get professional medical web design services to work for you, you have the greatest chances of getting all this right with a new website platform.
Click through rate (CTR) refers to the number of people who click a link against the total number of people who had the opportunity to do so. Optimizing your website using relevant keywords, tags, links and quality content is necessary; at the same time CTR is also important for higher search engine ranking of your medical website. In Paid Search, Google uses CTR as an important determining factor when it calculates the “Quality Score” of a website, which is a crucial factor in its AdWords ad auctions. A high CTR is an indication that searchers find your ads helpful and relevant. If you replace “ads” with “organic results”, the definition would still hold true for results within the top ten on Google. Experts are divided in their views regarding the impact of CTR on ranking. However, it would be good to work towards increasing your CTR anyway.
To boost your organic CTR you need to use SEO tools and techniques. With medical SEO services, your website will be ensured more online visibility and increased click through rate. Patients looking for your specific services can find you easily.
Following are some tips to increase your CTR.
Using relevant content as search engines prefer content- rich websites. Relevant content will help visitors to easily understand the flow of your website and also makes it easy for them to find what they are searching for.
Structured snippets comprise text given underneath the search results that draws the attention of the users. It helps you to stand out among the competition.
Call to action button will improve conversion rates and increase user interaction.
A relevant website URL with keyword incorporated is important for any website to rank high.
One of the most important techniques is to optimize your website with the right keywords. It helps connect searchers to your website and improves your visibility. But make sure that you don’t stuff your content with keywords which can affect your website negatively.
Using a creative title can drive more traffic to your site. A title with relevant keyword can grab the attention of users and also encourage them to click through. Using news or curiosity based words will boost your CTR quickly.
If you have your title and relevant keywords ready, then focus on good Meta description. Meta descriptions are concise explanations of the contents of web pages. It should have keywords used intelligently and make the description compelling that a searcher will want to click.
Sitelinks are powerful way to dominate the SERPs, increase trust and direct targeted traffic to your site’s internal pages. For acquiring site links, maintaining a clean and clear navigation is also important.
Keep testing your Meta description, titles etc. constantly and always track your ranking regularly.
If you wish to improve the CTR for your website, consult a reliable digital marketing company. It will increase the volume and quality of traffic to your medical website, make your services available to a wider patient base and improve your revenue.
