How Great Medical SEO Increases Patient Volume

Running a medical practice is difficult enough these days. And with so many different healthcare options available to the average consumer, you need a way to make your medical practice stand out. This is where medical SEO (search engine optimization) enters the picture. Search engines decide what websites receive the most traffic. Knowing how to reach them will help you to increase the number of visitors to your website. In this article, we will explain exactly what medical SEO is, how it can benefit your practice, and review some of the key components of medical SEO.

 

Medical SEO – What Is It?

Search engine optimization is a set of tactics that you apply to your medical practice website. The tactics are meant to attract search engines to your website. By providing the elements that search engines understand, your website gets examined and pages indexed. Indexing web pages ensures that if one of your pages matches a query made by an internet user, it will be offered as one of many search results. As the ranking of your web pages increases, they will appear more often in search results, which exposes your website to more potential patients seeking your specific services.

 

The Advantages of Medical SEO

SEO provides many advantages to a website. It increases a site’s visibility, so that a wider audience sees it. The more people who see your medical practice website, the better known your brand becomes. This eventually increases business. SEO also assists in giving your medical practice website an edge over those of your competitors. The better you rank over them, the more traffic your website will receive. Even if your competitors are giant corporate medical services, SEO gives you the tools you need to be competitive, regardless of the size of your practice. SEO also helps with the user experience (UX) of your website.

 

Key Components of Medical SEO

A solid medical SEO strategy has several key components. Here is a closer look at a few of them:

 

Key Component #1 – Content

Digital Authority Partners says that your website’s most important factor is its content. Your  website helps you reach out to potential new patients for your medical practice. However, for them to choose your practice, they need to learn as much as they can from your website. This is why the content is so important. It has to explain to website visitors what they can expect from your practice. The content has to be relevant to your type of practice and be educational and informative enough to assist website visitors in deciding to become a new patient at your practice.

 

Key Component #2 – Keywords

Keywords are the words commonly entered by internet users in searches. For example, if your medical practice is cardiology, the keywords would all relate to that in one way or another. Keyword research tools online can help generate sets of keywords that will all be useful as you build your website. Remember, keywords are the words and phrases the average person would use to find your service online. They won’t all use “cardiologist.” Some may use “heart doctor” or “heart specialist” and so on. This is why keywords are crucial to the content of any website. They also help search engines determine how to index your website for searches.

 

Key Component #3 – Structure

The way your website’s pages are laid out is another important consideration. While each page within your website should concentrate on a single topic, each page must follow some basic guidelines. The pages should load quickly, and the contents of the page should appear organized and attractive to the eye. Use easy-to-read fonts, include images to break the content up throughout the page, and have contact information that is easy to find on each page. Navigation tools should also be simple and located where they can be easily found. The background colors should not be flashy or cause text to be hard to read.

 

Key Component #4 – Links

Probably one of the easiest ways to improve the ranking of your website with medical SEO is through a well-planned linking strategy. Links are locations that appear throughout your website that can be clicked on and will either send visitors to another page within your website (internal linking) or to a page at another website (external linking). What makes internal linking valuable is that you can keep visitors to your website spending more time learning more about your medical practice. External linking, provided it is to authority sites with relevant content, helps improve your website ranking and may earn you links back to your site.

 

Key Component #5 – Social Media

Although likes and follows on social media have no impact on the ranking of your website, those feeds can still help. Business pages posted for your medical practice on popular social media platforms will give you exposure to different audiences you could not access before just from your website. All you have to do to gain from social media activity is to post links to your website and new content. Encourage sharing of those links and your website will receive more traffic. The extra traffic will help your website to increase its rank. Essentially, you are using social media to feed visitors to your healthcare website.

 

Final Thoughts

If you have a medical practice and have a website to promote it online, you can leverage medical SEO to increase your patient count. Just follow a few simple steps that incorporate some search engine-friendly components into your website. Over time, your website will have greater exposure, which will result in more patients seeking your services. Medical SEO makes your website more visible and turns it into a competitive site within your chosen niche. Without SEO, your website will get buried under all the others vying for space on the internet. To grow your medical practice, use SEO. It will turn your practice into a successful venture.

 

 

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