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Healthcare SEO | Search Engine Optimization for Medical Practices

Medical SEO Services


Medical SEO Services, tips, and tutorials for Healthcare practices, Doctors, Dentists, Orthodontists, and other Businesses. 

We can Optimize your Clinics, Hospitals Websites or even you can find a lot of information here on how to do that yourself.

You know that when you are a medical doctor you don't have enough time to start optimizing your website even though you know or you have heard that it is important to grow your overall patient base.

You want to be more easily found on the internet because that is very important for your medical practice. After all, patients now search for answers on the internet for their health problems or even out of curiosity.

But when they search on the internet and you are nowhere to be found therefore you don't stand a chance to increase patients at your clinic, hospital, etc...

Therefore you need a very strong Medical SEO strategy for your website so that potential patients can find you as a medical professional.

Even your existing patients ask for answers online all the time and you should be doing search engine optimization so that you can retain patients and prevent them from turning to your competitors for information.

Your website should serve as a valuable educational resource.

You should also optimize your social media strategy and content marketing.

SEO for Medical Practices


Why Your Medical Practice Needs Search Engine Optimization


Search Engine Optimization for Medical practices is a process that will help you to have more organic traffic on your website, will help you that those people that come to your site looking for health-related issues answers convert to be your patients.

Why is Necessary for Doctors to Have a Website


Physicians, Dentists, and everyone with a medical practice now need to have a website that represents them and their clinics.

When I say a website represents them I mean that websites represent their work and sometimes they represent even their personality.

Now almost everybody searches on their phones for everything, and that doesn't exclude their medical conditions, health tips, weight-loss tips, etc...

Healthcare SEO
Why Your Medical Practice Needs Search Engine Optimization

But, what all that has to do with you?

Well if you are a medical doctor or dentists then that definitively have a lot to do with you, because your patients already are using their phones to ask for their medical conditions, and if you are not present on the internet giving answers then you should know that your competition is already doing that.



If other doctors that are your competition are giving answers to your existing patients then do not be surprised when your patients are going to change you as a doctor with them.

But that's not all!

If you have a website where you blog and give health tips to people who search on the internet and can get answers from your website then chances are that they can easily turn to be your patients and therefore you can grow your patient base.

So I hope by now you have been convinced that you definitely need to have a website.

What kind of website medical and healthcare practices should have?


The most important thing is having a website, but what kind of website you should have?

You should have an informative website with medical and healthcare topics where searchers and your potential patients can find the answers they are looking for.

It doesn't matter what kind of CMS (content management system) you will use to create e manage your website as long as it is an informative and SEO friendly website.

Although I always recommend using WordPress, static website, or even Blogger for your website.

What Kind of Information Should You Put On Your Medical Website?

When I say you should have an informative site, I mean you should have information in there that will help your site visitors to find answers to their questions that they have.

First, you should have information about your clinic, like an address where are you located, your phone number, info about you as a medical professional, info about services that you offer, etc...

After this, you should be having a blog to write about various health and medical topics, so that you can give information to your website searchers or potential patients.

You should know what to write by doing keyword and other types of search engine optimization research.

You Have Created a Website, Placed Information on it, What Should You Do Next?


Well now that you have done the first part of the work, now you should start blogging and also doing SEO for your medical practice.

You should have a clear content marketing plan for blogging.

By content marketing plan I mean doing research on what to write, scheduling your posts on when to publish them, communicating with your site visitors, etc...

You should also start optimizing your website for search engines and for your visitors, and by this, I mean helping search engine crawlers to easily crawl your website, and creating a great UX (user experience) for your website visitors and this will help you convert your visitors to patients.

When it comes to converting your site visitors to become your patients you need more than just a good UX, but also a great CRO (conversion rate optimization) by knowing how to optimize your post titles or headlines, your meta description and by this, you will increase CTR (click-through rate) and now with the Rankbrain algorithm Google algorithm) you will increase rankings on SERPs (search engine result pages).

On-Page SEO for Healthcare Practices


On-page SEO includes all the optimization techniques that can be manipulated by the owner or webmaster of the website to increase search engine rankings.

On-Page SEO techniques are optimization of page titles, meta descriptions, and other meta tags, images, URLs, canonicalization, permanent and temporary redirects, anchor texts and interlinking, etc...

Medical SEO Strategy
Medical SEO Strategy

Structured Data Markup for the SEO of Medical Practices


Structured data markup is lines of codes that you can place on your website and that will help search engines to better understand the content of your website and this will surely help you rank better.

But, that's not all, now Google when somebody makes a question on their search field by typing it or even by voice search, Google have presented an answer box with the answer to the searcher's question and that answer usually is taken from the most relevant website that has their answer on their website and having structured data markup present helps that the answer to be taken from your website.

You Should Promote Your Medical Blog Posts


After creating amazing health and medical articles for your blog, you should start promoting them so that you can gain traffic to those pages on your website and increase your overall visibility and authority in the eyes of your website visitors.

By promoting your website and your blog posts you will obtain backlinks to your site articles, your website, you will get social shares for your posts, and this will lead to an increase of your site's overall domain authority.

Google and other search engines treat backlinks as the most important ranking factor and therefore you need to obtain as many backlinks as you can.

But, you should be careful with backlinks because you can get a penalty and you can for getting backlinks just for the sake of getting backlinks.

You should try to get natural editorial backlinks because those matter the most when it comes to getting a boost in SERPs.

Editorial backlinks are also the hardest to get because you need to have amazing content so that people will link to you, you need to know how to promote that content, etc...

But you should focus also on getting social media shares and because of that you should create social media business profile pages and have a clear social media strategy.

Create a Local SEO Strategy for Your Medical and Healthcare Practice


When it comes to medical practices, local SEO is very important, because most patients that you will get to your clinic are going to be from your city, town, or region.

There should be written a clear local SEO strategy, on how to create listings of your business on Google, Yelp, and other places where you can get a listing or a citation.

But not only listing but also reviews of your clinic are what matters for search engines, so having more positive reviews are going to be very important.

SEO for Medical Practices - is a series of tactics aimed at increasing your website’s visibility in search engine results – essentially, improving your chances of being found when patients are searching for the treatments and services you offer.

Medical SEO - Search Engine Optimization for Medical Practices


When prospective patients are searching online for your name and your practice, they will find something.

SEO for Medical Practices
SEO for Medical Practices


A strong SEO strategy for your health care practices will ensure that prospective patients find your website and receive your message as you intended it.

As the number of websites exploded and Google became the dominant search engine, not only SEO for medical practices but also search engine optimization, in general, has become more and more complex.

Even patients that are referred to practices by people they trust, they still go online to do research.

The Internet has become a resource for nearly everything these days, and selecting a new physician or specialist is no exception.

Medical SEO
Medical SEO


If your website serves as a valuable educational resource, it will be more easily found and will create confidence and trust for you and your practice.

SEO for Medical Practices - Full Guide


Here are the promised SEO Tips for Medical Blogs and Websites:

1. Choose the Right Keywords-Attract more patients with proven keywords


Users should be able to tell from the title of a web page and its headers what that page is about.

If these elements are jammed with keywords, readers will not be well-served.

Google hates keyword stuffing and is openly penalizing over-optimized sites.

You should do keyword research with SEO tools to find keywords that have good search volume and low SEO difficulty.

2. Define Your Meta Data: Title Tags & Meta Descriptions


Medical SEO strategy can liven up just by writing attention-grabbing headlines. List, “how-to”, and question headlines typically see the strongest results for click-through.

Your page title is used as a suggestion for the title in the search results. Describe your business in a concise, informative phrase. Place the focus keyword at the beginning of the title.

Meta descriptions are page summaries often used by Google and other search engines on the search results page. Write unique descriptions for each page in 160 characters or less.

Use unique descriptions for each page. A readable, compelling description using important keywords can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to the given web page.

3. Include a Site Map On Your Website


Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Using the Sitemap protocol provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

4. Local SEO for Medical Practices


When your medical website is optimized for local searches, you can be assured that a large number of leads generated by those searches.

That is because those searches will come from potential patients who have a real and immediate need for what your practice provides.

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website to appear in local searches when people are "Googling" for local bars, restaurants, or any other type of local businesses.

With over 50% of mobile searches being with local intent, there's never a better time to get your business found in local searches.

Getting a local listing on Google


Getting listed on Google is a great start to improving your local SEO, address here are some tips to get listed:


  • Create and verify your Google+ Local page
  • Use a local phone number
  • Have an address in the town or city that you’re targeting
  • Fully complete your Google+ Local page
  • Choose appropriate categories on your Google+ Local page

Bonus Local SEO tips:


  • Optimize local pages for target local keywords:
  • a) Include your city name on page titles and content,
  • b)Add your business physical address on-site layout (sidebar or footer).
  • Create a separate page on your website for each location that you want to target
  • Be consistent with your business’s name, address, and phone number
  • Make it easy for people to contact and/or find you
  • Add a map of your business’s location to your website
  • Create a separate page on your website for each product/service that you offer
  • Get ratings and reviews on your Google+ Local page and on 3rd party websites
  • Build links to your Google+ Local page and website

5.Social Media and Blogging


Blog - Write to your visitors


Having a blog on your site can have its SEO advantages because that way you will have fresh content on your site and both search engines and your users love that.

Create Original Content-High-Quality Content: Create Content To Provide Value & Solve Problems - So that being said, you have to create ‘problem-solving content’ for your readers as often as possible.

Social Media:


Social Media Marketing for Healthcare Practices

Join popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest.

Social Sharing buttons


Make the social buttons within the content very visible to make sure that the visitors will be forcefully lured to share your content.

If your content is good, problem-solving, and emotional it can easily go viral and bring huge traffic to your site.

6.Email Marketing


Email marketing occurs when a company sends a commercial message to a group of people through the use of electronic mail.

Email marketing is an efficient way to stay connected with your clients while also promoting your business.

Good email content deepens your relationship with your audience through effective subject line writing and delivering quality, niche-specific content your prospect needs and shares with others.

7.Use Schema markup - Rich snippets


"Structured data markup" is a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it.

Structured markup provides publishers with a way to provide the search engines information about their website.

8.Specify Country and Site Language


Specify the country and your site language in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools if you would like to get more traffic from local customers through search engines.
All of the SEO tasks can be done easier and better with SEO friendly CMS like WordPress through SEO plugins.

Some Final Pieces of SEO Advice


Usually, most doctors hire an SEO Consultant to optimize their website for search engines, but if you think you are capable of pulling it off or you have enough time then this blog will for sure help you to achieve this task.

Or you can always hire me as your SEO Consultant to help your blog rank better in search engines.

Medical Marketing is a part of internet marketing that is focused on increasing your medical website visibility on the internet with different marketing methods, such as search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media, etc...


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