Semalt Shares Healthcare SEO Fundamentals And Its Impact On Growing Your Medical Practise Online



SEO had to become more involved in the health care sector last year. Since patients suffered largely limited access to physical medical practitioners, several patients turned to telemedicine. More and more doctors began practicing from home and attending to patients remotely. This proved a great source of revenue and an alternative means to reach patients, but how were they able to get to their target audience? 

If you're a medical practitioner and want to outrank your competition in search and drive more traffic, you are in the right place. Today, patients need to find health care practitioners on google. This enables them to get quality health care and localized health care. This makes it possible to pick the best option available. 

Having a website as a doctor, physician, therapist, etc., is great. However, having your website appear on the first page of SERP is even better. By getting your website to the first page, we make it easier for patients to click through and schedule an appointment. 

Get this, if your website is not on the first page, someone else is. Your competition means you're losing out on new patients daily. This is why we at Semalt believe it's time to take health care SEO more seriously.

How can Semalt help with healthcare SEO?

Health care SEO is fundamental for any medical website. By capitalizing on search queries, you are putting yourself in the perfect position to get more clients. And when you're not, you're handing out your market to your competition. 

With Semalt, you have a website management agency that pays attention to Google's updates on good SEO, but this time, we are paying attention to the health care content of SEO. This means you can beat your competition and watch as your digital presence soars. 

Quality control

As a medical professional, PPC ads simply aren't enough to get you the visitors you are looking for. However, PPC has its benefit. An appropriate medical description will be that starting with PPC simply puts an adhesive bandage on a problem. It can work for a while, but you will need to do more if you plan on stopping the effects of that problem. 

As a medical website or business, SEO must be incorporated into your digital marketing to attract your potential audience. This should be consistent and over time. No matter your intentions, if your content doesn't meet Google's quality standards, your search presence will suffer. 

In the health care sector, there are two very important concepts you must possess. They are E-A-T and YMYL. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and YMYL simply means your money and your life. 

E-A-T for healthcare websites 

E-A-T is of grave importance to websites containing medical information. That is because the information and advice you provide on your website directly influence the lives of your reader. For this reason, your expertise must be absolute, you must have good authority in your industry, and you must be trusted by not only google but your readers. 

The information you provide must be void of errors as it involves medicine and health. People who will visit your website will require solutions. This means they entrust their health to your practice. Your website must be based on facts and content that help your readers. Only then do you have a chance of ranking well in the healthcare industry? 

YMYL for websites

YMYL is a concept that refers to any content that can impact its reader's health, finances, or safety. For obvious reasons, this is a concept that directly affects the medical industry. For any healthcare website to stand a chance in its competitive environment, it mustn't fall short of the set standards. That means that it shouldn't have inaccuracies - it should provide robust and complete information. 

Important healthcare SEO strategies 

By focusing on more long-tail keywords and using a localized SEO approach, we've discovered that medical websites can perform better. Now, this doesn't mean you'll outrank a website like WebMD; however, you will be on your way to the same SERP page as they are. 

By using the right kind of SEO strategy, you can get your medical practice to the eyes of your target audience. This allows you to perform and outrank your competition. Here are some ways we can help you perform better in healthcare SEO.

Use the appropriate medical keywords

Keywords are important even to doctors. But here, we must target the right keywords for your industry to get the right audience. 

We start by highlighting the services you offer as the most effective hook and the core of what searchers are looking for. Using tools such as Google's Keyword Planner, we can find the best keywords for industries and then compare our findings with what is currently being searched. After that, we have many trending keywords that will give us more ranking points. 

As in all cases, we do not stuff keywords into the content. And neither should you if you plan on doing this yourself. Google is quick to catch on to these scammy tactics, and in the end, offenders get penalized. Instead, we use well place long-tail keywords in a readable and natural way. That way, it improves the user experience and ranks for our target search query.  

Having many content pages

In the medical industry, we trust that your goal is to make your readers' lives better and easier. From providing a detailed description of your services and products in blogs and websites, one thing is for sure. High-quality content is king if you want to sell in the healthcare business. 

Google places much higher standards in vetting medical webpages when compared with other industries. That is because the information carried on medical pages has the ability to influence the health and wellbeing of its readers. 

Low-quality content on medical websites can cause severe harm or have unintended medical consequences. When creating content, we always try to interpret it the way our audience would. This helps us send clear and unambiguous messages. 

By thinking of our audience, we can also determine what they are searching for and what information is most important. By writing high quality and meaningful content, Google will recognize your contribution to the medical industry and improve your rank. 

Optimizing visual elements

Plain texts on a website are no longer as interesting to watch as they were. These days, you need to have a photo or a video on your website to keep readers engaged. That's why webpages with videos get the most organic traffic. People find it easier to spend more time on those webpages because they watch the video. This increases the time users spend on a page. This indicates on the search engines algorithm, and it recognizes that your website is so engaging users stay a while. 

When optimizing your website for SEO, we ensure we include high-quality, relevant videos along with your content. It could be a virtual tour of your facility or a detailed intro to your products. this is one way to convert an article of 600 words into 1min videos that are captivating. 

We also include a variety of images and infographics, which adds color to your website. When we create an interactive and engaging website, visitors find themselves naturally drawn to it. When including images, we always ensure we use the appropriate alt text. This is a useful description of the image to Google's bot and to provide aid tools a description of the images for the visually impaired. It also allows us to put in a few extra keywords. 

Optimized for mobile devices

Our mobile phones have become one essential accessory to our daily lives. The chances are that you're reading this from your phone. This means having your website built for mobile devices is an excellent idea. The majority of searches carried out in recent years have been from mobile devices. 

The best way to ensure your site has the necessary tools to function properly on mobile devices is by having the right responsive designs. This means your website will need to be intelligent enough to understand when it should shrink to fit a mobile screen. In general, these modifications will reduce the risk of poor user experience across several devices.

Conclusion 

The medicine career is a prestigious position in every part of the world. As one of the few careers where participants have to swear an oath before practicing, Google has little to no other choice in how strict they are towards you. For that reason, you need professionals who get things done in absolutely the right way. 

With little or no room for perfection, we treat your SEO success just like you would a patient. We give it absolute attention and listen for every signal. This ensures we are always conscious of the latest developments and ensure that they work in your favor.