Taking to steps to optimize healthcare websites for SEO starts by being data-driven in your decision-making process. For smaller practices, this means taking the time to learn different ways to optimize their practice websites, and for larger group practices, it means taking some of the top web analytic trends and pushing them on a massive scale for better patient conversion.
Whether you’re looking for a guide to optimize healthcare websites for SEO or want to learn about some new ways to optimize your current website, then below, we’ll provide a brief overview on how website optimization works and the most current trends market experts are using to improve business outcomes.
What Does It Mean To Optimize Healthcare Websites for SEO?
The steps to optimize healthcare websites for SEO are about experimenting with your current website to improve its results. When optimizing a website, it’s important to have a strategic plan in place that determines the following:
- Determine Your Objective: First, you need to know what objective you want to obtain. This can vary based on your type of business, your brand’s message, your target audience, and other factors.
- Predict The Possible Outcome: Once you have your objective defined, make an educated guess about how to make your objective successful. This can be determined by current data and demographic markers related to your website, such as current conversion rates and bounce rates.
- Experiment With Changes: Afterwards, start making changes to your website’s design, message, and function. It’ll most often include variations of the same page.
- Track and Measure The Results: Once those changes are made and published, you can then use analytical tools to track relevant data and measure the success of those results.
This process can be repeated as long as necessary, but it requires access to analytical tools, such as Google Analytics, to have greater success. If your attempts to optimize healthcare websites for SEO are subpar or don’t achieve your intended goal, then the best practice afterward is to adjust the changes, change the expected outcome, or completely revise your goal for a better chance of success.
Basic Terms To Know When Optimizing Your Website
In website optimization, there are many glossary terms used, some of which involve different methods of optimizing, or basic terminology related to improving how websites function. Here’s a small list of common terms you should know before continuing:
A/B Testing
A/B testing is a technique that compares two versions of the same page, hosts both pages on the website by splitting the traffic between them, then tracks the engagement levels of those two pages to see which one’s better and how it can improve.
In this technique, even simple adjustments such as changing the look of a call-to-action button, or shifting a web element to the opposite end of a page, can impact the results. It’s a form of data-tracking that’s used to inform the owner in the decision-making process.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate of a website refers to the rate at which people visit your website, then leave immediately without engaging with the website’s content. Bounce rates in this case are usually tracked by analytical tools such as Google Analytics, and are most often given as percentages based on the total number of sessions on a website.
Conversion Rates
The conversion rate, unlike the bounce rate, tracks the total amount of successful forms of engagement in your website. This rate is usually converted by taking the number of users who have taken the desired action and dividing it by the total number of users who have visited and engaged with your website. So, if you have a conversion rate of 25%, it means that out of every 100 visitors, at least 25 visitors successfully engaged with your intended action.
Front End and Back End
These two terms exist simultaneously, but represent different parts of your website. The front end focuses on the user experience in a direct manner, which includes how they engage with fonts, colors, visuals, and other elements. The backend controls the code aspects of your website, which includes data-tracking programs, CSS formatting (a web language used for designing websites), and even server hosting information.
Content Lifecycle Management
Content lifecycle management revolves around a simple concept; every idea, every piece of content, has a lifecycle, and eventually, it will become outdated. In this system, it involves tracking the life cycles of your content, from videos to blog posts, to determine the end of their lifecycle and make decisions on whether to delete it, repurpose it, or completely change the format of the content as a whole. This practice is dependent on your business goals, which can help you make decisions about your marketing strategies and where you want your financial investments into your brand made.
How Does Website Optimization Connect to SEO?
Website optimization focuses on the user experience. In SEO, the focus revolves around improving search engine rankings. Both of these are intrinsically connected, because when either of these practices improves in results, the other will influence your final, intended goal.
Here’s an example: If you’ve taken the time to enhance your healthcare website’s loading speed, navigation elements, and even its visuals, then the website may experience a higher rate of conversion for returning patients. However, for new patients unfamiliar with your practice, it requires SEO to reach out to that audience and gain their attention. From there, your goal would be to optimize your website for new patients, which can involve restructuring content, call-to-action buttons, and other website features to reach that new goal.
Both website optimization and SEO practices are practically inseparable in this case; they build off each other and directly contribute to each other’s results to help influence future decisions about your website’s content and appearance.
Unique, Viable Ways To Optimize Your Healthcare Website
Address The Mobile Experience
Mobile users are one of your best resources for engagement, as most internet users today often search for reliable practices and other businesses on their mobile devices. Taking the time to design and implement a mobile version of your website can help boost your website’s success rate, especially as mobile devices often suffer from poor internet connections.
Compress Your Images and Videos
Compressing your visuals, such as images, gifs, and videos, can slow down loading times on web pages. Reducing your content’s file sizes (as long as it doesn’t reduce quality) can help increase your website’s loading speed and make it more user-friendly.
Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching can help reduce loading speeds on the server end by loading website resources on the user’s local computer as a cache. If the user revisits the website, the website will have fewer components to load and will load faster.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network is a network of servers that stores digital copies of all your website’s assets, such as images, videos, and HTML pages. It’s a geographic system that focuses on delivering these assets to users closer in range to the website’s hosting server. When this network strategically handles it, users worldwide can access your website faster when their computer communicates with the nearest server.
Reduce Plugins, Scripts, and External Resources
Plugins, scripts, and other external resources can often overload a website, especially if the website is heavy with web content and receives multiple influxes of user visits. One way to improve your website’s loading speed is to reduce or completely remove these resources. When you remove them, it can help minimize the amount of HTTPs requests your website receives.
Revise Your Content’s Voice
For optimizing content, one way to ensure that your content is enjoyable for the user is by restructuring and optimizing the content to contain a consistent brand voice. This brand voice should maintain a specific tone, language use, and grammatical style of writing which can then be improved on with SEO keywords and adjusted by your content strategy.
Analyze Your Competitors Pages
If you want to know who your competitors are within your industry, then the best way to learn is by example. Using information from your competitors, you can analyze aspects such as feature snippets, customer reviews, their brand image, service pages, and other aspects of their online presence to build on your own ideas for improving your website.
Use Google Search Console Insights
Google Search Console Insights is an excellent SEO tool that’s able to track mobile performance, analyze SEO keywords, and identify where your top performing pages are in your website. It’s also a valuable resource to gain data about potential backlinks, fixing crawl errors, and even improve the content of less-successful pages.
Bring AI Technology To Your Website
One of the latest trends found in website optimization is the inclusion of AI, specifically with chatbot services. Chatbots can be used to connect to a large language model run by your server or by a server hosting company. These bots can handle quick requests for returning users and address concerns for new users all within a professional tone. More importantly, these bots can be customized with your own LLM trained on your data to provide more accurate responses.
Experiment With Testing Techniques
There are more techniques involved than just A/B testing. Some of these include minor variations such as A/A testing and A/B/n testing, both of which take similar or completely different versions and perform comparisons on a broader scale. In larger optimization projects, bucket testing can be used for full website revisions, taking two versions of the same website to test out performance rates, or if your company offers software as a product, canary testing to validate the software by releasing it to a smaller group of users and receive feedback on the product.
Leverage Your Website’s Rates With Optimized360
The process is ongoing for SEO and website optimization and requires staying up-to-date on the best practices and trends in the healthcare industry. If you want to convert your website’s traffic into fully-fledged patients, then our team at Optimized360 can help. At Optimized360, our team of SEO analysts, web designers, and content writers can work with your SEO efforts and help you gain business growth and patient retention. Schedule a consultation with our team today for more information about our services.