Imagine a person waking up with a massive toothache. In their hopes of finding treatment, they go online and search for “best dentists near me.” If your practice isn’t showing up on the list, they will likely go find other providers in your area. A Healthcare SEO strategy is about improving how your practice appears in search results, and having a website that’s optimized to your patient’s needs is what will help you become more visible and improve the likelihood of success. 

In our guide, we’ll go over why healthcare SEO matters, provide a glimpse at the challenges that come with developing a healthcare SEO strategy. This guide will offer some valuable ways for you to optimize your website for SEO. 

How Do Patients Search For Healthcare Providers? 

Today, most people don’t flip through phone books or even rely on word of mouth anymore. The Google search engine, among many others, is considered the primary source for gathering information about practices, services, and treatment options. Nowadays, people often use the web to search: 

• Medical symptoms: Phrases such as “Why does my knee hurt when I run?” or “symptoms of flu” will often produce the most accurate results based on various keyword metrics. 
• Search for Providers: In cases where patients need treatment, they’ll search for “primary care doctors in Dallas, TX” or “psychiatrist services near me” as a way to find resources locally. 
• Read through Reviews: When potential patients find a provider, they’ll often try to find reviews of the provider’s reputation, either through Google itself or through reputable review websites. 

For websites trying to reach out to an indented audience, all of these factors will affect your business reputation and success of your healthcare SEO strategy. If your medical practice does not appear on search results, then you’re invisible to your patients, even if your services are the best in your area. 

How SEO Connects You To Your Patients

A solid healthcare SEO strategy is all about connecting you to the patients you intend to serve at the right time and place. It’s a timely, concise, and planned system of techniques that aim to improve your website’s search rankings and help businesses attract attention from the audience they want to hear from. In healthcare, patients won’t know your practice exists unless you plan out and gain ways of attracting their attention.

SEO, in some ways, are like signs. If you don’t have signage placed throughout your local area advertising your business, then it’ll be less likely that prospective patients will find you. SEO is an entire subset of skills and tech-savvy techniques that can do wonders for your website in the following ways:

• Gain Visibility: Websites that use SEO often rank higher on web search results, especially when those websites offer what their customer base is searching for. In healthcare, this means the more visible your website is across the web, the more potential patients will be likely to see it. 
• Build Reputation: When a website ranks high, then patients will be more likely to trust your website as an authoritative or trusted source for care. 
• Attract Patients: Having SEO also means your location will appear on Google Maps and other local search results. For practices that offer many services, people will be more likely to find your business if those options are optimized for the most visibility. 
• More Scheduling: If your website is optimized, fast-loading, and offers valuable content that’s informative, friendly, and easy to read, patients will be more likely to schedule an appointment. 

Even if you already have a website up and running, if your website isn’t optimized for search engines, then patients will be less likely to know you exist. The right healthcare SEO strategy can be used to increase website traffic, improve your practice’s credibility, and even build online patient communities. 

How Does SEO Work In Healthcare? 

Building a healthcare SEO strategy is a process, and in today’s highly advanced age of technology, techniques and trends come and go just as quickly as the search results themselves. However, there is a wide collection of methods that are able to produce stable, reliable results for optimizing websites. These methods include: 

• Researching Keywords: Keywords are specific phrases that commonly occur during web searches, and keyword research allows you to identify your patients and what they’re looking for so your website can cater to those needs and attract their attention. 
• On-Page Content: Changing the content of your website, such as blog articles, website copy, and graphic elements, is another way to attract patients. If the content is educational and enjoyable to read, then it’ll likely be more successful. 
• Technical Improvements: In some aspects, updating your website’s code, server configurations, and overall architecture can help patients have a better time navigating through your content. The backend aspects of your websites are what power good websites, and aspects such as site speeds, mobile versions, and accessibility for disabled patients help create a good foundation to build trust on. 
• Off-Page Backlinking: Adding links to authority websites or using links to advertise for local businesses also offers ways to make your website more authoritative and trustworthy. When you reference medical information from reliable sources such as MedlinePlus or the National Institute of Health, then patients will be more likely to refer to your expertise and schedule appointments. 

While all of these healthcare SEO strategy points are highly used and valuable, they also come with their own challenges. Healthcare SEO is a competitive, extensively regulated landscape, and due to the nature of the industry, search results often compete for the top rank and make smaller practices void on the internet. Achieving top search results for your website, especially if you are a smaller, more localized business, can be difficult for the following reasons: 

• HIPAA Compliance: As you’re probably familiar with the concept, HIPAA has standards that’s meant to protect sensitive health information for patients, and requires security measures in place to adhere to those standards. If your website cannot provide those security measures, then it will be less likely to appear in Google search results. 
• Strict Requirements for E-E-A-T: Google prioritizes the “E-E-A-T” concept, which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. In search rankings, this concept is used to validate and fact-check against authoritative sources, and for websites that don’t meet those standards, it can impact search rankings and make it more challenging for practices to establish themselves online. 
• Large-Scale Healthcare Competition: For those looking into a healthcare SEO strategy, it can seem impossible to achieve, as many major health websites and hospital chains often dominate the search results. These healthcare organizations will have extensive resources to build and easily maintain an online presence, making it harder for smaller businesses to achieve similar results. 

Ways To Develop A Strong Healthcare SEO Strategy For Your Website

Your healthcare SEO strategy can vary greatly from others, but the most important aspect to remember about engaging with SEO is that the plan needs to be tailored to your practice’s goals, aspirations, and services. Here are our suggestions for building a strong SEO strategy that works with you: 

Use Local SEO For Website Traction

For smaller medical practices, competing with global competitors for the top keyword search results will be impossible, as the standards are higher in those search rankings. However, your patients will most likely be searching locally for their providers, and a local healthcare SEO strategy can be used to track them down and gain their attention. 

• Try Using Geolocation: Geolocation refers to ways of tracking web users that visit your page, and through this technique, you can use location-specific keywords to narrow down your audience and gain more visibility for your website. 
• Expand Your Location Options: When choosing keywords, you can choose cities, landmarks, regional markers, and even towns outside of your locality to bring in your audience. In these cases, you’ll need to decide on how big of a radius you want to reach out to to gain more patients. 
• Think About Your Community: Consider what types of services your patients will need. You can gauge their interest by search results and include common options such as “near me” keywords to match their intentions. 

Be Selective About Your Keywords

SEO keyword selection is probably the hardest part of making a healthcare SEO strategy work, as there are a lot of factors involved with keyword research that make it successful. In these cases, websites such as SEMRush and Google Keyword Planner can be used to analyze keywords. Here are some tips on how to select keywords for optimizing your website: 

• Give Yourself A Broad Range: When first starting out, you should aim for broad keyword searches that relate to your practice, as this can help you narrow down and find new keywords that have potential to gain traction.
• Find Well-Balanced Metrics: During your time narrowing down keywords, you should select keywords that are realistic and offer a good balance between volume, competition, and traffic. 
• Refine By Keyword Type: In other aspects of keyword research, long-tail keywords (ones that include multiple words in the search) offer specific phrases that can easily gain traffic. 

Focus On Intuitive Website Content

If the website’s content is subpar, lacks visual quality, and doesn’t help patients navigate to what they need, then it’s time to change how your content reads to its viewers. Your website, especially within the healthcare industry, should showcase your expertise in your field and work to build trust with your website visitors. 

• Update Your Content Pages: Your website should feature doctor biographies, credentials, and reliable photos to help build trust. Your content, alongside your healthcare SEO strategy, should also answer common questions and offer a specialized perspective on the services your practice provides. 
• Showcase Testimonials: Testimonials can be used to help build reputation and reviews that offer positive feedback can help new patients feel more confident with your care. 
• Check for Compliance: Make sure your website is compatible with HIPAA guidelines, ADA compliant for those with disabilities, and has HTTPS encryption to protect your patient’s data. 

Don’t Forget The Website’s Backend

For websites that have slow loading times or struggle with compatibility on other devices, then another way to optimize your website can include improving code-related performance on the backend of your website. Some ways you can improve your website’s running efficiency include: 

• Fix Broken Links: Having links that are broken and lead to an 404 Error can be an easy detractor for new patients. Make sure to check your website and fix any broken links or remove them entirely. 
• Enable Browser Caching: Browser caching refers to ways of storing your website’s information onto your user’s browser, so that when they revisit, they’ll experience faster loading speeds. It’s a great option for returning patients and can easily help them schedule appointments faster. 
• Compress Web Visuals: One of the key aspects of any good website is that their image-related content doesn’t take up data. Websites run on data, but too much can clog a website’s server and make it slower. Compressing the images to reduce their data size and embedding videos from other hosting websites can reduce load times for your patients and make navigation easier for them. 
• Make It Mobile-Friendly: Make sure your website adjusts to different size resolutions, especially for mobile devices. Many patients often search for results on their mobile devices, and optimizing your website to adjust to different resolutions can help them build trust in your brand and be more likely to schedule an appointment. 

Measure and Track Your SEO

Lastly, when your website is updated and optimized, the best way to take advantage of your healthcare SEO strategy is by keeping track of its performance. As you track your keywords and search results, you can also improve your strategy over time through the following ways: 

• Use Google Analytics: Google Analytics offers the best methods and interface for tracking visitors to your website. It contains valuable data for how users interact with websites based on factors such as conversion tracking, visitor demographics, and also provides detailed reports for you to assess and make decisions about your strategy. 
• Perform A/B Tests: A/B tests help test different versions of the same page or even the same website and track their results to compare against. You can compare different keywords, formatting, visual styles, and CTA statements to see which ones users like better. 
• Check Bounce Rates: Out of all the demographics you can check, bounce rates help determine why visitors leave without visiting other sites. You can use this statistic to improve your website’s visual appeal, navigation, and content and focus on reducing this rate for visibility. 

Drive Your Website Forward With Optimized360

At Optimized360, our team offers a full suite of healthcare SEO strategy and website design services focused on enhancing your site’s performance.  Whether you need help with your latest medical website design or want to ensure you get the most out of your website’s performance, we’re here to help. Contact Optimized360 today for a expert healthcare SEO strategy that will show successful results!