Things are changing for medical practices, and it’s something that can’t be ignored for a second longer. Traditional marketing methods that promote the services of healthcare facilities and medical practices are no longer as significant as they once were. New technology and the importance of the internet in everyone’s lives mean that doctors and medical practices have to be in touch with the value of online marketing and SEO for doctors.
Digital marketing and strong approaches to SEO help medical practices reach new patients. There’s a huge audience there for medical practices to tap into if they’re able to develop the right approach to things like SEO. Sure, it might seem confusing if you haven’t used these kinds of online marketing techniques before, but we’re here to help you.
Why SEO Matters to Medical Practices
The internet is used for pretty much everything in one way or another these days, and that includes finding medical practices. If you want patients to head to your practice, it needs to be easy to find online, and SEO for doctors is the thing that makes that possible. You are warmly invited to find out more about why SEO matters to medical practices.
What is SEO?
Before we go any further, we should define SEO. It’s essentially a marketing tool that focuses on increasing the number of visitors to your site via search engines. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. To achieve SEO success, it’s necessary to tailor your website and content in ways that search engine algorithms view approvingly.
SEO is a great way to increase visibility and to improve traffic to your website. Around 95% of people making searches on Google never look beyond the first page of results. That’s why ranking as high as possible for key search terms is so important.
Organic SEO and Local SEO
Organic SEO is about optimizing your website and making it search engine-friendly, helping to improve the rankings of your pages for key search terms. It doesn’t usually include a local element though. Instead, it’s about offering content that delivers value to people.
Local SEO is different because it’s not so much about focusing on relevant and trusted content; it’s more about ranking pages based on relevant locations. Both of these are important, and local SEO is particularly important to medical practices because they tend to only target people in a specific location.
More and More People are Turning to the Internet for Health Information
When people need health information these days, the first thing they do is make a search on Google or another search engine. It’s now the normal way of doing things for many people. And if they want to see a medical professional, they’ll probably also start by searching Google for the information they need.
That offers the perfect example of why it’s so important for modern medical practices to have a strong online presence. And as you should know, no online presence is strong without a good SEO strategy in place. It’s crucial to show up when people are making those searches and looking for the kind of help you offer.
Drive Traffic
As we mentioned earlier, one of the most important objectives of using SEO is driving traffic to your site. It’s no exaggeration to say that good SEO for doctors is capable of revolutionizing your website and the number of people visiting it. And that will lead to more potential patients finding out about the services you offer.
When you really think about it, it’s all so simple and obvious. If people can see your link at the top of a search engine results page, they’re going to be more likely to click it. It really is as simple as that. Of course, SEO gets more complicated, but at its core, it’s a very simple premise and works for very simple reasons.
Attract New Patients to Your Medical Practice
All of this comes down to attracting new patients to your medical practice. If you feel that your medical practice is currently lacking behind and patient numbers aren’t growing in the way you might have expected them to, it may be because your online presence and SEO strategies aren’t good enough. To avoid putting yourself in that kind of position, you should work on your overall approach to SEO and start attracting new patients to your practice via search engines.
Vital SEO Tips You Can Implement
Now that you understand why doctors and medical practices can benefit from a strong approach to SEO, you need to learn more about how to implement the right strategies. Here are just some of the most effective SEO tips and strategies that your medical practice can begin to implement.
Create Content That’s Relevant
One great way to get more people visiting your website from search engines is to create content that’s relevant to people making relevant searches. So, you might want to create blog content that offers educational information relating to particular medical conditions and things of that nature.
Alternatively, you could think about using video content to draw in the right people. Lots of people want short, sharp, easy-to-digest information, and video content offers that. It’s one of the reasons why video content is viewed so favorably by most search engine algorithms, so it’s important to make the most of it.
Build a Positive User Experience
As part of your new SEO strategy, you should aim to make the overall user experience people have on your website as easy as it can possibly be. This doesn’t need to be a challenge. There are lots of ways to improve the experience, from adding new menu features and links to including more images.
Improving the load time of your website’s pages will help too. People don’t like waiting around for pages to load. Understandably, we now all expect pages to load pretty much instantly, so your website needs to be able to offer that. All of this stuff will improve your ranking on search engine results pages too.
Focus on Local Searches
Local searches obviously matter. As we discussed above, medical practices generally target patients in a particular local area. That’s why you need to focus on ranking high for local search terms. Having a profile on Google Maps is obviously key because people might use Google Maps to see what’s near them.
Local searches will include words and phrases of your local area, whether that’s the state, country, city or town. You should aim to be precise if you want to focus on a specific area. It can be useful to start small when you’re building an SEO strategy for your practice for the first time.
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
These days, people don’t predominantly browse the internet on their desktop computers. Things are changing, and more people actually use mobile devices such as their smartphones to make searches via platforms like Google. That’s why it’s so important for your website to be fully mobile-friendly.
If it’s not, people will leave your website in frustration when it fails to load correctly. It’ll also mean that your website suffers to climb the ranks on search engine results pages because the algorithms that decide these things know the importance of having a mobile-friendly website.
Include Your Full Address on Each Page
Consistency is really important when it comes to succeeding in the realm of SEO for doctors. You should have your medical practice’s full address displayed on each of your website’s pages. It’s a simple thing, but it makes a real difference from an SEO point of view. You should also include some internal links. For example, you should have a button on your logo at the top of the page which, when clicked, takes the user back to the homepage.
Link Your Google Maps Listing to Your Website
Having a Google Maps listing for your medical practice is obviously important, as we touched upon earlier. What we didn’t mention is the importance of making sure that the listing links back to your website. Google Maps makes this possible, so it’s wise to make the most of the feature.
That way, people can see the location of your medical practice, and they can follow the link right away if they want to find out more about it. It could turn out to be a great source of traffic for your website, and it’ll help massively with your SEO aims and objectives. That’s why you should add it if you haven’t already.
Reach Out Today
As you can see, SEO isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s going to continue to be an important way for doctors and medical practices to connect with patients and to raise awareness of the services on offer at these facilities. If you haven’t already, it’s about time your medical practice started implementing SEO for doctors if you want to benefit in the future. To get started, reach out to our team at Crystal Clear Digital Marketing and find out more information about how our services can help your presence be found on search engines. Contact us today to speak with an expert!
