Our modern world is so plagued by acronyms that they gradually lose their meaning, but one acronym that you should grab onto for dear life is SEO. Plenty of modern marketing trends are doomed to be lost in a sea of useless noise, but SEO’s important role in the success of your website is only growing. No matter what kind of medical website you’re running, you’re only going to find success if you can drive traffic towards you, and search engine optimization is the best game in town. When people need to find information, they turn to search engines, and when you optimize your appearance on said search engines, you increase your web traffic and your ability to reach the people you are trying to reach.
Regardless of the type of medical website you are running, SEO needs to be your lifeblood. All medical sites, from private practice and hospital sites to medical manufacturer and distributor sites to informational and referral sites, rely on people knowing that they exist and that they provide a good service. There is no other way to show the people that you know what you are doing then to show up at the top of their search engine results. Growth only comes with change, and search engine optimization is a small change that can have a large impact.
Hippocratic Growth
It’s cliché to say that the world is growing and that you need to grow with it, but the sentiment is true. Businesses that hope to compete in the modern world are embracing SEO, which means that pretty soon, your only competition will be optimizing their website. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, and if you’re not optimizing, you’re failing. Your website will just sink into the internet ocean never to be found again. Keeping up with the competition is only the tip of the beneficial SEO iceberg, however, as the benefits of optimizing are far more than superficial.
Regardless of what you provide within the medical business community, you invariably rely on the credibility of your brand. No one is going to go to a doctor they don’t trust; no one is going to buy a syringe from someone who has poor reviews. The modern consumer or client trusts search engines more than anything else, running to Google before they’ll even ask the person right next to them for a recommendation. What better way to show that you have credibility as a brand than to be at the top of a Google search? It seems like a false or manufactured authority, but to the potential client, it is a true sign that you are the best business for the job.
Optimize and Monetize
Search engine optimization is a surprisingly low-cost, high-reward strategy for gaining and retaining business. Search engines have created a culture where people can distill tons of information all at once into something that fits their needs. SEO allows you to tap into those needs and interact more directly with potential clients or consumers. If digital marketing isn’t your strength, Crystal Clear Digital Marketing can work with you to make everything simple, easy, and financially beneficial.
Imagine advertising a business 40 years ago. If you created a print ad and put it in a newspaper, you were relying on potential clients to stumble across that ad and be moved to act. The name of the game became finding the best places to stick your ad so clients/consumers would be forced to see it. The process was completely inefficient. Now, when consumers want to search for a helpful website, they request specific criteria from a search engine, and your well-designed, search engine optimized website jumps to the top of the list. For very little money (perhaps the cost of creating SEO content), you have metaphorically placed your business on every page of every newspaper a client reads. If someone is looking for a website like yours, they find you, not your competition. Even if they aren’t looking for a website like yours, you can find out how to become the website they are looking for.
SEO costs very little, reaches many, and has a lasting effect. Let’s return for a moment to the marketing example from 40 years ago. Your print ad disappeared from those newspapers as soon as you stopped paying for them. With SEO, your ad never leaves the top of the list because of a lack of payment; it will remain there as long as you continue to optimize your content to keep it there. This concept may be more important for medical websites than any other business because people rely on search engines for medical inquiries more than for, say, recommendations for good restaurants or a good plumber. Without having to let any friends or family in on their private medical business, people can search for the answer to their questions online. And if you want to reach these clients, you need to be the result of their searches.
The internet is a massive juggernaut of over 600 million websites (and growing), and yours is just one of 600,000,000. Investing in SEO means that you can get recognition and differentiation in this massive space. And for your low-cost investment, the return is enormous. Studies have shown that if your website is the top search result for a specific keyword, you will receive about 33% of web traffic. Can you imagine a traditional ad having that kind of far-reaching effect on your website? If you are marketing a business, even if a small percentage of the people who visit your site actually become customers or clients, your business will flourish. Remember that this is all from a method of marketing that does not cost you a fee per ad, a method of marketing that does not cost you more as you scale up. This method of marketing is geared toward directly driving traffic to your business instead of just putting your business in the mind of potential consumers. If you are running a medical website where internet traffic is the ultimate goal, then you are getting the traffic you need for very little investment. For its low cost, its high return, and its lasting effect, optimizing your website for search engines is like driving a car from place-to-place when you used to have to walk. The impact is that large, and even the potential customers who don’t end up giving you their business benefit you, albeit in a less direct way.
Grow Smarter, Not Harder
Proper search engine optimization brings more than just traffic to your website and your business; it brings you data. When you analyze search engine metrics, you can learn a lot about your market and your potential clients. How would you adjust your business strategies if you knew exactly what potential clients were looking for? Through data analysis, you can figure out what is driving people to your business and, perhaps more importantly, what is keeping people from being driven to your business.
Maybe consumers are looking for a specific product or service that you don’t yet offer. Maybe you have been thinking about buying that brand new machine for your practice, and now you have the data to prove that it would pay for itself in profits in 6 months. This data will help you make informed decisions that will directly affect the amount of business you can do. If your website is the business, then the data will help you shape and adjust the kind of content and information you post and promote.
There are countless different reasons that make people choose one doctor, one supplier, one hospital, or one informational website over another, and SEO data will help you pinpoint ways to cater to clients who aren’t currently excited by your website. Data rules the world, and SEO gives you access to all the consumer data you could ever ask for.
Making Digital Marketing Crystal Clear
No one understands the tremendous positive impact that strong digital marketing, including SEO, can have on your business more than Crystal Clear Digital Marketing. We commit ourselves to being leaders in the digital marketplace and want to bring you and your business with us to the top. We understand how confusing and overwhelming digital marketing can be, and we know exactly how to make things simple for you. SEO, like other digital marketing, is just a form of advertising; we want to get the word out about your website, drive traffic to your business, and reach clients in the modern world. The results of our assistance won’t be some nebulous and general upward trend in traffic, either. We will work closely with you and show you exactly how our joint SEO efforts are directly benefitting you.
Your online presence is a reflection of your business, your mission, and your goals; let our team at Crystal Clear Digital Marketing help get that mission out to as many people as possible. If you are ready to take your medical business to the next level, contact us today and let us help you excel in the digital age!
