SEO For Healthcare Practices & Hospitals
People around the word search the internet looking for advice on their medical problems. Approximately 58 percent of internet users utilize the internet to seek out information on a variety of medical treatments and procedures.
As a healthcare practice or hospital, you can get an edge over your competitors and stand out from the crowd by having your hospital or healthcare practice show up in your potential patients’ search results. How can you ensure that your information will be listed on the top page of results with the healthcare industry being so competitive?
Search engine optimization (SEO) for a healthcare provider is designed to target patients who are seeking out the top keywords related to the healthcare provider’s practice. These keywords are the words that internet users use to search out information on treatments, diagnoses, and tests. When an internet user searches for these words, the search engine will list websites on its search engine result pages (SERPS). Healthcare SEO is vital to any healthcare setting that wants to stay competitive in our technology-driven, digital world.
Contact us today to speak with a professional SEO specialist for more information. FoundMe Online has provided the following information to help teach you the ins and outs of search engine optimization and how your healthcare practice can benefit from an effective SEO campaign.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) includes a number of activities and processes that are designed to improve your website so that search engines, such as Google and Bing, will rank your website higher in their search engine results. SEO campaigns utilize a number of practices and steps to ensure that your website reaches its right audience. Hospital SEO should be based on the specific specialties and needs of your organization to ensure that internet users are able to find your website when they are searching for information on medical diagnoses, treatments or medications.
Whenever a search engine updates to ensure a better experience for internet users, a website must update its SEO. Unless proper SEO techniques are done to your medical website, your website may not be listed on the top page, which can prevent you from effectively reaching potential patients and can allow your competition to get an upper hand and rank higher on the SERPs.
This is one of the reasons that healthcare practices and hospitals must have an ongoing SEO campaign rather than have SEO done only once. You must do frequent changes to your website to keep up with the changes that search engines adopt.
What Benefits Does SEO Offer Hospitals and Healthcare Organizations?
Whether you are trying to increase the number of procedures that are performed at your medical practice or hospital or add to the number of patients using your hospital or practice, you must have an SEO campaign that is cost-effective and will help you reach more potential patients. SEO helps to improve your organization’s online authority in the medical field and provides you with a better return on your investment (ROI).
Approximately 77 percent of all patients will search the internet before they book an appointment with a medical practice or hospital. Therefore, you want to ensure that your website is one of the first sites that they see when they search out certain medical terms. SEO provides the same opportunity for large hospitals and small practices. When you rank higher using specific keywords like “Cardiologists or Cardiology Unit”, you will be able to reach more potential patients and increase your profits.
High-risk treatments and expensive procedures are some of the most common searched for keywords. For example, patients will search for laser eye surgery rather than less expensive nonsurgical procedures. Extensive SEO can help you to capitalize on this type of medical keyword searches.
What is the Role of Content with Search Engine Optimization?
Creating unique, user-friendly content for your websites like blog posts, patient testimonials, videos, information about medical breakthroughs, interviews, and information about changes in the healthcare industry helps you to become a healthcare authority online.
Medical conditions and medical symptoms are some of the most common search topics that patients search for before visiting a hospital or medical facility. This is why you need to include a large amount of informational content on your website. Content makes your site more engaging and informative for your patients. Additionally, this information helps a search engine determine what your website is about and why your website should appear on the first page of the search engine results.
Lead Acquisition
One of the primary goals of hospitals and healthcare organizations is lead acquisition. By finding keywords that have been shown to spark conversation and then produce content that uses these phrases can help to improve the return on your investment.
Remember that your URLs, title tags and heading should include keywords to ensure help your website be listed higher up on the search engine results. Over time, these techniques will help generate more leads and more patients, resulting in increased profits.
Your Website Needs To Be Mobile Friendly
One of the major factors with search engine optimization is that your website is responsive. This is especially important in the healthcare industry because patients are often looking for urgent information concerning a condition or illness when they are on the go.
Approximately 44 percent of mobile users schedule appointments after finding the information they need online. Because of this, your website must be user-friendly. Additionally, when Google ranks a website, it takes into account the mobile-friendliness of a website. Therefore, to improve your page rank, your website must be mobile-friendly.
Local SEO For Medical Practices
Including local SEO practices to your website will help improve your page rank. Local SEO helps patients find information about medical practices in hospitals in their area.
Local SEO should include setting up a Google Places profile or updating your current Google Places profile. This will help improve your rank when a location-specific search is performed. For example, if a patient is looking for a hospital in XYZ hospital, you will automatically rank higher when a Google Places profile is updated and in place.
Service & Physician Pages
Many healthcare websites provide limited information about their doctors. If you are a patient, what type of information would you want to find when visiting a website? Use this information to help you provide information for your physicians.
Your website should contain all pertinent information about each physician, including their specialties, their education, qualifications, office locations, hours of business and photo. You can also improve on this by linking this information to publications that the doctors have contributed to.
Consider creating different pages for the different types of services that are offered. These pages help boost your ranking when this information is searched for. It also helps to showcase the uniqueness of your medical practice.
Ensure that your website answers questions about the types of insurance that are accepted, contact information and parking information. This will help improve conversations between your potential patients and encourage patients to contact you.
How Can We Help You with Hospital SEO?
You work in a time-sensitive industry and we know it is difficult to keep up with the search engine optimization requirements. This is where we can help. We will handle all aspects of your search engine optimization including creating content for your website, performing local optimization and determining the top keywords for your practice. We understand how valuable your time is and how important it is that you spend time with your patients instead of worrying about your website.
Our team includes experience online marketers that have the knowledge and skill needed to help your medical practice succeed. We will research your competitors, target audience and your website’s current rank before we formulate a strategy for your business.
Our marketing packages are designed for hospitals and healthcare practices just like your’s to increase traffic and improve your SERP rankings. We will help you become a medical authority online by providing you with resources and unique content for both your patients and other medical professionals.
Contact Found Me Online today or give us a call for more information!
