Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a form of digital marketing and is better defined as a method of optimising your website in ways that meets the needs of Google guidelines and helps your website to rank better in search engine results pages.
For example, say you’re a user looking for cosmetic services in your local area but you’re not sure what businesses to look for. You could type in a search query such as “breast reduction Manchester” into the search engine. This will produce a list of results of businesses that provide breast reduction procedures within the vicinity.
SEO is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies available which is why it’s a popular practice for many businesses, including healthcare providers. With healthcare being a must-need for practically every individual, it can be an extremely crowded market to stand out in. SEO practices can help you achieve this.
Considering this, let’s look at 5 SEO tactics that healthcare professionals should consider when optimising their website for SEO purposes.
Before optimising your website, you should have a good understanding of what your services/products are and the audience you’re trying to reach out to. There are many keyword tools available that can help you collate extensive keyword research. You need to be aware of the types of keywords that your audience is likely to use when searching for your healthcare facility and services.
Once you have your available list of keywords, you can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner to understand the range of search volume that these keywords get. This is important as you wouldn’t want to go for something too competitive, but also a keyword that doesn’t get a lot of search volume.
Once you decide which keywords to target, these will be the keywords that you’ll look to target as part of your SEO strategy.
An important part of SEO is making sure that Google is able to understand what your pages are about. This is where optimising your metatitles and metadata is essential. These are the links that you see in the list of search results in search engines and it’s here where your keywords should be implemented.
Metadata will be one of the first aspects they’ll read to understand what your page is about, before they begin to scan the content on the page itself. The metatitle will be the blue link that you see in search results when the website appears, and the remaining metadata is the grey, descriptive content underneath the link which provides more characters for you to describe in more detail what the page is about.
Finally, be sure to include your target keywords in the content on the page itself in the header tags. These are the h1’s, h2’s, h3’s etc.
One way to really stand out from the rest of your healthcare competitors is to ensure you provide them original, unique content. By educating your patients with quality content marketing, you’ll be able to showcase your expertise and knowledge within the industry and your services.
There is a range of content that you can produce on your website rather than simple written content - you can publish case studies, articles, blog posts, videos, interviews, infographics, medical breakthroughs and more.
One way you can ensure that your content is unique and effective is to research around commonly asked questions that your patients are asking around certain subjects. This can help you to understand what they’re actively looking for, providing you with avenues for what content you can produce.
Google regularly crawls websites to check whether information is up to date that they can produce on their search results. A sitemap provides a list of all the websites on your website and how they’re structured on the site.
To help crawlers understand your site structure and crawl all the pages on your site, submit your sitemap to Google Search Console which is a site analytics tool for your website. You can opt to create your own sitemap but this can be quite time-consuming so you can choose to use third-party tools instead which can be more convenient.
Being a brick and mortar industry, it’s extremely important that your patients are able to find you easily. When users look for services in their local area, you should be looking to be as high as possible in the search results so you’re one of the first that they visit.
There are several ways that you can ensure your site is ready for local search. First is to look for local keywords that include your location in the keywords. Similar to how you’d optimise your site with your core keywords, you’ll do the same with local keywords too.
It’s also important to make the most of Google My Business, which is a tool that helps local businesses to provide their information to users that look for them. This includes business information, address, contact information, social media platforms etc.
These business cards can be viewed in search results when they’re optimised correctly with your website. Ensure every piece of information possible is filled out in your GMB profile and encourage users that come to your practice provide you with a review as this is also a factor that is considered with search engine factors.
Each of the steps provided above are basic, crucial SEO steps that you need to consider as part of your healthcare digital marketing strategy. They will be extremely beneficial in helping you to stand out in search engines and be found easily by your patients.
