In today’s competitive healthcare industry, every doctor and medical organization should be on the internet if they want to drive more patients to their practice. While having your own website is a great start, it is only the foundation of your online presence. The real key to getting found and followed on the internet lies in search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO is the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through search engine results. According to the Pew Research Center, most internet users start at a general search engine when researching health and medical advice online.
For example, when a person wants to know what their symptoms mean, they typically resort to the Google search bar and type ‘symptoms for ear infection’ or ‘lower back pain’. Using these specific keywords will provide them with a results page that has the best match of information they are looking for.
SEO is all about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they are using, and the type of content they want to consume. Knowing the answer to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching for solutions your practice provides.
Search engines want to provide the best service for their users. This means delivering results on the search engine pages that are both high quality and relevant to what the searcher is looking for.
SEO is not all about ranking in the search engines, though it certainly is critical for any practice interested in attracting new patients. SEO is also about gaining trust among potential patients who are considering your healthcare practice.
SEO can benefit your organization because it allows potential patients to easily locate your practice. For instance, if a patient types ‘ENT doctor near me’ in a Google search, then your website should feature in the first three listings if you are utilizing those keywords correctly in your content. As you can imagine, every practice can’t rank in the top three spaces in Google search. Hence why you must invest in extensive SEO practices to become more visible. This will increase the chances of a potential patient scheduling an appointment with you and becoming a repeat patient.
In addition to ranking well on search engines, some of the other benefits of a healthcare practice SEO strategy include:
When patients search for a doctor online, millions of results will come up. However, when patients add keywords, such as specialty and location, the choices drop sharply. Having a strong SEO strategy will put your site in front of patients who are looking for exactly what you have to offer.
SEO is one of the most affordable forms of advertising and produces an exceptionally high return on investment (ROI). SEO has ongoing long-term results, such as constantly increasing traffic to your website and increasing brand awareness. Using the many strategies that SEO has to offer, you will be able to market your practices’ products and services to the patients that need them most.
Trust is essential for any healthcare practice to lead patients further down the patient journey. Search engine rankings are determined by the number of people visiting a website and how they react, such as time spent on the site or if they immediately “bounced” back to the search engine results. Therefore, a website that ranks higher on search engines is seen as more trustworthy than one that ranks deep in the search results.
LEVO Health creates and distributes SEO-friendly healthcare content focused on healthcare providers, procedures or treatments, conditions, or other healthcare topics for a range of formats to build fans and establish credibility for our healthcare clients.
Interested in hiring a professional marketing team to help grow your practice? Contact the healthcare marketing experts at LEVO Health today by visiting our contact page online. To learn more about what we offer, please visit our website.