In Today’s digital age, patients can find a healthcare provider at the convenience of their mobile device. Instead of flipping through yellow pages to locate a healthcare provider, patients are turning to Google, Bing, and other search engines to find doctors that suit their needs. By understanding SEO (search engine optimization), you can increase your visibility in search results generated by these search engines, which in return helps drive patients directly to you. 

If you are a physician working for a large medical practice, it is ideal to invest in your personal brand to gain more exposure as an individual. With the help of SEO, you can reach patients that are trying to find a specific doctor with your specialties and expertise. Here’s how:

Third-Party Listings

The first step to high ranking is to have your personal brand listed on third party sites, such as Google, Bing, Healthgrades, etc. Healthgrades is a company that provides information about physicians, hospitals, and healthcare providers. This leading online resource for healthcare information is used by millions of consumers each month in their searches for a physician. Your Healthgrades profile is a powerful tool for acquiring new patients, so it’s important that you fully optimize your profile to best promote yourself as a healthcare professional.

Whatever third party listings you decide to build upon, it is important to be consistent with the information you are putting on your profiles. This allows your personal brand to build E-A-T, a search engine algorithm we will get into in the next section.

Blogs

To rank well on Google and other search engines, you need to nurture your brand by building its Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T), and blogs are a great way to get started with this. Blogs with content that adheres to the E-A-T algorithm will help physicians improve their rankings and gain more exposure as an individual provider.

When it comes to health, Google doesn’t want to serve up links to pages that share uneducated advice and opinions. Google wants to be certain that they are recommending sites that display a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Back in 2018, Google made some additions on its guidelines stating that the quality evaluators are now reviewing both a website’s E-A-T and the content creator’s E-A-T as well. 

Google now wants to see who the author of a page’s main content is and what their credentials are concerning the subject matter. When writing specific content relating to healthcare, it is important to make sure that the author is credited and is actually a physician so they will gain a higher ranking on the web. Other ways to show your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness on blogs include:

• Create an author box that includes links to your profiles elsewhere on the web  
• Provide your expert knowledge in a way that engages people 
• Include links from relevant and authoritative sources 
• If you are ever mentioned in the news or on authoritative websites, be sure to include this information in your author box or your blogs
• Ask to be in podcasts or a guest writer in other blogs — this will also help build your authority scores.

Local Search

SEO is extremely doable for any physician, even if you are a small or brand new practice. To find a doctor nearby, patients generally enter search keywords like “Doctors in Tampa, Florida” or “physician near me.” Geo-specific locations like states, regions, cities, towns, etc. are entered into the search engines with the specific keyword to search for a doctor. This technique is called a local search and serves to work as a physician guide for the local population.

Having a built out biography page on your medical practice’s website with keywords associated with your specialty, along with education and awards, can increase local search. This will help bring in new patients who are interested in seeing a specific doctor based on their skills and expertise.

Contact us

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. 

To learn more about what we offer, please visit our website. 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.