IMPORTANCE OF SEO MARKETING FOR HEALTHCARE
A healthcare marketing journey : Episode 6
SEO refers to the optimizing strategy that improves the visibility of your website in search engine rankings. Customers are not going to go beyond the first page of the search results and subsequently, the top 3 search results receive more than 50% of the clicks. And a good SEO strategy can boost your page into the top search results listing organically.
Why is Medical SEO important?
A study has shown that 56% of internet users learn about medical procedures through online means. And a staggering number of 77% of patients use search engine results before making a consulting appointment. These numbers prove that it is crucial to establish your online presence to increase your visibility. SEO may not be the fastest digital marketing method, but it helps to drive more substantial traffic to your website, which increases the number of patients eventually.
How to effectively use SEO for Healthcare?
Healthcare providers are concentrating on SEO marketing more than ever. Reaching out to prospective patients has become difficult with increasing competition. And this has made the healthcare provider adopt SEO marketing strategies. In this digital age, implementing the right SEO strategy can make a vast difference in increasing visibility.
There are certain factors to maximize the effectiveness of your SEO marketing strategies, and they are :
1.Medical based Keyword Research:
A keyword is a single word or a phrase that is used as a search query in a search engine. And when your site has information related to the keyword phrase, Google likely ranks your page on top for that specific keyword. When your site tops the results for a set of medical keywords, it tends to gain more web traffic.
Perform keyword research to find out the most relevant keywords that patients would use to search for you or the services provided by you. Short-tail keywords are keywords not more than two words and attract very high traffic, Eg ”Eye Hospitals”. A long-tail keyword is a phrase which attracts low traffic, Eg ”Eye Hospitals in Chennai”.
When you are starting with SEO, it is wise to target long-tail keywords as they have less competition, and you can easily top the results for that keyword. Google’s search bar recommendations are the easiest way to figure relevant keywords, but there are many tools available to perform keyword research to find the best keywords that help you to rank well in search results.
2.Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions:
Content Management Systems like Wordpress, has plugins to edit the title and meta description of the content. There are automated meta descriptions based on the content, but they are not as effective as manual relevant descriptions.
Metadata helps Google to know what the page is about using its title tags, headers and meta description. A meta description is less than 150 characters, and it describes the content of the page. Using the relevant medical keywords in the title tags can improve the ranking.
3.Create Keyword specific Content:
Any marketing strategy will prove to be effective only when there is quality content to back it up. Patients visiting your website need certain medical-related information, and if your site does not provide it clearly, it creates a bad reputation.
Using the list of medical keywords that you have gathered by performing keyword research, create content relevant to those keywords that provide clear insights.
Fabricated and plagiarized content will prove to be counter-effective. Generate organic content and carefully incorporate the keywords into it. Creating content that addresses the queries of the patients will significantly increase your credibility. Unique content creation helps in improving the authority of the site.
4.Design a Mobile-Friendly, Fast Website:
Designing a fast, responsive website seems obvious, but many do not understand that it affects their search engine ranking. The ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide the best results to its users. If your website is slow, patients will visit other websites which hinder you search results ranking.
Google uses mobile indexing algorithms that optimize the search results based on the mobile versions of the site. If your site is not optimized to be viewed in mobile phones, the chances of the website being ranked on top are minuscule.
Developing and implementing an SEO strategy that is perfectly tailored to your healthcare service can pay dividends in the long term. Reaching out to the patients and prospective patients to promote your latest products will be easier.
So let’s start optimizing !!!!
Adithya is the host for the Branding and Patient Experience Summit for Doctors
He is the creative lead for this summit. Adithya has worked on several market research studies with doctors across India. Being an operations guy wants to explore and learn new things always.
www.krea.in , www.krux108.com,www.krux108.com/branding4doctors/
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