Healthcare SEO: How to Do Medical SEO for Hospitals

We have this guide on healthcare SEO or medical SEO for hospitals for two reasons. First, healthcare is becoming an online service due to reliance on apps and telecare-based services. So, the services need a strong online presence on search engines through SEO. Second, 42% of adults try to find medical service locations from search engines after COVID-19. So, your hospital can lose a lot of patients without having organic and local SEO for them.

Therefore, healthcare services must contact an experienced SEO service provider to rank them on search engines. But, with so many digital marketing companies available online, it could be impossible for a healthcare service to find one with proper healthcare SEO strategies. A healthcare manager must know the key components of SEO services and how it's done before making a deal. 

If you are not familiar with medical and healthcare SEO, let’s get started with the basics in this guide. 

Key Takeaways:

• Explaining the importance of healthcare SEO strategies for a healthcare service provider.
• The reasons why medical SEO is different and how to create authority in SEO campaigns.
• The key component healthcare SEO services should use for good and sustainable SEO practices.

There are several reasons why healthcare SEO is essential. During the pandemic, telehealth services became popular worldwide. Even the telehealth statistics show that 52% of visits happened virtually in 2020. According to marketing statistics, it was published that 82.8% of the patients searched for a healthcare provider online using search engines.

So, if you do not optimize your healthcare and telecare websites with SEO, there is no way the visitors will find your services. Healthcare SEO can bring the healthcare provider increased visibility, improved patient acquisition, trust, and 24x7 helpline facilities.

• Increased Visibility: People looking for your service are more likely to find it if your website is well-optimized and ranks higher in search results.
• Improved Patient Acquisition: Higher visibility leads to more website traffic, which translates to more opportunities to convert visitors into patients.
• Credibility and Trust: Based on market reports, 74% of patients consider online reviews to trust healthcare services. Ranking well on search engines helps your visitors see good reviews.  After that, your visitors can identify you as a reliable source of healthcare solutions.
• 24/7 Patient Education: Informative content on your website can educate patients about your services and the conditions you treat, even outside of office hours.

While SEO principles remain similar across industries, SEO for healthcare has some unique considerations. According to the legal facts, anyone can sue a doctor or a medical service provider for malpractice. Similarly, providing SEO-relevant content and links without data will also fall under medical malpractice for a medical service provider. 

That’s why medical services focus on authoritative content, local SEO optimization, and search intent carefully to make their reliable presence in front of search engines. Only a proven agency can remember the medical rules and regulations and apply white-hat SEO for healthcare idustry to improve its reputation. However, there are three ways to make content credible.

• Focusing on authoritative content
• Completing local SEO optimization
• Understanding search intent content

How to Focus on Authoritative Content?

Medical information needs to be accurate and trustworthy. Content should be created by qualified medical professionals. So, SEO specialists must use reliable contacts, resources, and links to craft articles.

How to Complete Local SEO Optimization?

Many patients search for healthcare providers in their area. Local SEO tactics like Google My Business optimization are crucial. Doing so, patients can find the best medical provider on Google Knowledge Panel and Local-packs. In order to do it, SEO providers need to collect all the required information pitch perfectly. 

How to Understand Search Intent on Content?

SEO agencies must know the effectiveness of keyword length and medical jargon to find search intent keywords. Understanding why patients search for specific terms (e.g., symptoms vs. treatment options) helps SEO content to their needs.

Keyword Research and Targeting

As a medical service provider, you know the severity, frequency, and trends of any diseases or medications. You must research keywords related to those factors. To make it easy, mark three checklists to find the best keywords.

• Identifying the target audience and their choice of words.
• Mix keywords relevant to your healthcare service business and products.
• Prioritize your keyword based on sustainability and difficulty

Once you complete the checklist, you will have the effective keywords. To target the keywords, there are some tricks. When any patient visits a doctor, try to analyze their records. When you list their queries and the medical jargon, your SEO executives can understand the important part of keywords, and they will plan accordingly.

On-Page Optimization

Google’s content update states that content should be made for people first. So, optimizing on-page website elements like title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags should be more for humans than crawlers. This kind of effective healthcare SEO strategies always contains everything in a smart format, that works for human and crawlers both. 

Besides, on-page optimization needs some special things to be taken care of, such as unmatched URL slugs, long meta texts, wrong header selection, etc. Sometimes, SEO strategists use tools that generate random slugs or meta descriptions. But medical SEO requires a direct answer to the keyword to index the most transparent web page.

High-Quality Content Creation

If you know what high-quality content is, that is an extra advantage. You could ask your SEO service providers to make those. But, if you do not know about it, here is a simple overview. High-quality content is a combination of E-A-T principles, patient-centric answers, and variation.

• EAT Principles: EAT refers to expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. EAT evaluation is a kind of ranking factor. When you write as an expert author in the medical field, your EAT level could beat some of Google’s SEO mechanisms for content credibility. 
• Variation in Content: Mix blogs, social links, testimonials, and informative videos so that different audiences can take your messages according to their tastes and interested mediums. Plus, it’s an extra trick because search engines like Google and Bing prioritize video content in search results pages these days. 
• Patient-Centric Answers: FAQs are the finest way to provide short answers in the simplest manner. The reading rate could be higher if you write the most asked questions for general readers. So, search engines will feature your content as well as your specific answer on the snippet.

Mobile-Friendly Website

Speaking of worldwide mobile phone usage, 96 percent of internet users are relying on mobile phones to connect to the internet. For medical emergencies, a mobile phone is handy for searching for anything at any time. So, you must have your website responsive and user-friendly on mobile devices.

Effective medical SEO service providers have included “making mobile responsiveness” in their priority list since the beginning of the project. But, typical SEO service providers will avoid working twice and lose visitors from mobile phones due to weak and complex website infrastructure. 

Link Building

Earning backlinks from reputable medical websites and local directories improves website authority and ranking. Still, backlinks play a major role in ranking a website. For medical healthcare service websites, backlinking is a key component because of its unimaginable benefits.

When an SEO service provider creates backlinks with other verified and popular healthcare services for your website, it becomes more authoritative and professional. Industrious agencies create backlinks in three ways: guest post service, partnership featuring, and strategic link building.

1. Publishing guest articles on websites that feature special sections for medical-related articles.
2. Collaborating with institutions and partners and featuring their sign of trust on various websites.
3. Putting own links in the government and non-government healthcare directories. 

Online Reputation Management

How many SEO agencies include reputation management in their list of services? If you check, you will see the amount is very small. Everyone just pushes new content in their sitemap so that Google can scan and index. But, effective medical SEO strategies recommend removing the webpage, reviews, and citations put in a negative way.

Imagine your website has published content accidentally with the wrong information. Now, it will be a red flag for Google no matter if you publish a lot of updated information. Plus, readers will find it disappointing and give you negative reviews. 

In such cases, the reputation management service deploys special teams and strategies to make your clean personality on the internet. They can even make a new Google Business Profile and Knowledge Panel on your new impression.

VISER X stands for a compilation of Visibility, Integrity, Security, Expertise, and Relationship. These are the core principles that guide our approach to healthcare SEO. We can help you develop a comprehensive SEO strategy that improves your online presence, attracts new patients, and fosters trust with your community.

• We have SEO strategists who are academically acknowledged for medical and engineering-related projects. So we can find out the niches more effectively for your healthcare SEO service. 
• Our content development team studies the core SEO basics for healthcare services to validate their information in every sort of content.
• We have a media buyer and graphic design team to include relevant photos and videos for your services so that people can find you easily on the internet.

Can I do my own healthcare SEO?

If you understand SEO, you can do your own optimization. But that’s not a good practice. Partnering with a healthcare SEO specialist can ensure you use the latest best practices and achieve optimal results. Also, a healthcare SEO service provider can save your valuable time so that your can focus more on your services.

How long does it take to see results from healthcare SEO?

SEO is an ongoing process, but you can expect to see improvements in website traffic and rankings within 3-6 months with a consistent strategy. Various packages are available for healthcare SEO services, featuring different time limits. 

How is SEO used in healthcare?

SEO in healthcare services improves the ranking of medical and pharmaceutical websites in search engines. As an outcome, doctors, clinics, hospitals, and medical shops can reach the audience easily. The SEO process also increases the authority due to relying on specific methods such as credible guest content, backlinks, and EAT optimization.