Every medical practice wants to stand out from its competitors. However, with such a saturated market that is subject to constant change, it can be challenging to drive attention and patients to your medical practice. One fantastic strategy for medical practices is to implement proper SEO practices that allow your medical practice to stand out and draw more patients in. While some SEO strategies work best in the short-term, others have proven to be fantastic long-term approaches that will increase the strength of your overall medical practice and promote excess growth.
What is SEO?
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, and it is used to increase the quality of content and traffic to a website. Using a variety of tactics, SEO can boost your standing on internet search engines and promote your medical practice to interested parties.
The goal of SEO is to understand what people are searching for and how to appeal to that market. By directly answering commonly asked questions pertaining to your medical practice or line of work, your website will receive more attention on search engines, making you easier to find for those who are interested in some aspect of your medical practice.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO is an important tool for medical practices to grow and expand to larger markets over time. Unlike paid advertisements that need constant monitoring and editing over time, SEO strategies, when done correctly, require less work and pay back large dividends to the medical practices that implement them. Providing solid articles with direct information pertaining to a certain topic combined with utilizing precise keywords can establish a continuous flow of traffic to your website.
Content created using accurate SEO strategies can become a form of passive advertising, meaning that the content does the work so that you don’t actively have to. This is why optimizing your SEO is a great asset for your medical practice.
Strategies to Make Your SEO Content Bulletproof
The internet is full of SEO lists that try to explain the best strategies to optimize your content. Many of these lists can be misleading, confusing, or be a compilation of short-term strategies that are hard to maintain in the long term. There are, however, many SEO strategies that have been proven to work over time and provide great results for many medical practices. Some of the most effective SEO strategies proven to optimize your content are:
- Using keywords to your advantage- Keywords are incredibly important to search engines. Search engines like Google are more likely to promote content with keywords that directly relate to the topic at hand. By placing relevant keywords in the title and the heading of your content, you are letting search engines know that you have the most accurate and applicable information that will be helpful to the majority of people researching that particular topic.
- Making your site easy to read and use- The internet has been around for a while and while many websites have been optimized in order to fit into modern levels of website sophistication, many websites are still stuck in the past. Websites that are difficult to navigate with content that is subpar can really take away from its credibility. Because there are so many other options, a casual internet user won’t put effort into trying to navigate a difficult website, they will simply move onto another, more clear, website. Additionally, make sure the language you use on your website is catered towards your intended audience. For example, if you are an attorney looking to cater to potential patients, avoid using complicated legal jargon that may confuse your audience.
- Optimizing your content for the answer box- One of the most helpful and most-used features on Google is the answer box. When someone searches for a particular topic, typically, the first thing that will appear is an answer box with bolded text relating to the question at hand. If the answer box pops up, a user is more likely to receive their information from it than to click on any other link under it. A great way to see a boost of your SEO is to create content intended to directly answer questions that appear in this box. If you can successfully do so, it will increase traffic to your website and establish a form of credibility.
- Optimizing your images- Adding captions or text descriptions of images on your website is incredibly helpful for a variety of reasons. Optimizing your images will allow Google to be more likely to support your content because captions and text allow the image to be categorized. Text descriptions are also very important for viewers who may be visually impaired and rely on descriptions in order to navigate through content like yours.
- Using internal linking- Adding internal links to your content is a fantastic way to improve your SEO. Using descriptive text and adding a link to another webpage into your content allows Google to create a link between both pages of content and allows it to better understand the similarities between the two webpages. Because this action creates a relationship between both pages, you especially want to use links on your most important pages that relay influential information.
- Checking your past content- After you’ve gotten internal linking down on your most important pages, you can begin to add them to pages that see less traffic. Though these pages may be older, you can still revitalize them by adding internal links and broadening their information scope. If you are unsure of what pages may qualify under this category or see minimal traffic compared to your other web pages, you can use tools like Semrush to check the traffic of specific pages.
- Allowing people to comment- Many people believe that adding comment sections may be bulky or unprofessional when they actually add credibility to the websites that utilize them. When people engage with comments it shows search engines that people like this content and that it is helpful to them. Google employees have even said that comment sections help improve a medical practice’s SEO on search engines.
Implementing all of the above strategies will give your medical practice the best and most reliable path to gaining notoriety on search engines. It may seem overwhelming at first, but once these practices are implemented, they will essentially provide results on their own.
Contact Us
If you are looking to improve your medical practice’s SEO practices contact the professionals at NOVA Advertising. We have been helping medical practices like yours strengthen their SEO for years and would love to see what we can do to better optimize your medical practice.