If you are a doctor, dentist, or other healthcare professional, you’ve probably heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You’ve also heard that it can help you in your healthcare practice. However, you may not know the nitty-gritty of SEO and exactly how it can increase your visibility with your patients and prospective patients, as well as help you win new patients.
Many doctors and dentists have a website but may not be able to optimize their content and increase their visibility online. In this article, that’s exactly what we’ll talk about….So, here are some step you can take to ensure that you and your practice are top of mind when it comes to winning new patients, as well as retaining existing patients, using SEO…
- Provide good, high-quality, and relevant content: Google constantly changes its metrics and algorithms. This affects how websites will be ranked in search results. Google has also cracked down on web spam, black hat strategies, and poor quality content. To keep up with these changes, you, as a healthcare practitioner, need to let go of your own SEO mindset of focusing too much on links. Instead, you need to subscribe to new standards and norms that focus primarily on providing good, high-quality and relevant content that patients want.
- Create content that is brief, precise and concise: Your patients and potential patients are exposed to a deluge of information every day. This makes it doubly difficult for you and your website to rise above the clutter and get your patients’ attention and interest. This is why content should be brief, precise, and concise while maintaining originality and high-quality. This is the kind of content favored by more than 68% of consumers.
- Create a buzz around your content: You need to create a buzz that will promote your practice and significantly increase visibility. You can make use of various tools and strategies that will put your content in the spotlight. This includes the use of visuals, the latter being shared more by social media users than any other kind of content. Another strategy is to create content that appeals to the core emotions of your patients. You can also position yourself as the expert in your field and post relevant content accordingly.
- Become active in social media: Combining search and social is an increasingly popular digital marketing strategy. Both these will help you create meaningful signals and interaction between your brand and your audience.
- Create more linkable assets: Linkable assets are special kinds of content that people will normally link to or share with others voluntarily. While there are several types of content that can become linkable assets, the main characteristics of such content is that it provides good educational information. Guides and how-to are also popular content that can be linkable. This is something that you, as a healthcare professional, should actively pursue, as it will engage your patients and prospective patients.
- Get more brand citation links from authority sources: Brand visibility through SEO increases significantly when you get more brand citation links from authoritative sources. Just one authority source citing and linking to your content can boost your visibility by as much as 32%.
- Convert your website to a responsive, mobile-friendly one: Many of your patients probably use their mobile phones to access your website and content. This will only increase. What this means is that you should ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and responsive. You should give your patients a unique user experience through their mobile devices.
- Monitor links and brand mentions: You can monitor links and citations about your brand and practice. This will not only gauge your SEO visibility and monitor bad links but will also help you manage your online reputation with your patients and prospective patients. You should embark on this monitoring scheme not manually, but by using various tools. This will ensure that you can perform this job faster and more effectively.
- Pay attention to the latest SEO news: About 72 percent of consumers prefer connecting with a particular brand if the brand’s digital marketing team use integrated marketing strategies. This applies to both healthcare websites as well as patients and prospective patients. You can use this to boost your SEO visibility by getting access to and the latest SEO information from SEO news providers and websites.
- Keep learning: You should keep learning about SEO and other digital marketing strategies that you can apply to your healthcare practice. An improvement in SEO visibility can only occur if you keep learning about these systems. SEO is changing and changing rapidly, so it is up to you to keep up with these changes.
If all this seems too much to digest, don’t worry – we can help! You can call me at IntellaHealth, I was a healthcare provider so understand it is hard to do it all yourself. That’s why I started a company that specializes in helping healthcare providers with full-service marketing.
IntellaHealth can help you boost your SEO visibility among your patients and prospective patients. We can help you build brand awareness and help you turn the patients you already have into word-of-mouth advocates for your practice. And what’s more, we help you do all of this at an affordable price.
So, don’t continue to stick to the old paradigms of search. Embrace the new, hire a specialist to help, and watch how better SEO can help you!
For more information on how you can hire a digital marketing agency to help grow your healthcare practice, contact Kristine Grace DDS, MS, MBA at kristineg@intellahealth.net.
by Kristine Grace, Jun-23-2017