Medical SEO - Search Engine Optimization for Medical Practices
When prospective patients are searching online for your name and your practice, they will find something.
A strong SEO strategy will ensure that prospective patients find your website and receive your message as you intended it.
As the number of websites exploded and Google became the dominant search engine, SEO has become more and more complex.
Even patients that are referred to practices by people they trust go online to do research.
The Internet has become a resource for nearly everything these days, and selecting a new physician or specialist is no exception.
If your website serves as a valuable educational resource, it will be more easily found and will create confidence and trust for you and your practice.
Here are the promised SEO Tips for Medical Blogs and Websites:
1. Choose the Right Keywords-Attract more patients with proven keywords
Users should be able to tell from the title of a web page and its headers what that page is about. If these elements are jammed with keywords, readers will not be well-served.
Google hates keyword stuffing and is openly penalizing sites that are over-optimized.
2. Define Your Meta Data: Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Medical SEO strategy can liven up just by writing attention-grabbing headlines. List, “how to”, and question headlines typically see the strongest results for click-through.
Your page title is used as a suggestion for the title in search results. Describe your business in a concise, informative phrase. Place the focus keyword to the beginning of the title.
Meta descriptions are page summaries often used by Google and other search engines on the search results page. Write unique descriptions for each page in 160 characters or less.
Use unique descriptions for each page. A readable, compelling description using important keywords can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to the given web page.
3. Include a Site Map On Your Website
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.
A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Using the Sitemap protocol provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
4. Local SEO
When your medical website is optimized for local searches, you can be assured that a large number of the leads generated by those searches will come from potential patients who have a real and immediate need for what your practice provides.
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website to appear in local searches when people are "Googling" for local bars, restaurants, hairdressers or any other type of local businesses.
With over 50% of mobile searches being with local intent, there's never a better time to get your business found in local searches.
Getting a local listing on Google
Getting listed on Google is a great start to improving your local SEO, address here are some tips to get listed:
- Create and verify your Google+ Local page
- Use a local phone number
- Have an address in the town or city that you’re targeting
- Fully complete your Google+ Local page
- Choose appropriate categories on your Google+ Local page
Bonus Local SEO tips:
- Optimize local pages for target local keywords:
- a) Include your city name on page titles and content,
- b)Add your business physical address on site layout (sidebar or footer).
- Create a separate page on your website for each location that you want to target
- Be consistent with your business’s name, address and phone number
- Make it easy for people to contact and/or find you
- Add a map of your business’s location to your website
- Create a separate page on your website for each product/service that you offer
- Get ratings and reviews on your Google+ Local page and on 3rd party websites
- Build links to your Google+ Local page and website
5.Social Media and Blogging
Blog - Write for your visitors
Having a blog on your site can have it's SEO advantages because that way you will have fresh content on your site and both search engines and your users love that.
Create Original Content-High-Quality Content: Create Content To Provide Value & Solve Problems - So that being said, you have to create ‘problem-solving content’ for your readers as often as possible.
Social Media:
Join popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Stumble Upon.
Social Sharing buttons: Make the social buttons within the content very visible to make sure that the visitors will be forcefully lured to share your content.
If your content is good, problem-solving and emotional it can easily go viral and bring huge traffic to your site.
6.Email Marketing
Email marketing occurs when a company sends a commercial message to a group of people by use of electronic mail.
Email marketing is an efficient way to stay connected with your clients while also promoting your business.
Good email content deepens your relationship with your audience through effective subject line writing and delivering quality, niche-specific content your prospect needs and shares with others.
7.Use Schema markup - Rich snippets
"Structured data markup" is a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it.
Structured markup provides publishers a way to provide the search engines information about their website.
8.Specify Country and Site Language
Specify the country and your site language in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools if you would like to get more traffic from local costumers through search engines.
All of the SEO tasks can be done easier and better with SEO friendly CMS like Wordpress through SEO plugins.
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