The Essential Guide to SEO for Healthcare Practices

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is fundamental to your healthcare practice’s online presence. But it’s something rarely understood, even by digital marketing professionals.
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Despite how complex it is, at it’s core, SEO is extremely logical.
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It’s about doing things that simply make sense for your business.
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It isn’t about stuffing keywords into a web page.
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It isn’t about hiring shady SEO professionals online to boost your backlinks.
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It’s about making quality assets that are helpful to your potential patients, and it’s an iterative process of improving your assets to ensure they get better over time. In this case, your assets are anything online about your practice’s brand—your website and how it was created (its code and structure), your content, and the effort you put into your potential patient’s user experience to name a few. The key phrase in this paragraph is quality; it has to be embedded into everything you do.

Quality assets create a great user experience. A great user experience is favored by Google (or any search engine for that matter) because if they promote something that is enjoyable to a user, then that user is more likely to continue using Google as a search engine since that user associates the good experience they had with a certain website with the search engine that pointed them there.

If Google pointed that user to a site that gave them a poor experience, despite the fact that Google had nothing to do with the creation of that site, in the user’s mind, they’ll associate the negative experience with the search engine that pointed them there. Hence why Google wants you to create quality online assets and give your users a great experience.

Now there’s more nuance to this SEO stuff.

That’s why this article is going to give you an overview of some key concepts when it comes to understanding SEO for your healthcare practice. It isn’t meant to be exhaustive, but it is meant to help give you a baseline understanding of this key component to digital marketing for doctors.

We used insights from Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide to give you a quick idea of what you should be looking out for when doing SEO for your healthcare practice.

Understanding the Foundation of SEO for Healthcare Practices

SEO is essential for helping search engines understand your content and making it easier for your potential patients to find your site. But first, you need to understand how Google search works at a high level and what exactly SEO is.

Google uses little robots called crawlers to explore the web and add pages to its index. Most sites are found and added automatically. The goal is for you to make your content discoverable by these little robots through different tactics such as (but not limited to) the keywords you use your on your site, your content, and following SEO best practices regarding your site structure and user experience.

At the end of the day, Google’s search engine is simply trying to return the best, most relevant results to its users.

Now what exactly is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of doing things to grow your healthcare practice’s organic search traffic, traffic that you aren’t paying for like what you’d get when using Facebook Ads or Google Ads.

SEO involves doing keyword research, creating content using the keywords you’ve researched, ensuring you’re website is using the keywords you want to show up for, getting links from other sites that serve as references that you have a link-worthy site, and regularly checking for technical opportunities and issues that can help your search engine optimization efforts like ensuring your site has proper internal linking, a decent page speed, its site map submitted to Google, and is mobile-friendly to name a few. This combination helps search engines find your website easier, thus increasing the chances that you show up higher in the search results.

In a nutshell, SEO is about bridging the gap between your website and your potential patients through search engines like Google. Google’s bots are always crawling the web and adding pages to its vast index. The goal is to ensure your site gets easily found by the bots and indexed, which allows users to find you when their looking for a new practice.

SEO Beginner Tips & Tricks For Doctors

Now that you understand SEO at high-level, here are few tips to get you started:

1. When you first build your healthcare practice site, structure it with SEO in mind. A well-organized website is not just user-friendly; it's also search engine-friendly. Logical site structure, descriptive URLs, and not having duplicate content can significantly boost your site’s SEO.
2. Create Quality Content. High-quality content that is unique, tailored to your patients, and up-to-date can dramatically improve your site's search performance.
3. Use and get links. Links, both internal and external, are like bridges that connect the internet. Use them wisely to guide users and search engines to and throughout your site. Consider regularly linking to authoritative external resources (like what I did linking to Google’s SEO starter guide at the start of this article) . And remember: the quality of your links are more important than the quantity of them.
4. Regularly improve your site’s appearance and UX (user experience). Go to your site frequently and fix things that affect the user experience like buttons that don’t load or links that don’t go anywhere. Also, remember that how your site appears in search results can influence whether users click through to your site. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to things like your title tags and meta descriptions to ensure you stand out in the search results.
5. Don’t just focus on SEO, promote your website beyond it. While SEO is super important to your online marketing strategy, don't overlook the power of promoting on social media, online communities, and even offline channels. Word-of-mouth and getting Google Business Profile reviews for your healthcare practice can amplify your SEO efforts and drive more traffic to your site.
6. Avoid common SEO mistakes. As you start your SEO journey, stay away from outdated practices like keyword stuffing and paying for links. Focus on things that will genuinely improve your user experience and your overall website’s quality. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO because what works for one practice may not work for another.

Keep learning and adapting. SEO is an ongoing process. Continuously monitor, learn, and adapt to stay ahead of the game since the SEO landscape is always changing. Consider using tools like Google Search Console, SEMRush, or Ahrefs since they can offer insights into your site's performance and give you opportunities for improvement.

We hope this brief guide was helpful. Remember, the ultimate goal of SEO is to connect with searchers and search engines. You do this by doing those actions that logically make sense for your business and following SEO best practices.

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