How SEO Can Work For Healthcare Companies

Healthcare is one of the most competitive industries on the web, for very good reason. A Healthcare company that can be found easily online is benefitting from being the first thing that millions of searchers are seeing. According to Google, one in every 20 searches online are health related. If your business appears in any of those searches you’re reaching an incredible audience, building a relationship based on authority and brand awareness that will benefit you immeasurably going forward. SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the practice of refining a website to give it the best chance of appearing high up in a Google search. The value of a high search engine ranking cannot be undersold; without it, you won’t be found. It’s as simple as that. Unfortunately for most Healthcare providers, the competitive nature of the industry makes SEO a difficult task. It takes a professional knowledge of both the healthcare industry and the ever-changing world of SEO to be in with a chance of succeeding. A successful Healthcare SEO campaign needs to include the following things: A well-planned website You might think that SEO all happens with keywords, but it’s been a long time since that was all it took. Now, search engines look at your website very closely from the code they’re built with to the content on the site. Everything has to have SEO in mind, so if your site isn’t up-to-date, or you didn’t build it to SEO best practice, you’re far less likely to rank. Even things you may not have noticed, like the green padlock that indicates a site is secure, might not be present if you don’t have an up-to-date SSL Certificate. Depending on your CMS, it might not be as hard as you may think to solve this. Wordpress offers plugins that can help bring your site up-to-date. For the best results, get the advice of somebody who will be able to audit your site and highlight any problems you might miss. Mobile Friendly capabilities Smartphones are used for 62% of health information searches, so you need to make sure that you’re accommodating for your audience not only from an SEO perspective, but a user experience perspective. Consider mobile appointment bookings, a responsive site and a way to find directions quickly to make sure that your mobile customers have everything they need at their fingertips. When it comes to Mobile SEO, there are slightly different rules to a standard strategy. You need to be aware of your mobile page loading speed and the responsivity of your site, as well as the keywords you use. Mobile searchers tend to type differently to desktop searchers, so it’s vital that these types of keywords are accounted for in addition to the traditional keywords you may already be using. A Focus On Local SEO For the majority of healthcare providers, local business is the only business you want. A nationwide page one ranking is incredible, but the majority of your new patients will be arriving from your local area. Patients want treatment and products from a location that’s near to them. Identify the locations near you that you want to target and begin a local SEO campaign that addresses these places specifically. Local SEO combines citations, off-page links and your on-page content to distinguish which locations your business is serving. High Trust Flow Trust is vital in the healthcare business, and it’s no different in healthcare SEO. Just as your patients know that you’re a qualified medical professional with the skills they need, Google needs to know that your site is relevant and trusted by others. It does this by creating a ‘Trust Score’, evaluating the links to your site from other websites. If these links are from high-profile, trustworthy sites, you will see a benefit. Conversely, if they’re from low-quality sites, your site will lose ranking. Trust Flow is often the decider between two sites that are well optimised on-site. If you have a great trust flow, you’ll rank more highly than your competitors who may not. To achieve this, create citations on online directories and reach out to other sites to gain a link. Competitor Research In an online world with lots of competitors, it’s in your best interests to know what they’re doing. Not only can you see what others are doing right, but you’re able to see the things they haven’t got quite right. With this information, a good SEO professional will be able to create a strategy that can take advantage of any missed opportunities, pushing your rankings above your competitor. Competitor research requires some insider knowledge and some specialist software that’s hard to come by if you’re trying to optimise your site alone. For this part, an SEO professional will be able to audit your competitors and discover the things you should be making the most of. For a competitor audit, an expert opinion or a full strategy that will help shoot your healthcare business to the top, speak to the expert SEO team at Zinc today. We’ll be happy to help.

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How SEO Can Work For Healthcare Companies