How are people finding you?
Where do show up in search engines?
What are the best keywords to use?
How do you respond to reviews on search?
All of these questions need to be answered and more when you talk about growing your business, your side hustle or your practice. For the medical professional it's especially important because that's how people find you, recommend you and rate you. If you want to improve how people find you online, we've compiled some tips:
Perform a Medical Website SEO Audit
How can you decide on what medical SEO strategies you need to move forward if you don’t know what’s going on now?
Your website is the single most important digital asset to your business, especially when it comes to ranking highly in SERPs for keywords related to your practice specialty or geographical area.
With the 100s or 1000s of algorithm updates that Google releases annual it is critical to check, recheck and continuously update your website content and site structure.
An SEO audit tool will identify any errors, weak points or areas of improvement on your website and provide a roadmap for your local SEO marketing plan.
What is your current medical website page speed scores?
Page speed and load times play an important role in page ranking and overall SEO of your website.
Why? Because if some clicks on a search result for your website and the page takes too long to load so, the exit Google will start correlating that page as a bad result for a given query. It will then begin to drop its overall position in search results lowering your ranking position.
How many quality backlinks do you have pointing to your website? Are some of those now broken?
Backlinks are one of the more critical rankings signals for pages. Having high QUALITY (not significant quantity) backlinks to a page showing Google the page has “authority” and makes it more likely to be ranked higher in search results.
Broken links or toxic links can do the opposite and hurt your standings, so you need to pay attention to building quality backlinks and fixing any broken links along the way.
Using a tool like AHrefs or SEMRush will give you a detail backlink audit report that is extremely useful.
A.) Choose Keywords with High Traffic
One of the highly effective ways to determine where the most valuable traffic flows into your website is by analyzing your website’s keyword traffic. You can refine your SEO efforts by examining the keyword traffic.
Keyword traffic helps attract high-quality traffic from your paid search campaigns and garner additional traffic from relevant searches.
This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it's a great way to fill out those lists.
If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, go to Google.com and take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
Another important thing to remember is to check for a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords.
If you don't know the difference between head terms and long-tail keywords, let me explain. Head terms are keywords phrases that are generally shorter and more generic -- they're typically just one to three words in length, depending on who you talk to. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are longer keyword phrases usually containing three or more words.
It's important to check that you have a mix of head terms and long-tail terms because it'll give you a keyword strategy that's well balanced with long-term goals and short-term wins. That's because head terms are generally searched more frequently, making them often (not always, but often) much more competitive and harder to rank for than long-tail terms.
Someone who is looking for something that specific is probably a...
... much more qualified searcher for your product or service than someone looking for something really generic. Long-tail keywords tend to be more specific, it's usually easier to tell what people who search for those keywords are really looking for. Someone searching for the head term "blogging," on the other hand, could be searching it for a whole host of reasons unrelated to your business.
So check your keyword lists to make sure you have a healthy mix of head terms and long-tail keywords. You definitely want some quick wins that long-tail keywords will afford you, but you should also try to chip away at more difficult head terms over the long haul.
High commercial intent and valuable keywords can be found and prioritized for your content creation. Selecting relevant keywords for tightly organized ad groups by structuring your paid search campaigns. Find and be sure to exclude the negative keywords in your SEO marketing campaign.
B.) Create a Healthcare Blog
It's easy to create content that drives in traffic during the initial stages, but after some time what you write doesn’t matter much. What matters is how you direct the traffic that flows into your website to be loyal and help you generate new traffic.
Blogs not only help you interact with your visitors but also assists in achieving better ranking for your website in search engine results.
Let’s look at a few ways to keep your blog interactive and generate traffic:
> Reply to your audience questions - creating a blog post to answer the questions you receive from your visitors makes you the authoritative figure.
People will start depending on you for the answers which inevitably drive more traffic to your blog and your website. Discuss recent trends; writing posts about recent trends and discussing on them will create evergreen content which will draw in more traffic and also widen your knowledge base.
> Create Evergreen Content - creating content that will stay relevant for prolonged periods of time will help your blog sustain higher rankings in search engine results for longer periods of time.
This is the most important factor that acts as a source to drive in more traffic into your blog and website alike.
C.) Don't Forget About Local Listings
Your website is connected with the visitor via the local listing. Companies like Google, Facebook my business, and yelp list out local websites for visitors to access.
Local listing acts as an important generator of web traffic to a website. Local listings play a key role in building a reputation, ranking, and revenue for a website.
Thus it is vital for a website to be listed locally to enjoy a healthy flow of web traffic.
There are a plethora of local listing services available on the internet, you should search and pick the appropriate platform which will propel your website.
In June 2014, Google LLC launched Google My Business for business owners. It is an internet based service that hands more power to the business owners to determine what is displayed in the search results when a user searches for a given business name.
Google My Business is a free tool provided by Google which assists organizations and businesses manage their virtual presence across various platforms of Google including Search and Maps.