Tips for Boosting Your Healthcare SEO Strategy This Year

Want to supercharge the SEO strategy for your healthcare or healthtech company? This post will zero in on four highly effective strategies for reputation and trust building. They include building a tech-forward website, geomarketing, online reputation management and content-based authority-building.

So you’re building or have built a website for your healthcare company. If it’s a site for local healthcare professionals or services, then you need to find a way to help prospective patients find your business online. And if it’s a site for online healthcare services or healthtech products, you need to make it easy for prospective users to discover your solution.

There are lots of tactics you can use to do this. For instance, you could build up a presence on social media. You could also run ads on platforms like Google and Facebook. You could even ask current patients or users to refer friends, family and others to your website.

These are all effective tactics, for sure. However, they can be time-consuming to manage, costly or not as effective as you’d like them to be.

This is why search engine optimization (SEO) is a necessity. With an effective SEO strategy, you’ll have your website and search engines do a lot of the brand building, lead generation and conversion work for you.

So, which SEO strategies should you focus on? In this post, we’ll look at four particularly effective SEO strategies for healthcare.

Healthcare SEO Strategy Tips

SEO is so often associated with tactics like keywording and backlink building. The reality is, search engine optimization is a complex process that involves optimizing the content on your pages, the technical aspects of your website and your off-site presence.

While your SEO strategy should include as many of these optimization tactics as possible, these ones in particular are going to be useful for healthcare and healthtech companies looking to strengthen their online search presence and gain the trust of prospective users and patients:

1. Build a Modern, Tech-forward Website

SEO always starts with the website. While it’s possible to build a digital presence with just social media for some businesses, it’s not something that can be done in healthcare.

One of the reasons for this is the need for security and privacy. That’s not something you can guarantee when you’re doing business through third-party websites.

Another reason is because social media doesn’t have all the functionality and capabilities needed to run a modern and streamlined healthcare business online. For example, this is the website for Advanced Dermatology:

For starters, this dermatology website looks great and feels modern. You’ll find photos of real people instead of stock photography. There’s ample white space and the content is evenly paced, so it’s very user-friendly and readable. Plus, the header is well-organized, making it easy for prospective patients (and current ones) to find what they’re looking for.

While you might be tempted to adopt one of the latest web design trends, be careful. Many of these trends don’t have staying power and, if you don’t keep your design or features updated regularly, the website can easily become outdated. There’s tons of healthcare competition out there, so you want to build a website that can keep up.

The Advanced Dermatology site is also chock full of the information that prospects and current clients need to know. Like what kinds of services are offered, who the clinicians are, payment and insurance policies, locations and directions, and more.

What’s more, this website is equipped with many of the features that healthcare websites need these days. For instance:

• Location finder tool and map
• Online booking form
• In-person and telehealth appointment bookings
• Secure bill payments
• Exclusive patient portal

Creating a tech-forward website such as this one is critical these days. While you’ll certainly have some patients that prefer to pick up the phone to talk with someone, more and more patients prefer to do a lot of this stuff online and without the hassle of automated systems, lengthy wait times, poor connections and so on.

These types of technologies will also improve the efficiency of your healthcare business as well. Instead of fielding calls all day to book, reschedule or cancel appointments, for instance, the support staff can provide better on-site assistance to patients.

This might seem irrelevant to SEO. However, user satisfaction and engagement rates play a big part in how well your web pages rank. You can increase both by creating a website that’s easy to navigate and provides convenient, user-friendly tools.

2. Do Geomarketing on Your Website

Geomarketing is the process of using one’s physical location to reach local users or customers. This particular SEO and marketing strategy won’t apply to digital-only healthcare businesses. However, for those of you building websites for local providers, geomarketing is a must.

Ultimately, your goal in doing geomarketing/local SEO is to get your website to rank in “near me” search results.

Using Google Keyword Planner, here’s a sampling of what I found in terms of monthly search volume:

Every month there are hundreds of thousands to millions of searches being done online for healthcare services and providers. With geomarketing, your website will be poised to rank in these search results when people are nearby.

For example, I did a Google search for “urgent care near me.” The first result I saw was for an urgent care center called CareSpot:

The link brought me to this localized landing page. It includes everything I need to learn about the operation of this particular urgent care center, like:

• Phone number
• Map location
• Directions
• Location house

I can also schedule and cancel appointments with just a couple clicks.

Location-specific landing pages are one way to do local SEO and geomarketing. (By the way, if you’re running a business with one location, all this information should appear on your Contact page.)

Other ways to inform the search engines that you have a healthcare business nearby include:

• Utilizing location-specific keywords (e.g., “jacksonville urgent care") in your copy
• Adding contact info, address and a corresponding Google Map on your site
• Using schema markup to share location and operation info with the search engines

Outside of your website, it’s essential that you create a Google Business page if you have brick-and-mortar locations. This business profile is what appears whenever a prospective or current patient looks you up in search or they stumble upon your listing in “near me” results.

For example, this is what the CareSpot urgent care listing looks like:

Although patients could find all of this information on the CareSpot website, this profile summary in Google Maps search results makes it much more convenient. It provides location-specific info, links to the website and scheduling, info about the business as well as customer reviews.

3. Manage Your Online Reputation

Speaking of online reviews, a 2020 survey done by Software Advice found that 90% of patients nowadays rely on customer reviews when evaluating and choosing healthcare providers. Not only that, 71% use reviews as the first step in the process, so many providers get weeded out based on that factor alone before they consider other things like price, distance, etc.

This is why online reputation management is an absolutely critical part of SEO. Just as Google factors in the way visitors engage with your website when ranking it, it also factors in the way people respond with your business when it appears on other platforms.

According to Software Advice’s survey, these are the most popular review platforms that patients reference when evaluating healthcare providers:

• Google reviews (37%)
• Healthgrades (26%)
• Yelp (13%)
• RateMDs (12%)
• Other (12%)

So, the first thing to do is make sure your business is established on the most popular review platforms. You want to get in front of as many prospective patients as possible.

For example, this is what your review listing would look like on the Healthgrades website:

You can see how user reviews are prioritized. Just under the practitioner’s name and specialty is their star rating and number of reviews. With its prominent position and eye-catching design, it’s obvious how important this detail is to patients in the decision-making process.

The next thing to do is to manage your reputation on each of these sites.

According to a Reputation.com survey, patients are looking for certain things in providers’ reviews:

• At least six or more reviews available (80%)
• The positivity of the review (73%)
• How recently the review was made (72%)
• Average star rating for the provider (54%)

If you can impress prospects with the quantity, quality and frequency of your online reviews, it’ll help you get more clients. According to the survey, two-thirds of patients are willing to wait longer if there’s a healthcare provider with more positive reviews.

This increase in engagement and conversion rates will do wonders for your brand’s reputation in search results. In turn, it’ll help your site rank better.

Just make sure you’re bolstering your reputation on the platforms that matter. It’s important to establish yourself on the ones noted above as that’s where the patients are. However, it would also be beneficial to get listed on high-authority directory sites like Yelp, Trustpilot and ZocDoc to help bolster your overall online reputation.

4. Build Authority with Content

The goal of SEO isn’t just to attract bottom-of-funnel users or patients who are looking for a healthcare service or product right now. Your SEO strategy should help you connect with prospects at every stage of the journey.

For example, blogging can be a highly effective SEO tactic.

It’s a great way to reach people who are in those earlier research and information-gathering phases of lead generation. Heck, you might even reach people who hadn’t considered paying someone for help, but who decide to do so after reading your content.

Blogging is also a great way to continue delivering value to patients and users even after they’ve converted. The trick is to get them subscribed to your newsletter or following you on social media, so your content remains front and center as they go about their lives.

Another reason why blogging is such a great SEO tactic is because it gives you a chance to tell the search engines what your site and business are all about.

For example, I did a search for “best meditation strategies if you work from home.” One of the top search results was this Meditations You Can Do at Work post on the Headspace blog:

This is a well-written blog post from a trusted and authoritative space in the mindfulness and mental health space. But how did Headspace manage to position their health brand that way?

Having a high-quality app and website certainly helped as did rave reviews in the mobile app stores. However, extensive blogging work also helped. If you go to the main Blog page on the website, you’ll find that there are four categories listed:

• Mental Health
• Meditation
• Mindfulness
• Sleep

The content they write neatly fits within each of these categories. By staying on brand and on topic, Headspace has carved out a clear niche for itself.

It’s also strengthening the signals its website sends to search engines that they’re experts and go-to resources when it comes to mental health. So, when someone performs a related search query and Headspace has content that deals with the subject matter, it’s no surprise to see the blog take one of the top spots above the fold.

Another way to get more of your blog content ahead in search results is by adding schema markup (when relevant) and optimizing your images for search. If you have a YouTube channel, also consider creating video-based posts. Video SEO is a great way to propel your blog to the top of search results as many people prefer quick video explainers to reading.

Wrapping Up

Offering an in-demand healthcare service or product online is no guarantee that patients and users will come pouring in. Some may. However, as digital-savvy generations like Millennials and digital-native generations like Generation Z seek out more healthcare solutions, their standards for evaluating and choosing from the available options will be much higher.

So, creating a well-crafted digital presence is a good start. Your website (or app) needs to feel modern, seamless and offer all the conveniences that your target users expect from it.

Beyond that, you need to enact certain SEO strategies to attract these users and retain the ones you have. Geomarketing, online reputation management and content creation are all effective strategies for the healthcare space. Put them into place on top of your standard SEO strategy, and you should find that you are attracting more website visitors from search than ever before.