2021 SEO for Healthcare companies
( steps to Increasing your online presence)

Whether you are a Doctor, dentist, surgeon, hospital owner or anyone else in the medical and healthcare industry, you play a vital role in our daily lives. Especially During this pandemic, more than ever, we have indeed noticed their essentiality.
Suppose you are sick and need an immediate healthcare assistant. Where would you look?
Usually, you would start Googling locations or phone numbers of a nearby hospital or clinic to book appointments. If these facilities were not listed on Google, it would be difficult to get help during an emergency. The online visibility of essential companies is very vital in this digital era.
With over 4 billion active internet users worldwide, Digital marketing is getting popular and essential every year for big and small business owners. Digital marketing is better than traditional marketing since it provides cost-effective, engaging and better audience targeting options.
As a healthcare business owner, you would want to increase your online visibility and traffic. You can do that by trying different digital marketing strategies like social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, paid advertising and SEO.
In this article, we will discuss

What is SEO for Healthcare companies?

digital marketing for healthcare
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a process that helps websites rank high on the search result page (SERP) by generating unpaid search results to gain more web visibility. If you properly learn how to use SEO effectively, you will win your local business competitors. If you are a business person looking for a cost-effective method to increase your traffic online, you will need to know SEO fundamentals
Let’s dive in

1) Original valuable content

seo for healthcare specialists
Before you begin writing on your web page, you should be able to conduct original research. Original research will help you understand your audience. As a healthcare company owner, you have a vast client base. These clients are mainly based locally since patients won’t travel far to get service unless it is necessary to commute. Besides collecting surveys and data from your residents, you should provide valuable content on your web pages. If your content is not relevant, readers will not be engaged and think it is not worth their time reading. When you write your content, you should be informative about the service you give, your location and contact information. Be thorough about the prices, and use medical terms, images, and infographics throughout your content.

2) Keywords for Healthcare companies

A keyword is a phrase a search engine user inputs to satisfy the search internet. Keywords are essential when it comes to increasing your web traffic. When looking for keywords to integrate throughout your web content, you should first make a keyword list. Research on words people is using to express and phrase their intent when looking for healthcare services. You can acquire keywords by carrying out research and analyzing the predictive Google searching tool. Some tools can help you get free keywords like keyword explorer, Keyword research, and Google trends.
Use these keywords to integrate them throughout your web content, Title and Meta tags, and URLs.
Wondering what Title and Meta tags are?

3) URL, Title and Meta tags

URL

A URL stands for Uniform source locator. A URL is composed of letters, words, and symbols. Just how your home address gives direction to where you live, a URL locates web pages on the internet. A typical URL starts with HTTP or HTTPS.
The part where it says “SEO health care companies” is called a domain name. Your domain name should contain keywords you have selected for better visibility on the search engine result page.

Title tags

A title tag is a descriptive title of a specific web page on a search result when a particular query is searched. You can find these titles in larger fonts and highlighted along with URLs and Meta tags when you look at the search results.
These title tags are visible on the page source code, usually at the header of HTML coding. And they can be found on the web content as well. When title tags contain keywords, they help users get the right match to their keywords. When you include the proper keywords on title tags, you increase your clickability and get a higher Google ranking.
However, these titles could get cut off when displayed on the SERP if they are too long since Google shows title tags only of 60 characters. So try to keep your title characters less than 60.

Meta tags

Meta tags are found along with Title tags on the search result page. These tags are other factors that affect your web visibility. Unlike Title tags, Meta tags are only found on the page’s source code and the search result page but not the web content itself. These descriptive sentences help readers glimpse your web content since it tells them what the site will be about before opening it. When you include keywords in your Meta tags, it allows Google to analyze your site to label it as relevant and valuable for the specific keyword inserted. Thus, ranking it higher.
title tags and meta tags

4) Quality Backlinks

Acquiring suitable Backlinks affect your visibility and ranking majorly. A backlink, inbound link or hyperlink is a link found on a web page that you may or may not own, but when it gets clicked, it leads to your web page. Backlinks are like a backdoor to your web page to give you an increase in traffic. When you plan to get suitable backlinks, you should begin to look for online content relevant to your niche. As a healthcare business, you can start looking for blogs, health magazines, and especially your local news outlets. When you develop a connection with your local news outlet and get a referral from their online news page, you will access their local regular web visitors. You would want the locals to visit your page because it will create familiarity with your brand and eventually develop trust. People prefer to get their services from a known and credible source.
20 promising Canadian digital health companies
health care statistic
If you look at the blue highlighted words, you will notice the hyperlinks that will take you to a whole new web page talking about a different topic. The blog post talks about healthcare companies in Canada, and you can see some local Canadian companies are mentioned in the post. This could be an excellent example of a quality backlink since these companies are mentioned on a popular healthcare technology-focused digital media platform. By taking this as an inspiration, you can start doing the same for your business.
Even though there are paid software platforms that can help you build and analyze backlink profiles like Ahrefs, there are various ways to get backlinks for free, like building a network with local news websites, health magazines and blogs. Offering backlinks to other web pages to do the same for you and asking for referrals on sites you are interested in directly are some methods to acquire quality backlinks.
Learn about why SEO is essential for healthcare companies later on

5) Compelling Web designs

website optimization for healthcare
A well-designed site is easy to manage, navigate and is an attention grabber. An attractive web design should take its time to consider various things like Fonts, layouts, graphics, colour, images, infographics, etc. A well-designed page helps readers skim through the pages quickly and acquire the main points that are mentioned. An attractive website can increase your web traffic, but it wouldn’t always determine your session duration. Session duration is the average time a user spends time on your web page. You can identify that by viewing your Google analytics. When you design your website on your website, you should touch up your brand personality and include health-related pictures for a better visual experience. When you create your web, it is better to incorporate it with graphs and clear and detailed charts to determine your service’s costs, reviews of previous clients, and your companies’ success in earlier times. Various medical website building software with free trials are easy to learn, like Wix, Ukit, Dr. Leonardo Medical Website Builder.
Besides paying attention to a website’s aesthetic design, let’s see some essential elements a website should have

Web responsiveness

When we say a website is responsive, it is designed to be flexible to fit and adjust into multiple devices’ screens, like phones, computers, and tablets. This type of design is preferable for users since they don’t have to worry about using your site from any device and anywhere, thus increasing a user’s experience and web visitors.

Server speed

A server speed is when a website doesn’t take too long to load content. It shows how fast your website can process a user’s request. Google recommends website server speed to be 2 seconds at most.

6) Promotions

social media marketing for health care
With 4 billion active internet users worldwide, if you somehow haven’t started marketing your company digitally, now is your time to consider. There are one billion users on Instagram, 2.8 billion on Facebook, 187 million on Twitter and 1 billion users on TikTok; imagine the number of users, visitors and potential clients you would reach and lead to your website and boost your traffic If you start advertising your brand on social media.
SEO for health care companies
Social media is highly essential in SEO more than you think to drive those organic search results. Social media doesn’t guarantee web traffic and doesn’t affect your google ranking directly. But your website links, pictures and services you share on your social media platform would indirectly help you acquire web visitors and popularity.
In addition to that, posting on social media will help you obtain quality backlinks. If the content you post is relevant, informative and engaging, news posts and bloggers will link your page to theirs.
To increase your social presenc
  •  You should build your followers
  • Create informative and credible content
  •  Localize your keywords
  • Analyze your audience and understand their intent
  • Create topics that open discussions among your followers and for you to interact with them
  •  And finally, measure your performance with social media analytic tools like HubSpot, Sprout Social and Hootsuite
You can also check the social media platforms you are using if they offer an analytical tool. For Example, Twitter has its own Twitter analytic to manage and review your social media metrics.

Why is SEO essential for Healthcare companies?

SEO for health care
The health care sector is one of the largest, diverse and complex industries with a vast client base. If you have a company that is in healthcare, you will need to know how to market correctly, especially with your potential patients, using search engines as the primary method to find your services. With the traditional market dying and the digital market on the rise, you will need to know the digital market fundamentals to succeed in this era. If you are a small business company and have a limited budget to market digitally, SEO is the right choice.
Some of the benefits of using SEO for your healthcare company is,
  • Rank high on Google search result page.
  • It makes it easy to analyze your business performance
  • Easier to analyze your target audiences
  • Building close connection with existing and potential clients
  • Increasing your familiarity and credibility
  • Decrease the workload for healthcare companies to get started with clients. Before your patients visit you, they will visit your website and research the service you give to match what they want or need.
  •  Increase the opportunity to turn leads into customers.

Nurture your business with SEO

SEO for health care companies
Even though SEO requires a lot of patience, time and effort to learn, anyone who is not tech-savvy and determined to optimize their website desirably can do it. If you are a healthcare company owner who wants to reach and increase their client base with a cost-effective method, SEO is the right choice for you.
When you begin to use SEO for your business, you should answer questions like
  • Who is my target audience?
  • Am I providing relevant content?
  • Is my content engaging?
  • Is my website easy to manage and access?
  • Am I using the right media platform to promote my brand?
If you took your time to optimize SEO properly, you would gain the right audience, increase your web traffic and turn leads to loyal clients. If performing SEO for your website a time-consuming task, you can always consider hiring an SEO manager. SEO manager helps you with every optimization there is to do to increase your website visibility, ranking and measure your web performance.
I hope this article was informative enough and gave essential pointers to get you started with SEO.
Ready to start your new project but have a few questions? We are here to discuss.