Follow Our SEO Game Plan to Drive High Quality Leads to Your Medical Website
June 27th, 2022 by
Key Insights
- SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Spending time to create an SEO game plan is crucial in identifying key items to work on to support website growth.
- Take time to identify the signs your website needs a checkup, diagnosis the issues that be added to your SEO gameplan, and begin tackling the items on your list.
- SEO takes time. Continuing to optimize your medical website over time will show long-term benefits to your rankings and ROI.
Your website should represent your practice’s brand and demonstrate your expertise in the industry. Traditionally patients turn to Google for the closest and best option when looking for a new medical practitioner. With that in mind, your practice should have a website that appeals to your target audience and is properly set up on the back end to support ranking on Google.
Having well-optimized content on procedures and services provided, before and after galleries, and reviews/testimonials all support the overall experience of a user when visiting your site. Optimizing your site will give your medical practice higher quality leads which can support growing your practice.
Yet, a great front end doesn’t always mean the backend is optimized to its fullest potential! It can be overwhelming to begin creating an “SEO game plan.” During this process, it’s important to remember that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Google wants to see consistent improvement and engagement from website owners. It takes time for Google to process and give your website credit for all the improvements you’ve made (generally a couple of weeks to 1 month per change).
In this post, we’ll provide the steps to take and consider when reviewing your medical website and optimizing it to improve your business’s visibility in search engine results page (SERPs).
Symptoms: Signs Your Website Needs a Checkup
You have a visually appealing website and layout, but your medical practice isn’t crushing goals and generating leads as you’d like. Do any of these resonate with your medical practice?
- Leads don’t come in from the website
- Patients can’t find you on search engines
- Patients can’t find your office(s)
- Your website loads slowly
If you answered yes to any of the above, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s dig into the common causes of these challenges.
Diagnosis: Common Causes of Website and SEO-related Issues
Duplicate content
Having high-quality and unique content is crucial to SEO and rankings. It is especially important as a medical professional to have unique content to show authority and overall expertise in the industry.
However, duplicate content means the content displayed on your site also is displayed somewhere else on the internet. When this happens, Google has a hard time knowing which site is more relevant to a search query. This, in turn, forces search engines to determine which site’s content is more relevant to a specific search query.
Incorrect Directory Information
You must have your name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistent across the internet. Since many medical offices share one main address with unique suite numbers, ensure you have your suite numbers outlined in all listings online to keep your NAP consistent.
As medical offices move to new buildings or expand, updating directories online to display correct information is a step sometimes missed in the move. This can add to the challenge of your patients having trouble finding your practices’ office because Google will display outdated information.
Clunky, outdated websites that don’t load quickly
Data suggests lower load times lead to a drop in overall conversions because a patient will bounce off a slow loading site to find another provider.
There are plenty of free tools to utilize to consistently monitor your site speed. When partnering with a Healthcare SEO team, this is something that is included within your campaign and monitored for improvements.
User experience
A common reason a user leaves a website is that they can’t find what they were looking for. When a user visits your medical website, is it user-friendly? Is your navigation easy to digest and navigate?
Website Responsiveness
Your website should be a responsive website that is mobile-friendly and works seamlessly across all devices, whether a user is visiting it on a mobile device or tablet. Having a responsive website means your layout is flexible to screen size and adjust accordingly depending on the device. This is important to have as it offers a user a good experience regardless of what device they decide to visit you on.
Contact form is missing, buried, or lacks a call to action
When a patient visits your website, they should have a clear call to action (CTA) along with steps to follow after the CTA is complete. It is common that a patient would hesitate to fill out an on-site form due to unclear required fields.
Treatment: Procedures Needed and Expected Outcome
Just as each patient is different and has different priorities, so do websites. There are many ways to diagnose your website and create an “SEO Game Plan.” You should triage website issues on a case-by-case basis.
Taking a step back and completing a full SEO needs analysis is crucial to begin your SEO journey. Our team reviews a site’s health and identifies strategic areas of opportunity for improvement in the following areas:
- Technical on-site SEO
- Local search visibility
- Link health
- Content and keyword optimization
- Website user experience
- Conversion rate optimization
As mentioned, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Typically, executing tactics happen over time. As each medical practice has its own priorities and time budgets to support these efforts, it can take time to get everything in place to begin seeing results. This all depends on the time and effort the medical practice is willing to put in.
Generally, the tactics below are a standard of care for a website that needs the full treatment:
- Re-write and expand website content for priority services and procedures. As website content goes live on your site, you may see an improvement in rankings in 2-3 weeks for that given topic.
- Improve site navigation
- Update local directory listings
- Creating clear call-to-actions across the site for conversions
- Redesign website (long term play)
It is important to recognize that all websites can utilize optimizations from a user and technical perspective. Allocating time and resources to spend on analyzing your medical site’s needs is crucial in making sure you are set up for success.
For more information on optimizing your medical website, contact the experts at Search Influence.
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