HEALTHCARE SEO HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR ORGANIC PERFORMANCE 

It’s harder than ever for many healthcare companies to get new patients. Hospitals and clinics must give patients a competitive digital experience since people have a plethora of options when it comes to choosing their healthcare provider. Since most patients use search engines to find a new physician, investing in SEO is the first step in providing a digital experience that will draw patients.

What Is Healthcare SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving your website to draw in more of the target audience through natural search results. In actuality, it entails making your website more search engine-friendly so that prospective clients seeking services similar to yours may find it on Google and other search engines.

Online searches bring three times as many people to hospital websites as other methods, according to Google, making them the clear choice for patients looking for healthcare providers. Your website must be optimized by an SEO agency Dubai to appear at the top of search engine results pages to draw in new patients; therefore, SEO is a crucial investment for any hospital, clinic, or medical practice.

How Can The Healthcare Industry Benefit From Search Engine Optimization? 

• Grow your patient base

According to one survey, 80% of Dubai individuals searched for healthcare-related information during the previous 12 months.

Patients mostly use the internet to explore new healthcare providers, schedule appointments, see provider reviews, and obtain important information. You must invest in healthcare SEO if you want to give your patients the greatest digital experience possible. This type of strategy will ensure that your website ranks well in their search results, which will increase your patient base over time.

• Show up for local searches

Appearing in local search results is an additional advantage of a healthcare SEO plan. Many patients use localized search keywords, such as “physical therapist in Dubai.”

Your site must be properly optimized to appear for such location-specific queries. When it is, you may access local, relevant searches from prospective patients seeking digital marketing services Dubai similar to yours.

• Rise above the competition

Because the healthcare industry is competitive, SEO is much more crucial. You will miss out on important growth prospects if a patient searches for a hospital in their region and your primary rival appears in the first or second search results, but your hospital isn’t even on page one.

You can stand out from the competition by investing in SEO. If the best SEO company in UAE also provides excellent online services and a website, you’ll be well on your way to providing a digital experience that patients will want to return to.

11 Actionable Tips For Your Healthcare SEO Strategy

You can begin developing a healthcare SEO plan that will help your website rise to the top of search results now that you have a more profound understanding of how well it is working. Start by implementing the 11 practical suggestions listed below.

1. Focus On Quality Content

High-quality content is perhaps the most crucial component of a successful SEO strategy. You must have material that search engines can display for your website to show up in search results. Additionally, search engines place a high value on the quality of your content because it is the reason visitors visit your website. Make sure your material is accurate, comprehensive, and of high quality.

Content may also be used as a strategy to increase website traffic. SEO content strategy Dubai helps healthcare brands create targeted, high-value content that improves visibility, attracts qualified patients, and strengthens long-term organic growth. You can increase the number of searches you can appear for by starting a blog on your healthcare website where you can provide useful patient resources (you won’t appear for a search if you don’t have any material covering that topic!).

If you find yourself in a bind, observe what your competitors are writing about and enhance your content accordingly. Ensure your articles are more detailed or take a unique approach to the topic, setting yourself apart from your competitors.

To find out which terms people look for most frequently, you may also utilize a keyword research tool. Make it a priority to write about pertinent medical phrases that people are most likely to look for, since such content will boost your traffic.

2. Make Sure Search Engines Can Crawl And Index Your Website

Now that you have comprehensive, original, and high-quality material that is pertinent to your healthcare business, you must make sure that search engines can index it.

Let’s start with the fundamentals: Search engines store and arrange the content they discover when they scan your website. When a page gets indexed, it indicates that a search engine is aware of its content and may provide it to users as a search result. In essence, search engines are creating a library of material that they can access when a user does a search.

Therefore, it’s imperative that search engines can easily index your healthcare material. Using a sitemap is one efficient method for accomplishing this. A sitemap lists all the URLs on your website that you want search engines to index and display to users. Creating a sitemap according to Google’s guidelines and uploading it to Google Search Console is a smart place to start.

3. Monitor Your SEO Progress

It’s critical to track your progress to report on return on investment if you want to manage a successful healthcare SEO program.

A few SEO KPIs to monitor over time are as follows:

• Position on average in search results
• Click-through rates to your website from search results
• impressions from search engines
• Total number of natural visitors to your website
• Conversions

You will need to utilize a website analytics tool to examine all of this information. Make sure your analytics platform aligns with these KPIs and enhances your healthcare SEO strategy. You must also use an SEO tool that automatically tracks some of this data and shows your SEO success over time.

4. Benchmark Your Healthcare SEO And Compare Performance To Your Competitors

Tracking and reporting your SEO efforts is vital to showing your ROI.

Remember, though, that SEO performance is always comparable to that of your competitors. Even if your organic traffic has grown by 50% in the past year, you may not be attracting the right kind of visitors if you are still on page two of search results while your competitors hold the top positions for high-priority keywords that attract the ideal patients.

Use an enterprise SEO software that compares your SEO score to the industry average and your particular competitors to see how you compare. This will give you a thorough overview of how to improve your SEO score and optimize your most important keywords.

5. Improve The Patient Experience On Your Website

As was already noted, a strong healthcare SEO strategy can help you draw in new clients, but to retain existing ones, you must offer an exceptional online experience.

Search engines also take into account a high-quality website experience when determining rankings. The following should be considered while evaluating your entire website experience:

• Site speed: How rapidly does your website load? Make sure your website loads quickly because the typical user will abandon it within two to three seconds.

• Simple navigation: A simple menu can help make your website easy to use and index for both users and search engines.

• Clean, universal design: Your website should be easy to browse by adhering to universal design standards, particularly for healthcare websites.

• Quality assurance: Verify the quality of your website by checking for broken buttons, media files, links, or 404 errors. These issues might cause users to have a very unpleasant experience.

• Easy user journey: Avoid making it difficult for users to finish a task. Reduce the number of steps consumers must complete and make the procedure simple and easy to understand if they choose to make an appointment online.

• Accessibility: Older adults and others with impairments should be able to easily navigate healthcare websites. Make sure your website is legible to individuals with physical, cognitive, hearing, or vision impairments, and maintain a strong contrast between colors.

In addition to keeping patients, you may tell search engines that your website is worthwhile by offering a seamless, captivating user experience.

6. Build Your Website Authority

Increasing the authority of your website is another technique to enhance your healthcare SEO strategy. Backlinks, or links from other websites to yours, are the most effective approach to do that.

Search engines view backlinks as a vote of confidence; essentially, if another website is ready to direct its readers to your site, it means that they have faith in your company and your content. SEO for healthcare content marketing helps medical brands reach the right patients with high-quality, trust-driven content.

But not every backlink is made equal. You want reputable, high-quality websites to connect to yours, not ones that are spammy or unreliable.

If another website has highlighted your hospital or clinic for intriguing research, positive results, community service, etc., ask the owner of that website whether it would be okay to include a link to your website when they do so.

Get your company in front of as many reliable third parties as you can, and ask them to link to your website when they use your material, mention you, or conduct an interview with one of your employees.

7. Focus In On EAT Requirements For Healthcare SEO

In 2018, EAT, a major change to the Google algorithm, had an impact on medical websites. Google made this move in an attempt to motivate medical websites to adhere to stricter guidelines, known as EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).

Healthcare organizations must ensure that search engines and patients alike recognize them as reliable sources of information. When enhancing your website’s EAT, keep the following points in mind:

• Make excellent, educational About Us and Contact Us pages that are jam-packed with details.
• For all of your in-depth articles, be sure to include author bios that detail their backgrounds and areas of expertise.
• Make it simple for patients to get in touch with your company.
• Add terms and conditions, a privacy policy, etc.
• Include a phone number and address on your website that are easy to find.

8. Prioritize Local Healthcare SEO With Google My Business

For your healthcare company, local SEO is essential. Usually, patients look for local providers. Create a Google My Business account and claim your company listing to begin working on your local healthcare SEO.

Next, make a thorough company profile that includes your website, images, business hours, and a current phone number and address. Reacting to customer feedback is another way to gain the trust of your patients.

By completing all of these steps, you will build a strong local profile that Google will promote by displaying in local maps and searches.

9. Make Sure Your Website Is Accessible For All Users

Websites related to healthcare must be mindful of accessibility compliance. The aged and disabled should be able to use all healthcare websites. By doing this, you not only give your patients a better online experience, but search engines also take it into account when determining your ranking.

Assessing the accessibility status of your website is a smart place to start. To determine whatever degree of compliance you should pursue, you should next review the accessibility laws in your region. WCAG 2 Level AA is a wonderful place to start.

10. Look Into Your Site’s Speed And Mobile Usability

Google’s SEO ranking algorithm now takes into account mobile usability and website speed; therefore, these characteristics have a big impact on your SEO success.

Mobile Usability

About half of all internet traffic globally originates from mobile devices, according to Statista. (That percentage is around 60–65% in Dubai). Hence, your healthcare website must be mobile-friendly. The following are some considerations for mobile SEO and usability:

• Make use of responsive web design. Make sure your website’s design adapts to the many devices that consumers are using.
• Ensure that all content, such as pictures, videos, and more, is visible on a mobile device.
• Steer clear of pop-ups and other overlays since they occupy a significant amount of screen real estate on mobile devices.
• Avoid using thin or extremely tiny fonts that require consumers to constantly zoom in on their mobile devices.
• Spread out the touch-responsive components on your website so that they are simple to tap on a mobile device.

Site Speed

If a website takes more than two to three seconds to load, the majority of visitors will abandon it, a tough standard to meet! However, you must invest in a quick website if you want to give patients the greatest possible experience and raise your SEO ranks. When working on your site’s speed, bear the following points in mind:

• Downloading a page’s components, most of which require an HTTP request, takes up the majority of the loading time. To speed up your site and minimize HTTP requests, minimize the number of components on your page.
• Reduce the number of redirects your website utilizes since they increase the number of HTTP requests and cause your website to load more slowly.
• In addition to making for a negative user experience, broken links can make your website sluggish.
• Cut down on the size of your image files. Large file pictures will make your website larger overall, and larger pages take longer to load. Use a free online image optimizer to make your picture files better.
• Avoid uploading video files straight to your website since they are even bigger than image files. To minimize space and speed up load times, use a video hosting provider to host your video and then embed it on your website.

It’s not something to be disregarded because investing in a speedier and more mobile-friendly website can improve the digital experience for prospective patients, make your company seem more reliable, and raise your SEO rankings.

11. Don’t Forget About Bing In Your Healthcare SEO Strategy

Yes, Google dominates the search business, particularly in Dubai. However, Bing and Yahoo! still account for 10% of all search traffic. Fortunately, optimizing your website for Bing searches doesn’t need any more actions on your part. Prioritize offering a reliable, accurate, and high-quality online experience for both search engines.

To track your site’s Bing performance and improve for quick wins, you should still set up Bing’s webmaster tool.

Corpstation Medical Marketing Agency Is An All-In-One SEO Partner That Can Improve Your Healthcare SEO

To improve website performance and increase your healthcare SEO, you must work with a specialized firm that aligns marketing and digital tactics.

The Corpstation Medical Marketing Agency helps you draw in more potential patients and expand your practice naturally. We offer a thorough method for creating a competitive, high-performing healthcare website through professional content optimization, competitive analysis, and strategic keyword research.

FAQs About Healthcare SEO