Written by: Sandra ReidSearch Engine Optimization or SEO is important for any business with an online presence - even medical practices. Whilst new customs may often arise via word of mouth for this type of business, a strong online presence and SEO campaign can also help greatly. In this article, we look at 5 simple tips you can incorporate to boost the SEO and grow your medical practice.
1. Find Keywords relating to your profession
The first step is to identify important keywords relating to your medical practice.
Keywords are important words or phrases that are likely to be searched for on Google
and other search engines. The keywords should reflect things that your customers are
likely to search for. For example, you may want to attract customers from your local area.
Therefore, a keyword could be “medical practice in X” with X being your town. Tools
like Google Ads can also help with keyword research.
2. Utilize these keywords in your content
With a list of keywords you wish to rank for, you must now implement them in your
online content. This should include your website, blog, and social media posts. It is
important to insert keywords naturally into your content. Do not spam keywords, or
insert them into sentences or areas that do not make sense.
Common places to insert keywords include page titles, headings, in the first paragraph
of a page’s text, and in the last paragraph of a page’s text.
3. Include META tags for each website page
META tags are header data that is read by search engines. The two most important
META tags are the title and description tags. Each website page should have a
completed title and description tag.
The title tag should be between 45-55 characters with spaces. This should ideally
include your main keyword, and describe the page content in a short, snappy manner.
The description tag should be between 135-155 characters with spaces. This should also
contain your main keyword at the start, and provide a more in-depth description of the
page content.
4. Create a medical blog
Aside from a website, a blog is also a fantastic thing to have. This can help with your
branding, and it can also boost SEO rankings. Medical practices should easily be
able to create a blog with interesting content. For example, you could write articles
about healthy living, recovery from surgery, or different illnesses and their signs, etc.
You can then promote and share your blog via social media, and also boost customer
engagement as they read your content. Ideally, the blog should be updated regularly,
and have content that has real value to your patients. It should also include your medical
practice branding like a logo (you can create a free medical logo using logocreator.io,
for example), fonts, and colors.
5. Create backlinks to reputable medical sources
Lastly, try to incorporate authority backlinks into your online content. By authority,
we mean reputable websites with a decent ranking of their own. Backlinks can be
included in your blog, page content, and social media posts. For medical practices, a
great source of backlinks could be medical journals and case studies.
These are all simple things that anyone can do. It doesn’t require expert SEO knowledge or web design skills. Most of the things are easy to access if you are using a website builder like Shopify, Weebly, or Squarespace.
Why not implement an SEO campaign today and improve the ranking of your medical practice on search engine websites like Google? For a relatively small effort, you can reap big rewards and help your business grow indefinitely.