Healthcare SEO: A Guide to Help Your Organization Stand Out

An Example of How Healthcare SEO Works

Let’s set the scene for this guide. We want to establish why SEO is so essential for healthcare. We’d also like to establish our credibility as a top-quality healthcare SEO agency.

Suppose there’s a person who just moved to your area who knows they need to establish a new primary care provider. They might know who accepts their health insurance, but they’re looking for someone who can address their unique needs and isn’t too far from their new home.

If that person were to search for the term “primary care physician near me,” they would get something that looks a little like this:

These are the search results that appeared after the sponsored content and featured places that Google pulled for this location. Since up to 80% of people ignore paid search results, these will likely be the first results they look at.

These directory sites are also likely to bring in a lot of valuable organic traffic.

By offering the new mover information and options for different primary care physicians, these directories are attracting their ideal customers to their websites. They likely have put a lot of thought into user intent, so they can fulfill those needs.

But what is user intent? User intent is what a searcher online wants to find on the internet when they type their term into a search engine like Google.

In this case, the intent of someone searching for the term “primary care physician near me” is pretty clear. They’re likely to need a list of different primary care physicians in their area, so those directories are likely to be helpful to them.

If you can understand and empathize with your target audience, you’ll be able to find more valuable keywords and create better content for them.

Why SEO for Healthcare?

People trust search engines to find answers and solutions to their problems. Even more, according to a Pew Research study, 66% of internet users look online for information about specific medical conditions or diseases. That includes people over age 65 who are more likely to need routine, unplanned, or elective medical care.

If you aren’t investing in search engine real estate for your healthcare system, you may be missing out on traffic that can help you find more patients and grow your service lines even further.

How to Use Patient Empathy to Market Your Services

The key to successful healthcare SEO marketing is to focus on your patients and their concerns and questions first. Before you even think about launching your first campaign, you need to know more and care more about your customers than your competitors do.

This means focusing your content on what their daily life is like, their pain points, how they search for solutions to their pain, and what they experience before they need your solution. Here’s what that might look like:

• Surveying patients: Patient feedback about what brought them in can be extremely helpful in developing relevant content.

• Answering common questions: While you may not have the resources to develop videos, pages, or infographics about every possible condition, providing answers about FAQs you get through social media, email, or from your doctors can make a huge difference.

• Providing multiple ways to learn: Some people prefer videos, while others prefer written content, and others like learning through live chat.

• Using the most updated information: Updating and maintaining your website shows your patients—and Google, by extension—that you care about providing answers with the latest information about their possible conditions.

By listening to your customers and gaining empathy for them with an evidence-based marketing strategy, you’ll get a clearer picture of how they might use search engines to find your services—and the types of content that will bring them to your website.

6 Parts of a Good Healthcare SEO Strategy

1. Create Helpful Healthcare Content

No matter which service lines you offer, creating helpful content is essential to a robust healthcare SEO strategy. Aside from having written copy that discusses conditions you treat or treatment methods you offer, it also means having videos, images, infographics, and other content they can use to learn more.

Regardless of the type of content you’re creating, we recommend asking yourself these questions if you’re trying to create helpful content that Google can help users find:

• Does the content directly answer the question your user is asking or the problem they have?
• Does the content provide original research or information?
• Is it a complete, comprehensive, or substantial description of the topic?
• Does it provide substantial value compared to other pages in search results?
• Is the content well-produced, or does it look sloppy or hastily put together?
• If it draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying and rewriting the sources, instead providing value and originality?
• Does it have any spelling or stylistic issues?
• If someone were to research the topic your content addresses, would they leave with the impression that it’s trustworthy or recognized as an authority on the topic?

These are just a few of the questions you may need to ask yourself. Google and other search engines are getting stricter about the types of content they deem helpful. Therefore, it’s not only helpful to ask yourself these questions about the content as you’re creating it but also in subsequent months or years as new insights become available.

2. Utilize Your Doctors and Practitioners as Experts

As more people have begun using them, search engine result pages (SERPs) have begun to put more and more emphasis on content that experts have written or reviewed.

This doesn’t necessarily mean your physicians must take time out of their extremely busy schedules to write content for you. Rather, you can have dedicated content marketers like us create content based on our expertise and research, then have your physicians review the content as experts.

While this doesn’t necessarily involve your physicians writing the content themselves, it does satisfy most search engine requirements for expert-reviewed content, especially if you include credits for their review within the page’s content.

3. Prioritize User Experience

User experience can be challenging for some healthcare organizations, in part due to the intricacies of their back-end tech infrastructure. However, this doesn’t negate the need to prioritize it. Whether your users are trying to schedule an appointment or just trying to see if the condition they have is worth scheduling a doctor’s appointment, it’s essential to make it as easy as possible for them to find the answers they need. Here are just a few ways you can improve your website’s user experience.

Mobile Optimization

Chances are, a large portion of your target audience is looking for healthcare services on mobile devices. Google also uses mobile-first indexing, so having mobile-friendly pages can make a massive difference in how your website ranks.

Load Speed

Your page’s load time is essential to your potential patient’s experience with your website. If it improves user experience, Google will be more likely to promote sites that have faster load speeds.

This is especially important for mobile devices. If someone is trying to access your website on slower 3G and 4G networks, this will help them get to your page faster.

Ease of Navigation

While we don’t recommend following what UX designers call the “3-click rule” literally, your goal is to make it as easy as possible for your users to find what they’re looking for. This can mean the difference between your users choosing your services or getting frustrated and going to a competing healthcare organization’s website instead.

4. Include Internal Links

While external links to credible sources that have information on your service lines can be valuable, internal links are worth their weight in gold.

Internal links—that is, links that go to other pages on your website—help Google index and understand all the pages on your site. If one page is ranking particularly well and links to other pages, it can make Google see the other pages as more valuable because it knows the first page is credible. This also makes it easier for users to navigate your website.

5. Implement Robust On-Page SEO

On-page SEO mostly refers to the content of your page—including keywords, page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and other signals that tell Google what’s on your website. Search engines want to make sure the content is relevant to what the user is searching for, so relevancy is essential.

6. Use Local SEO for Healthcare

Local SEO comprises a set of strategies that help your healthcare system’s website and branding be more visible to people who are looking for your service lines locally.

Local SEO tactics are critical for healthcare organizations. For example, if you have an urgent care clinic, using local SEO can make it easier for someone to find directions to the clinic and see if it’s right for them when they develop a full-body rash after a bee sting.

Here are some of the basic methods for improving your local SEO:

• Create and maintain a Google My Business account.
• Mention your service areas on your website, including on specific location-based pages for every city or municipality you serve and the service lines you offer there.
• Make sure you are listed on local directories like your local Chamber of Commerce and insurance portals.

Content Marketing for Healthcare: Identifying Ideas

Identifying and developing content ideas may or may not involve brainstorming every quarter once all your service lines have a robust page for patients to learn about them. Here are some methods we recommend:

• Talk to your patients: You might know less than you think about how your customer looks for medical information. Start by surveying them to get more information about who they are and how they think.

• Conduct keyword research: Using keyword research tools can help you find more relevant keywords that your customers are using to search.

• Look at content types in SERPs: Your target audience might not be looking for answers in written copy—instead, they might be looking for videos or tools like quizzes to help them find answers.

Our SEO Services: Working with a Healthcare SEO Agency to Get More Patients

Chances are, your organization’s in-house marketing department is likely swamped with all manner of marketing for your healthcare system—including overall strategies, internal marketing, and pet projects your executive team may see as important but don’t necessarily attract new patients. That’s partly why working with external healthcare SEO services can provide better ROI than having your marketing department work on it when they get a few spare moments.

A dedicated healthcare SEO agency can make it easier for your team to publish content that undergoes rigorous quality control, including review from your physicians.

Apply for our FREE SEO Strategy Audit

Evidence-Based Healthcare Marketing

At Avalanche Creative, we specialize in evidence-based, highly executable search engine and content marketing plans for medical clinics and healthcare companies. Our process takes the mystery out of SEO and provides a watertight plan for how to execute an SEO and content strategy that brings in more traffic and qualified leads.

Our SEO services mitigate the risk of a bad investment in search engine optimization. We help ensure this by researching and planning more thoroughly than anyone else. We never cut corners because we want to make sure your healthcare SEO strategy is possible for your business.

Other Healthcare Marketing Resources

We recommend using multiple different channel strategies to own your marketing. For healthcare, that includes:

• Email marketing
• Search engine marketing
• Your entire website
• Custom mobile apps
• Social media marketing

Get a List of Healthcare SEO Keywords

Ready to find the perfect list of healthcare keywords for your organization? Fill out the form below! We’ll send you the list and chat about it with you so you understand our recommendations and how we came up with our findings.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Does SEO Matter in Healthcare?

Yes. Not only does SEO help build your healthcare system’s brand authority, but it also allows users to find your services when they need them the most.

Why Is Healthcare SEO So Hard?

It’s no secret that SEO is competitive for healthcare organizations. Not only do you have to compete with other healthcare systems in your area, but also with nationally known organizations like the National Institutes of Health, Mayo Clinic, and others.

Even more, Google holds higher standards for medical SEO. This is because content relating to medicine falls under its rules for “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics. In other words, they consider medicine to be a topic that could significantly impact people’s health, financial stability, or safety.

Because of this YMYL rule, Google is more likely to prioritize high-quality content that is strictly reviewed, factual, and trustworthy. This is why local SEO is essential for helping people find your services when you need them—and why it’s essential to have your physicians review your website content.