Whether you are starting a new medical practice or have been an established doctor for decades, you can benefit from SEO for doctors. SEO, search engine optimization, refers to the wide range of tasks that an SEO specialist will take to improve your online presence. In short, SEO for medical practices can improve traffic to your website, leading to an increase in office contacts and patients, but that’s not all. By investing in SEO services for doctors, you can enhance your reputation for expertise and more effectively communicate with your current patients too.
Today, the medical field is as competitive as any other industry. In a financial sense, attracting and retaining patients is no different than when a business works to attract and retain customers. SEO for doctors helps medical providers compete with other providers in their locality to build up their medical practice. In order to successfully market your practice or specialty, SEO for surgeons and doctors provides you with the foundation you need for optimum growth. Learn why you should invest in SEO services for doctors.
How Does SEO for Doctors Work?
When you partner with a digital marketing firm for SEO for medical practices, you can expect its SEO specialists to perform a thorough audit of your current online platform and reputation. That helps them create a plan for improving your online presence and search engine page rankings. They will consider which SEO tasks are needed to catapult your practice to the first page of local search results. Their goal is that when people search Google for “doctors near me,” your practice will appear early in the results. The earlier it appears, the more website traffic and contacts you can expect.
Your SEO provider will create a highly detailed doctor SEO plan that includes tasks associated with technical SEO, local SEO, mobile SEO, and other measures that will enhance your online presence, including both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. What does all this search engine jargon mean? SEO is a broad term that encompasses all the measures that your specialist will use to improve your search engine rank. On-page SEO, for example, refers to all the SEO tasks they perform in association with your website. Off-page SEO refers to the tasks they’ll perform outside of your website on platforms like social media or online business directories.
Technical SEO refers to the highly technical tasks they’ll perform such as speeding up your web page loading times and improving its structure. Local SEO for medical professionals involves the measures they’ll take to improve the website’s local visibility online. Taken together, all of these measures can greatly enhance a practice’s online visibility and reputation, helping it to market its services successfully.
Benefits of SEO for Doctors
To effectively market your practice or medical services in your area, you can benefit from local SEO for doctors in numerous ways, including:
Attract More Patients
In order to build your practice, you need to attract patients. If your practice is currently buried in search engine results back on page three or four of local searches, it’s losing patients to other local practices found earlier in the results. With SEO for doctors solutions, you can bump your practice up in those results in order to attract potential patients to your website. More traffic equals more patient leads.
Increase Contacts with Your Practice and Appointments
In addition to attracting new patients, improved SEO for doctors can lead to an increase in contacts and appointments from current patients too. Your improved online visibility allows your practice to connect more easily with both new and current patients. Instead of losing calls to competing practices, you can capture more local patients to increase your appointments–and revenue.
Establish or Improve Your Reputation
SEO for surgeons and physicians can help you improve your online reputation for service excellence. As a medical provider, you aren’t selling a product; you’re promoting health services based on your medical expertise. It’s important for you to market that expertise effectively online where, as you may know, your target audience happens to be. The more robust your online presence is, the more positive your reputation, the more you showcase yourself as an expert in your field. That also helps you attract more patients to your office or other medical facility.
Important Tips for SEO for Medical Practices
When you are ready to invest in SEO for doctors, it’s important to work with a digital marketing firm that specializes in SEO for medical practices. You’ll want to discuss the following tips with your SEO provider to ensure that you’re making the most of your investment:
Improve Website Design
Your website is your practice’s online hub. Partner with a firm that has the proven capability to develop and design a world-class medical provider website that is search engine optimized, mobile friendly, and patient friendly.
Increase Positive Online Reviews
Negative reviews can sabotage your online reputation. Your SEO provider can help you solicit positive reviews and then post them on relevant online platforms to enhance your reputation, which improves your SEO.
Create a Google My Business Listing
Google My Business is a key online directory that you want to appear in to boost your SEO. Your SEO specialist should choose the “provider” listing when establishing your presence in this directory.
Establish a Social Media Presence
Potential patients often search for local providers, even medical specialists, on major social media platforms like Facebook in addition to search engines like Google. Be sure that you have a presence there so that searchers can find you.
Perform Extensive Keyword Research
Your SEO specialist will perform exhaustive keyword research so that you can employ the best keywords and phrases associated with your practice and locality in your website content. Keywords help the search engine algorithms index who you are and what you do.
Create High-Quality Content
Your website content helps you market your services to patients and helps you establish your online expertise and authoritativeness. Your digital marketing firm will help you create keyword-rich content designed to more effectively market your services online.
Rely on Analytics to Measure SEO Success
Analytics are crucial for measuring the success of your SEO strategies. Using them allows you to measure your return on your investment for SEO for medical practices.
Why Every Doctor Should Use SEO
If you are a physician or surgeon, you should note that, today, people search for local providers online. With SEO for doctors, your practice will become more visible to online searchers. Greater visibility leads to more website traffic, more patients, and more appointments.
