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10 Ways to Make Your Healthcare Website More Visible Posted by Tyson Downs on 12/10/14 6:06 PM
On Page SEO Tips Healthcare Professionals Need to Know If you are like most healthcare professionals, you probably understand how important it is to have a great presence online. After all, people are searching online these days for a doctor more than ever before. Every year more and more people are searching online for their doctor. What does this mean to you? This means that unless you are where they can find you, you have no chance of getting found. No chance of getting that $20,000 total mouth makeover. No chance of getting that $5,000 Invisalign job. No chance of that $7,500 mommy makeover. Where’s that leave you?
Relegated to getting referrals from insurance, primary care physicians, and word of mouth. Maybe you’ll get a drive by here and there. But unless you understand that the future is in online marketing for doctors, then you have little to no chance of competing. So, the million dollar question, How can I increase the rankings of my website? We’ve talked about numerous ways for you to grow your practice previously. Today we are going to talk about perhaps the most overlooked aspects, of building your online presence, the coding of your website, also called On Page SEO. If you’ve been practicing for any length of time, there’s no doubt you’ve been inundated with advertising for SEO assistance. Perhaps, you’ve even been approached by someone who claims to be able to boost your ROI and SERP rankings (as if you were vastly familiar with the terminology). Today, we’d like to share 10 on page SEO tips for healthcare professionals to boost your success rates and site ranks.
1. Create Unique Quality Content
First things first, your site needs to be uniquely valuable to your visitors. There must be content on your pages that is so compelling and informative that visitors have no desire to hit the back button. In fact, everything about it: images, text and graphics should stand out from all other sites proposing to provide the same information.
Essentially, your content needs to meet a demand and thereby be completely relevant to the topic that led visitors to your page. If you meet this criteria, then the next aspect of consideration is your page’s link ability. This will include internal links that will take users to other pages within your site that provide additional information. But more importantly, perhaps, it will enable users to link your site to theirs which will bring in more traffic and increased SEO ranks. What is quality content? It is content that get's links. Content that captures the readers attention and reduces your bounce rate. One of the factors used to determine the search results.
2. User Experience Focused UX, or user experience, is super important these days. Content is king and while making sure the bots are liking your site is important, it won’t make a bit of difference if you aren’t providing your patients with a site that loads quickly, gives them specific information and makes them want to hang around to learn more. Sadly, doctor SEO companies have a tendency to be so hyper-focused on tags and the like, that they forget the importance of design with a healthcare website. Therefore, it’s crucial to realize that the way your site looks will drastically alter its success. It must be attractive and easily navigable. In addition, content needs to come before the ads and be laid out in a way that makes sense to the user. In other words, don't make the visitor to your site think. Make it so easy for them to find what they want that they could do it in their sleep.
3. Target Keywords It is reported that SEO ranking factors includes upwards of 200 different things. So, deciding what aspects to focus on can be a great challenge. Your URL is one thing that you should consider because it has an impact on where Google places you in the search results. Both your domain name, as well as the url of a blog post or service page. It is generally accepted that you should use shorter url's and cut out the extra words like 'the', 'and' 'if', etc. As an example, if you are a dentist, and understand the value of content marketing chances, are you will blog. Perhaps a good url of a blog post about teeth whitening would in something like: /teeth-whitening-tips. Going just a bit further, the title tag, you'll want to keep under 55-60 characters, and add a keyword, naturally in that as well. Make sure you include your target keywords within the first 100-150 words of content. You can also use related keywords because Google has a thesaurus-like technology that can determine the relevancy of your content, so they know when you are referring to something, but by another name (it’s called LSI, in case you were wondering). Don’t forget to optimize your pictures (or other media based content). If you do, optimize their file names and ALT tags to increase your site traffic. As a final consideration, make sure you include authority based external links. Though it may seem counterintuitive to send people away from your site. Google sees those links as proof that your content is applicable. Of course, the sites you link to have to have topic relevance to your page as well.
4. Bot and Crawler Optimized While you should certainly be concerned with human visitors, the bots are an issue to consider too. They look at different aspects of site design. To ascertain what the bots are seeing, disable Javascript and images in your
browser’s preference and settings when possible. This will help you see if everything is showing up where and how you want it to. Specifically, make sure that your meta tags allow for robot crawling, that your URL is static and that it can be reached in fewer than 4 clicks from any other page on your site. Additionally, adhere to the following: Title <60 characters, URL <90 and meta description <160. If bots can’t crawl your site due to your host server or robots.txt files, then they can’t rank it, make sure crawling and indexing is enabled on all fronts!
5. Be Shareable through Social Platforms
Social Media is definately helps page value determination, at least with regards to UX. Enable all viable and applicable social platform sharing opportunities. Make sure your content is relevant to your URL and that it has value to the reader. Facebook and Twitter users love posting things that they think will garner some attention. They want people commenting on their pages, posts and pins. If you are including share buttons and providing “likeable” material, you’ll bolster your rankings because you'll be improving time on page, and interaction with your site.
6. Responsive to Multiple Devices Given the number of people accessing online content through their mobile devices, it’s imperative that your site has impeccable mobile usability. Your URL should load the same way no matter what device it’s being accessed on. Meaning, the name shouldn’t change and it should be elegant and legible on every possible screen size. Thankfully as the phablet develops, this will become easier (at least we hope)!
Google has even come out with an update to their search results on mobile devices so they can tell you if a page is mobile friendly or not. You don't want your page showing up as NOT, and having somebody pass by it. Don’t forget that people utilize a number of browsers these days and therefore your site should be optimized to load effectively on all the most popular ones. You should know from your personal experience that a slow loading site means a site you leave. You don’t want that! Easily analyze your website with Google’s mobile friendly test for free.
7. Add Rich Snippets Rich snippets. Sounds so weird, huh? These are the segments of text that happen just below your link when it comes up in a search. They enable the viewer to ascertain what might be found on the page, and thereby decide whether the needs will be met there. Basically, they give users quick access to your content and if it’s relevant to their search, you’ll achieve a higher click through rate! Take a look at what shows up in the search results when you type in 'Titan Web Agency Reviews'. Those gold stars sure stand out, don't they?
8. Prioritize There are a number of on page SEO steps necessary to achieve the greatest level of optimization. So many in fact, that it might be hard to choose just where to put your greatest efforts. So, here are our recommendations: Make sure your page is uniquely relevant to your target audience (searchers). Make it interesting enough and compelling enough to earn shares without begging for them. Make your best effort to balance UX with keyword targeting (not forgetting what you’ve learned about titles, URLs and content).
9. Load Time People are in no mood to wait. Therefore, a quick load time is essential to your website’s success and return clientele numbers. Here are some things to consider in order to maintain a quick load time: Amount of Javascript Number of social share buttons Optimize the size of your images Do you really need a background image? Number of ads? Necessary at all?
10. Control What Gets Indexed
You can control what the bots see and how they index your site. If you have pages or posts you don’t want them looking at you can easily add a file to your site to tell the 'bots' not to read particular pages. Through the use of robots.txt file and a little bit of code knowledge, (or watching a YouTube Video) you can control which sitemaps get indexed and help Google understand the focus of your site even more (plus not losing link juice unnecessarily). While online marketing for healthcare professionals may seem daunting initially, these 10 tips are tried and true methods to alleviate those concerns. Have these tips worked for you, or do you have other tips to add? Share your experience with us below. Now that you’ve reviewed the “Do’s” in SEO for doctors, check out these 5 common SEO challenges doctors face. Though the SEO world changes on a continued based, no need to worry. That’s why we’re here. SEO for doctors is a fine art, and who do you want practicing this fine are for you? Somebody that works with online marketing for medical professionals each and every day, or an SEO company that works with every business and industry under the sun? Your choice, but we are here if you 1) have budget, 2) have a desire to grow, and 3) need help.