If you want to acquire more patients and grow your medical practice, you need to follow best practices for search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a collection of strategies and techniques, like publishing keyword-rich content, aimed at improving your website's ranking in Google searches. When you rank higher in search engine results pages, it increases your online visibility, helps more patients find your medical practice, and enhances your team's reputation as skilled and compassionate healthcare providers.
While there are powerful benefits to implementing a healthcare SEO strategy, there are also some major challenges. For example, your medical practice needs to compete against massive healthcare systems for clicks, Google's algorithm prioritizes expert-reviewed medical content, and strict regulations like HIPAA impact how you interact with patients online.
To help you navigate these hurdles successfully, we created this comprehensive guide to SEO for medical practices. It covers important healthcare SEO topics for doctors, dentists, hospitals, and clinics, including:
Let's jump straight in by reviewing some different categories of medical SEO.
To reiterate, SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization.
The purpose of SEO is to help Google find, navigate, and understand your website, which will boost your rank in search engine results pages (SERP).
The higher your medical website ranks in Google search results and local searches, the more potential patients are likely to find it. In fact, a mere 9% of Google searchers reach the bottom of Page 1 search results, painting a stark picture of why it's crucial to rank as highly as possible.
There are multiple types of healthcare SEO, including local SEO, on-site SEO, technical SEO, and others. There are also multiple ways of improving your SEO, from increasing your website speed to creating a Google Business Profile.
We'll explore ways to improve your search engine rankings, including your local SEO rankings, later in this guide. But first, let's break down the major SEO categories and why each one is important for healthcare websites.
On-site SEO, which is also called on-page SEO, refers to changes you make to your website to improve its search rankings and overall user-friendliness.
The goal of on-site SEO is to optimize your site's content, along with various elements of your website's individual pages, so that they're more relevant to the searches your target audience is performing. By ranking for relevant keywords, you can draw in more unpaid ("organic") search traffic and boost the online visibility of your medical practice.
A well-optimized medical website should be:
Technical search engine optimization is a subcategory of on-site SEO. The difference is that on-site SEO is broadly focused on improving user experience and content quality, while technical SEO — as its name implies — deals specifically with the technical components of your website, like its architecture (structure), speed, and mobile-friendliness.
Since websites have so many technical components, there are numerous opportunities to improve your SEO in this category. For example, you can optimize the images on your site by compressing them to make the files smaller and increase load speeds. We'll talk more about strategies for upgrading your site's technical SEO later in this guide.
While SEO aims to boost your ranking in general Google searches, local SEO is focused on boosting your ranking in searches with local intent — for instance, getting your website into the Google Map Pack, which are the top three web pages displayed when someone performs a geographic or "near me" search.
The example screenshot below shows the Map Pack that displays when someone searches the term "pediatrician Los Angeles":
Why is local SEO so vital for healthcare services? Here are a few statistics that put it into perspective:
On-site, off-site, technical, and local SEO are all key components of a successful medical SEO strategy. Here are a few other types of SEO for healthcare industry professionals to be aware of.
In the section on technical optimization, we briefly mentioned the importance of optimizing for mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. Mobile SEO involves tasks like:
White hat SEO exclusively uses legitimate, Google-approved strategies to boost page rank, while its opposite, called black hat SEO, uses unethical, high-risk tactics to try and quickly manipulate Google's rankings. Always avoid the temptation to fall back on black hat strategies, which can lead to penalties that, ironically, end up hurting your ranking in search results.
In 2024, every dental and medical practice needs a robust SEO strategy — but why?
Here are four ways healthcare businesses benefit from search engine optimization.
SEO helps increase your online visibility and get more organic traffic, which can translate to more referrals and bookings. According to research by Backlinko, the top Google search result receives almost 28% of all clicks — and according to SparkToro, Google organic search accounts for more than half of all global web traffic (57.8%).
High patient churn costs your medical practice money — but optimizing your website can help. In fact, according to Semrush, more than 40% of marketers say they use SEO to increase customer retention.
You can improve patient retention by continuously publishing helpful, informative content that keeps readers coming back to learn more, such as guides to managing conditions, articles about what to expect after specific procedures, and/or guides to various treatment options. This strategy keeps existing patients engaged, while helping boost your organic web traffic.
By optimizing your website and boosting your online visibility, not only can you connect with more patients, but also enhance your reputation and credibility. For instance, by publishing peer-reviewed articles that answer search engine users' FAQs about a procedure or condition, you can position yourself as a leading expert in your field.
Research shows that consumers are significantly more likely to visit high-ranking websites than sites that appear on the second page of Google. For example, according to Backlinko's research, "Only .44% of searchers” — less than half of 1% — “go to the second page of Google’s search results."
Now that we've explored some categories and benefits of search engine optimization, let's dive in with actionable SEO tips and strategies for medical practices.
Here are six ways for healthcare providers to improve SEO in 2024:
Conducting keyword research is an integral part of developing your content strategy. Use keyword research tools, like the Google Keyword Planner, to identify relevant keywords that potential patients search for.
Here are some other tools that can help you find relevant keywords, compare keywords by search volume, analyze search intent, and conduct other keyword research:
You can integrate keywords into all types of content, from blog posts, landing pages, and homepage content to meta descriptions, page headers, and paid advertisements.
It's important to target a mix of "short-tail" and "long-tail" keywords for your content. Short-tail keywords have higher search volume but, due to their generic nature, are usually more difficult to rank for. Due to their specificity, long-tail keywords are less popular searches, but are also easier to rank for.
Short-tail keywords are short, succinct, basic terms and phrases, like "heart surgery" or "chest pain." Long-tail keywords are more detailed — for instance, "most common causes of chest pain for men over 60" — which indicates that the searcher is getting closer to purchasing a product or service.
It's also useful to think about keywords in terms of search intent and stages of the patient journey, like searches made pre-treatment vs. mid-treatment vs. post-treatment. For example, a person who's researching potential dentists might perform a search like "when is the right time to take out your wisdom tooth?" while an existing patient might perform a post-surgery search like "when is the best time to check my wisdom tooth wound?"
Google gives businesses a rating known as an E-E-A-T (also styled EEAT) score. E-E-A-T is an acronym that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which are the factors that your Google E-E-A-T score is based on.
As Google's developer blog explains in this post from December 2022, "While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful. For example, our systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health... or safety of people, or the... well-being of society. We call these 'Your Money or Your Life' topics, or YMYL for short."
So, what does this mean for you as a healthcare provider? To ensure that your website content ranks as highly as possible, you need to get it medically reviewed.
There are a few different ways you can approach this challenge, like consulting with medically licensed freelance physicians and/or working with your own in-house team of physicians and medical reviewers. Whichever approach you take, your reviewers should pay special attention to details like:
If you’re interested in taking a deeper, more technical dive into how E-E-A-T scores are determined, check out Google’s search quality rater guidelines, which includes the criteria Google’s raters use to evaluate content.
Google uses bots called "crawlers" that attempt to access your website and compare it against Google's algorithm — a process that typically occurs anywhere from once every few days to about once per month, according to Safari Digital.
If Google's crawlers can't easily access and evaluate the pages of your website — for instance, if they run into crawlability obstacles like slow site speeds or poorly structured URLs — they won't "index" or add your site to Google's database.
Needless to say, that massively hurts your ability to rank. Therefore, you need to ensure that your page is crawlable and indexed.
However, that's just the beginning of technical SEO: from there, you need to take additional steps to help your site rank highly. Here are just a few examples of the numerous strategies for improving technical SEO:
Link building is an integral part of any medical SEO strategy. When authoritative, reputable websites link back to yours, it sends a signal to Google — and to potential patients — that your website content is trustworthy and accurate.
Links that go back to your website are called "backlinks," and the snippet of text containing the link is referred to as "anchor text." In the example screenshot below, "responding to Facebook reviews" is the anchor text:
Websites with .edu or .gov URLs are generally high-authority, high-quality opportunities to get backlinks. We'll share some strategies you can use to request and build backlinks in just a few moments.
Interlinking or internal linking is another important component of SEO. Unlike backlinks, which link from external sources to your website, interlinking involves linking between the pages on your website — for example, linking from a blog post to a landing page.
It's helpful to use a mix of anchor text on your healthcare website, such as:
Exact-match or partial-match anchor text has more SEO value than generic anchor text, which should only be used occasionally. Try to keep anchor text brief but descriptive, and perform regular site audits to identify opportunities for improvement.
While you have complete control over your internal linking strategy, building backlinks requires more outreach and collaboration. Here are a few tips and strategies for getting more backlink opportunities:
According to Think With Google, "76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours and 28% of those searches result in a purchase." Google also reports that "near me" searches increased by a whopping 400% from September 2020 to August 2021.
The bottom line? Boosting your local SEO efforts is a worthwhile investment for healthcare services.
Here are some tips and strategies to help your medical practice rank higher in local search results:
You might not think of your online reviews as a factor in SEO — but in fact, they actually play an important role in your local search visibility.
This has been confirmed by Google, which recommends responding to reviews as one of its tips to improve your local ranking (along with taking steps like verifying your business locations, maintaining accurate hours, and uploading photos of your medical facility).
As Google explains, "When you reply to reviews, it shows that you value your customers [or patients] and their feedback. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers [or patients] can improve your business visibility and increase the likelihood that a shopper [or patient] will visit your location."
Using a review response service, like ResponseScribe, makes it faster and easier to reply to patient feedback, giving you more time to focus on treatment and care.
Of course, Google isn’t the only place where your business should be listed. You should also add your medical practice to other doctor review sites, along with social media platforms that support reviews and ratings. Some examples include:
Learn more about how responding to reviews helps SEO for doctors.
The takeaway is that by following these six strategies, you can optimize both the technical and visual structure of your healthcare website, ensuring easy navigation for crawlers and potential patients. The more you optimize your website, the higher it will boost your ranking on Google and help you dominate local search results for the medical services you offer.
Manual review management is an inefficient use of time and resources, particularly for large healthcare systems with multiple locations and listings. ResponseScribe offers a faster, more streamlined, more economical alternative.
ResponseScribe is a review monitoring and response service with use cases for inpatient and outpatient clinics, dental offices, family practices, urgent care centers, and other types of healthcare providers. Services we provide include:
Boost your search engine ranking and connect with local patients by using ResponseScribe to manage online reviews of your healthcare business. With ResponseScribe's powerful AI features, you can generate personalized responses to patient reviews within minutes, get detailed insights into your review performance, and build your reputation by sharing positive online reviews on your website.
Discover our all-in-one review management platform for medical practices and healthcare services. Schedule your demo today to explore how ResponseScribe can help your business grow.
Done-for-you review response service for local businesses.
Part of the Shout About Us family.
