Tips for Your Medical SEO Campaign

This will help you better understand how to manage your campaigns.

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Airto Zamorano
Co-Founder
Numana Medical & Numana SEO

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What you need to know to rank better on Google.

Patients use Google more than any other source to find a doctor. When searching online, the vast majority of patients will click on the first organic position or one of the map listings. In short, these listings on Google offer highly valuable real estate, and that’s why you want to invest in medical SEO for your practice.

When overseeing a multi-specialty medical practice in a competitive market, I learned how to use medical SEO heavily to impact the financial growth of our practice. Today, I work with doctors across the country to help them rank at the top of Google.

Here are my tips to help you rank better on Google search.

Tip # 1: Know exactly what your competitors are doing.

Marketing is an arms race. What your competition does will dictate what you must do to compete in your market.

Luckily, in the world of digital marketing, you can access a lot of data that will tell you what your competitors are doing so you can beat them.

Here’s what to look for:

• Check their Domain Authority score and compare it to yours.
• Evaluate their website and what it offers to patients.
• Review their content to see which topics they cover and how much you need to write on your website.
• Look at how much traffic they are getting to their website.
• Research their backlinks to learn about their SEO strategy.
• Spy on their online paid ads (e.g., Google Ads or Facebook Ads).
• Check out their reviews online.

Once you know what your competitors are doing, you can design your campaigns to outperform theirs without any guesswork. When this information is utilized correctly, you will beat your competitors.

Tip #2: Pay more attention to your website.

Your website is the centerpiece of your marketing efforts. Beyond that, the vast majority of your patients will likely interact with your website at one time or another.

Pay attention to these details:

• Speed and security matter more than ever before. As of June 2021, Google uses performance metrics like these to impact your rankings directly.
• Your content needs to be written for your patients (and Google), not for your peers.
• Structure your website’s layout to match what patients search for on Google.
• Make it easy for patients to contact you by phone, text, or email.
• Spruce up your provider profiles. Doctor’s bio pages are generally some of the most visited pages on a website, so be sure to provide them with good content, video, and patient reviews.
• Add location pages to your website, and feature internal and external photos of your building for patients to see.
• Have patient testimonials and online reviews featured throughout your website.

Your website is never “done,” so make it part of your efforts to evaluate and update your site regularly. With this approach, you’re more likely to have a website that generates revenue for your practice.

Tip #3: Write better medical content to save you money and improve your rankings.

Strong medical content will save you money on your ongoing marketing costs while also helping you rank better on Google. Why? Because having more high-quality content sends more signals to Google about who you are and what you do.

Here’s how to write better content:

• Plan your content before you begin writing it, and use keyword research to learn what patients want to know.
• Write 1,200 – 3,000 words to compete with your competitor’s content.
• Evaluate your content every month and update it as needed to sustain or improve overall SEO performance.
• Don’t add content to your site without a strategy.
• Remove unused content or content with poor performance metrics as it will harm your SEO campaigns.

For best results, build backlinks to key content pages to help them rank better on Google. While this will require a monthly budget, I have found that you can get further on a smaller budget when you have strong medical content on your website.

Tip #4: Properly manage your business directory listings.

The vast majority of medical practices fail to manage their online directory listings, yet this single activity can have a substantial impact on how your practice ranks in local search results.

Here is what you need to do:

• Avoid services that use APIs to deliver your data, as they often revert your data when you stop paying a monthly fee.
• Identify which business directories matter most in your market.
• Ensure your Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP listings) are 100% consistent wherever you list your information.
• Ensure that you don’t have duplicate listings for your practice or your providers.
• Make sure you own all of your listings.

The truth is that managing your business directory listings is not terribly complicated. However, it is tedious, and that is why most marketing agencies fail to manage listings properly for their clients.

Tip #5: Invest in quality (not expensive) backlinks.

Backlinks are still the number one ranking signal measured by Google. Backlinks are essentially votes online, so the more votes you get from quality websites, the more Google sees your site as an authority in your field.

Now, backlinks costs can be free to thousands of dollars for one link.

Here’s how you determine the right price point for your practice:

• Research your competition and find out who is linking to their websites.
• Develop a smarter anchor-text strategy (anchor text links back to your website) to outperform the competition.
• Know exactly how many links you need by spying on your competitors.
• Keep track of your backlinks each month to ensure they stay live online.

The bottom line is that if you want to rank on Google for competitive search terms, you need to build links. But, you don’t necessarily need to spend more to outperform your competitors.

Conclusion

A lot goes into an effective medical SEO campaign, but you will rank better on Google if you ensure that these tips are being applied to your campaigns. While I don’t expect most of you will become medical SEO experts, I do recommend that you take the time to understand your online presences to manage it as effectively as you do any other part of your practice.