Were you under the impression that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) doesn’t apply to the medical profession?

Well, gone are the days when your patients would find you through word-of-mouth marketing. If you’ve got a medical practice, then you need an online presence as well.

However, just being online isn’t enough. You are also required to be at the top.

SEO can help you get there—without any expensive ad campaigns or aggressive marketing strategies.

Got Frequently Asked Questions About SEO for Doctors?

We’re here to answer them all!

Frequently Asked Questions About SEO for Doctors

1. What Is Medical SEO?

Medical SEO involves a set of practices that can help medical websites/clinics rank higher on a Google search.

Medical SEO includes using targeted keywords, organic search queries, online reviews, backlinks, quality of content, listings, and more.

2. How Do I Decide Which Keywords to Choose for Medical SEO?

To choose the right keywords, start by understanding your potential patients better. Think about the terms they might use when searching for a doctor, clinic, or specialist. If you’ve got a dental practice, for instance, then your website content must be focused around the services you routinely perform, the symptoms you treat, special or any state-of-the art equipment that you have, etc.

If you’re confused about what to focus on, do a keyword research.

How Many Words Should Every Page of My Website Have?

It depends on what the page is about. For instance, a home page should have at least 1,000 words. And not just any content—this content needs to be relevant to your business. It needs to inform the reader about your services. Your service pages should have at least 500 words of content.

You might have heard that a higher word count is better, but that’s only true if the content is relevant. Nothing can bring your ranking down as filler content can. Worst case scenario, your website gets reported as spam.

The basic rule is that the reader should not require more than 30 minutes to read through your webpage.

4. Can I Copy Content From Other Medical Websites?

No. Using content from other websites can negatively affect your SEO ranking and the ranking of the website you’re stealing from.

You can avoid this by creating original content and then running a plagiarism check.

It is always better to write original content and optimize it for SEO, as this helps your page rank higher. Here’s a short guide on unique content and how it impacts your site.

5. How Long Does It Take for Medical SEO to Work?

Medical SEO efforts can take anywhere from four months to a year to take effect.

How quick your SEO strategy works depends on factors such as:

• Competition
• Location of your medical practice
• Domain authority
• Website structure
• SEO strategy
• Page load time
• Content quality
• Listings
• Inbound and outbound links
• Image and video tags
• Website user experience

Check out these Google Ranking Factors for beginners.

6. Does Searching For My Own Medical Practice Every Day Help My SEO?

No.

Doing a Google search multiple times does not improve your SEO rank drastically, but it will reduce it. Here’s what happens when you Google your clinic’s name.

Let’s say you are curious about where your page ranks. You Google your name but do not click on your web page link. This might lower your ranking as the search engine thinks your web page isn’t answering the search query.

But that does not mean clicking on your link solves the problem.

Clicking on the link is a good step. But that’s not where the search engine’s job ends. The search engine now considers the time you spend on the website and how you interact with the page. If you leave without doing anything, the search engine considers it as a “bounce.” Check out more details on bounce rates here!

So be careful before searching your clinic’s name unnecessarily, as all of it affects your SEO ranking.

7. How Long Should It Take for My Webpages to Load?

Not more than 4 seconds.

If your website takes longer than that, then you’re losing potential customers to competitors. If it takes over 10 seconds, then you’re losing all your visitors.

Don’t lose customers to slow load speed after all the hard work you’ve put into website ranking. The best thing to do is invest in optimizing the factors that are affecting your page load time. Not sure what these are?

Some factors that can slow down your page load time include:

• Size of images, files, etc.
• Redirects
• Browser cache
• Server response time
• Check out this guide to improve your page loading speed quickly.

Want to know how to resolve page load delay fast?

8. How Does SEO for Doctors Help Their Medical Practice?

Research from PatientPop shows that 3 out of 4 people have looked up a health practitioner or medical service online before making an appointment.

Let’s consider an example. When a patient searches for a dental practice near their location, they will get a list of all dental practitioners closest to them. The most relevant results will be on the first page, the less relevant results will be on the next nine pages. No patient will go beyond the top 4-5 results, and it’s even rarer for them to go to page 2 of the search results.

SEO used by doctors on their websites and content helps their website rank higher on Google, making it a cost-effective way to extend their marketing efforts. The result? You’ll gain new patients organically and compete with practices running expensive ad campaigns.

Search engines also rank a website by the number of visitors and the amount of time they spend on a website. Ranking higher increases the authenticity and authority of your webpage. Once your medical practice ranks at the top of a web page, customers trust your practice more. This, in turn, increases the probability of them choosing your practice over someone else’s.

9. What Is Off-Site SEO for Doctors?

Off-site SEO is the actions taken off your website that affect your search engine rankings. Some off-site SEO strategies include:

• Google My Business
• Forum Submissions
• Social Media Engagement
• Influencer Outreach
• Guest Author Contribution

All these tools can help you build authority in your field on platforms other than your website.

10. Are there any effective ways to rank higher on Google quickly?

Well, yes. As a first step, list your medical practice on google. The next step is to “claim” your medical practice. Other aspects that help your rankings include providing complete information—for instance, name, address, phone number, category, etc. Need another tip? Use local addresses and phone numbers. Results for queries such as “doctor near me,” are based on relevance—distance being a key factor. Providing these details will help Google match your services to queries. Verifying your clinic’s location and giving accurate working hours are also crucial to your rankings, especially on Google Maps.

Don’t forget reviews. Ask your happy patients to write about their experiences and don’t forget to respond to their reviews when they do post them on Google. Nothing inspires more trust than a patient who feels valued.

Final Thoughts

We hope our answers helped solve some of your long-time queries and frequently asked questions about SEO for doctors.

And now that you know everything you need, you too can rank at the top organically. Add SEO strategies to your web content and help patients in need of your experience find you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t a term you need to learn in law school, so why is it so important for lawyers today? To be more specific, it’s not just lawyers who need to be concerned with SEO, it’s anyone with a digital media presence in the current technological era. Search Engine Optimization affects how easily people (and search engines like Google and Bing) are able to access your website content. SEO itself describes a variety of techniques used to make your content as accessible as possible.

In order to determine what content is physically on your website, search engines send out digital bots (also referred to as “spiders”) to gather data about all existing web pages. From there, search engines rank these pages based on perceived value and credibility. You want to make sure your content is getting picked up during these crawls and receiving a high rank, which will ensure it appears in search results when users type in related keywords. This is where Search Engine Optimization comes in. The information on your website should be clean, easy-to-understand, and valuable to your audience. By utilizing key SEO techniques such as keywords, metadata, and structured formatting, you can increase your website’s overall performance.

What Is Organic Search?

You may hear the terms “organic search” or “organic SEO” thrown around quite a bit when it comes to optimizing your law website. Both of these terms reference the same general concept: utilizing SEO “naturally” (versus through paid methods) to improve the overall ranking and results tied to your website. To do this, you utilize search engine approved techniques to design a website that is, overall, user-friendly and easy to access.

What Does It Mean to “Optimize” Your Website for Organic Search?

Focusing on content creation that embodies all the best SEO practices is how you can optimize for organic search. But what does this look like? To start, consider your keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that lead users to your content via search engine. Keywords you rank for are commonly used terms that already exist in your website content. To ensure you continue ranking for these keywords, continue to utilize them throughout your site. It’s also smart to see what kinds of keywords your competitors rank for. Are there keywords you would like to begin ranking for? Start to utilize these regularly in your content and metadata. Metadata is what tells search engines and users, at a glance, what is on a web page. When you think of search engine results, these are the little blurbs that appear about each result with the name and description of a webpage. Metadata can be written directly into your websites code or added via a plugin or through your Content Management System (CMS) depending on which one you use. Another way to make your content more approachable is by varying your formatting. Use headers, bullet points and lists, icons, or graphics to break up bigger concepts and larger sections of text. Doing this will help you improve the overall readability of the content and allowing for skimming, which many modern readers who are used to the “bite-sized” social media internet climate are expecting and find valuable. Images, too, are a great way to break up large blocks of text while also providing a more visually engaging content that will draw in the reader. While custom imagery is always recommended, stock imagery (which you can find both free and paid online) can also be a valuable solution.

What Is Paid Marketing or PPC Marketing?

Similar to “SEO” and “Organic Search,” “Paid Marketing,” “PPC Marketing,” and “Paid Search” are all interchangeable terms referencing the same thing: digital marketing you pay for. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and refers to marketing efforts that enable you to put the web content of your choice in front of a very specific audience at a set cost. This can be a cost that you determine (a per-day budget allotment you set for your ads) or a cost that is established by competition. For example, highly in-demand keywords will cause the cost of related search results to be much more expensive.

Paid marketing can be a great solution if you want to expand awareness of your website quickly, but it also comes at a price – quite literally. Depending on the method of paid search you choose to adopt, you may be facing a pretty hefty price tag.

Organic and paid search efforts can and should be used in conjunction with one another. The efforts you put into your free, organic SEO will only help to enhance the natural/unpaid awareness of your content, which will then benefit any paid efforts you choose to implement and help keep costs down overall.

The Value of Knowing Your Competition

Competition is everywhere, even in the legal industry, and understanding your competitors’ digital presence to the best of your ability is key to developing a strong, resilient Search Engine Optimization strategy. By acknowledging your competitors when building your SEO strategy, you can make more educated decisions when it comes to keyword selection, content formatting, and overall industry approach.

Okay, but what does this mean exactly?

Having a solid understanding of the keywords and frequently searched questions your competitors are attempting to win can help you frame out what search terms you would like to go after. Is there one search term that everyone in your industry is after—something that you need to make sure you’re including in your content? What about a search term that is used less often by your competitors but is still as effective? The proper implementation of this term could shoot you to the top of the search results and give you an edge.

Are your competitors using paid marketing efforts? How much? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you determine if PPC marketing is something that’s right for your company and, if so, what a healthy budget might look like.

SEO for Lawyers – What Does It All Really Mean?

So now you know about search engine optimization, organic search, and paid search, but what does it all really mean for your law website?

At the end of the day, SEO and law firms have a lot more in common than you might think. It’s all about reputation. Search Engine Optimization just happens to be how you build your reputation online. While, of course, SEO is nothing without valuable content to promote, it is how you can ensure the right people are seeing your content at the right time.

SEO, just like the law, doesn’t have to be confusing. Ensuring your content is concise, clear, and easy-to-read will not only help your users to engage more, but it will also make your content more valuable to search engines (and, therefore, appear higher in search engine results).

Have more questions about how SEO relates to lawyers and your law website? Our team is here to answer all your Search Engine Optimization questions. Contact us to learn more.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has many great benefits for companies looking for more customers. The Google 3 Pack is one of those tools that could help take your business to the next level. Here is how to rank your GMB in the Google 3 Pack.

What is the Google 3 Pack?

What is GMB?

Why Should I want to be in the Google 3 Pack?

How Does Google Rank Companies for the 3 Pack?

1. Google My Business (GMB)

2. Links, Citations

3. Reviews and Social Engagement

4. Personalization, On-Page, Behavioral

What happens if I do not have a GMB?

Summary

Is your business still affected by the global pandemic, even though all other businesses have picked up?

Maybe you’re not visible to your customers yet.

If you’re yet to include SEO in your marketing strategy, then now’s the perfect time!

Don’t know what SEO is? It’s not too late for you to get started with SEO now.

Let’s take a closer look at SEO before we understand why it is important for your business.

What Is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a type of marketing strategy with the aim to increase the visibility of your business online.

How Fast Can You Get Results With SEO?

It can take about 4 to 6 months for an effective SEO strategy to give you results.

An effective SEO strategy is not an unattainable dream or a shot in the dark. It can be easily developed if you do your research well and execute the strategy in the right way.

But what’s the importance of all this? Read on to find out!

Why SEO Is Important for Your Business?

1. SEO Helps Your Website/Article Rank Higher on Search Engines

If you’re only reading about SEO for the first time, then you must be wondering what the importance of ranking higher is.

There are multiple reasons why SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings are important. Here are some of them:

Businesses that rank in the top three search positions are more likely to get visited. According to this data, searches ranking at the top get 33% of the search traffic.

2. SEO Puts Your Business Where Customers Are Looking

Do you know where your customers are?

Customers are no longer looking for businesses using the old methods. They want instant answers and they know the place to find them is online.

With no concrete online presence, you would be missing out on all those customers and all that sales!

Think that’s not a big deal? Let’s take a look at the numbers.

According to a study conducted by GE Capital Retail Bank, 81% of consumers will search online before visiting a store.

SEO Gives You Organic Traffic

Before you get into organic traffic strategies, you need to understand what organic and inorganic traffic mean.

Organic Traffic

When people visit a site online it is described as website traffic. This traffic can come from many different sources. Organic traffic includes people who visit the website by clicking on an unpaid link.

Visits made to the website from the following sources are considered organic.

• SEO
• Email captures
• Social media
• Guest posts
• Faster page loads
• Responsive websites
• Comments from forums and blogs
• Webinars and conferences
• User experiences
• Quality content

Inorganic Traffic

Inorganic traffic refers to the visits made to a website by people who have clicked on a paid advertisement.

Visits made to the website from the following sources are called inorganic traffic sources.

• Paid advertisements
• Social platforms
• Affiliate marketing

How Does SEO Help With Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is generated when users truly find your content useful, interesting, or entertaining. Since the content isn’t in the form of an advertisement, they consider it to be more authentic. This makes customers more likely to buy your product or subscribe to your service.

So, when users visit your site from organic pathways, they are more likely to convert/make a purchase.

3. SEO Is Inexpensive

No matter what your marketing budget is, and how much you’re deciding to spend on the marketing activities. All of it can be done through SEO and on a cheaper budget as well.

Here are some inexpensive SEO strategies you can try out:

Create SEO Content

One of the ways to attract customers online is to put SEO content on search engines and social media platforms.

This is very cost-effective since you only have to create content of good quality. The search engine’s algorithm does the rest. Users who click on your link also help increase your rank.

Add Your Company to Online Business Listings

If you haven’t done this yet, then we urge you to hurry up and do it right away!

Don’t know how to add your business to an online listing? Check out this guide to add it on Google.

Update Content

How many times did you question the authenticity and relevance of an article because it was written long ago?

It’s not just you, algorithms do this as well.

That is why updating your content is so important.

Updating is easier than creating new content and it helps establish your brand’s experience in the industry as well.

Link (Internally and Externally)

Adding links to your own website is known as internal linking. Whereas, linking to the URL of a different website is known as external linking.

However, linking is a tricky SEO strategy. External links to or from a good website can boost the credibility of your own. But links to or from a bad website can bring down your website’s credibility.

Here’s an article on good and bad linking.

That does not mean there aren’t any benefits.

Linking helps create more link juice for your brand across the world wide web. If you’re running an online business, this can put you on the world map.

A good number and quality of links also tell algorithms that your website is trusted and vouched for from other web sources.

Increase Page Load Speed

There are loads of statistics stating the obvious, but we won’t recite those again.

Think about the time you would wait for a page to load before switching links or pages?

3 to 5 seconds?

Maybe.

8 to 10 seconds? That’s unlikely.

Your customers/readers are the same! Speeding up your page load time is, therefore, an organic way to attract and retain consumers.

What’s more?

SEO has a higher ROI than any other marketing activity you’ll be investing in. So, it’s a no-brainer why marketing experts love SEO so much.

4. SEO Is Accessible to Every Type and Size of Business

Traditional advertising can be expensive.

But that’s not the only barrier that prevents small businesses from entering the competition. Little exposure, means of communication, a small consumer base, and more are only some of these barriers.

However, SEO practices are an effective solution to all such problems small businesses may face when trying to grow their consumer base or increase sales.

Here’s a list of ways in which SEO can help small businesses.

• SEO allows small businesses to compete with big organizations on fair terms
• SEO allows businesses to become thought leaders in their industry
• Businesses can get real data from consumer activity on their websites
• No matter your scale SEO helps you attract consumers

SEO Can Help You the Optimize Local Search

Not all businesses need to be on the top and compete with organizations for ranking.

We’re talking about local businesses such as local dental care clinics, therapists, plumbers, etc.

If you’re a local business, then you want to appear only to users looking for your service in the area you operate.

SEO allows you to appear in local searches only. With business listings and targeted content, you tell algorithms where to place you online.

Too confused?

Let’s look at the example below,

A person searches for ‘dental care clinics in San Francisco.’

The search results will show a list of dental care clinics that are listed in San Francisco. That could be you if you made sure to put some investment into your SEO strategy.

This way you won’t waste your efforts appearing on someone’s search for ‘dental clinics in Chicago.’

Final Thoughts

We hope our detailed explanation convinced you of the importance of SEO for your business.

Whether you run a small or big business, a local clinic, or an online service, you too can benefit from SEO.

So, how did you use SEO to put your business on the map?