Doctor SEO Services

Digital Marketing for Doctors

In an era where so many people head online to find medical info and resources,  digital marketing has become all the more important for doctors. As we’ve established above, SEO offers a wide range of benefits, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop there.

A digital marketing strategy may involve everything from social media to email marketing, YouTube SEO, PPC, and blog articles. A digital marketing campaign may target current patients, or present your medical practice to potential patients that need care.

When compared to the long-term value of SEO, many of these strategies allow you to make a more immediate impact. This is certainly true for PPC advertising and social media posts, which both allow you to target specific demographics, locations, and search terms.

YouTube SEO and blog articles, on the other hand, are an excellent way to share medical information and knowledge. Of course, these strategies can also be a part of your greater SEO content marketing campaign.

What is Doctor SEO?

Doctor SEO or Healthcare SEO is the process of optimising a healthcare facility or a clinic’s online presence to generate awareness and increase visits from search engine users. SEO services for doctors are provided by various SEO agencies that tweak elements on their website to encourage positive online mentions and higher rankings on search engines. It ultimately helps individual doctors and health professionals to get relevant traffic from online sources.

Best Practices for Doctor SEO

While SEO services for doctors include a lot of elements, listed below are some of the must-haves for your SEO strategy.

1. Create Content with Medical-Oriented Keywords

Keywords are essentially the tools that Google uses to understand what your website is about. They are phrases that visitors type in on Google to look for information. If a visitor is looking for a gynaecologist, they will type keywords like, “Top gynaecologists in Brisbane” or “Gynaecologists in West End, Brisbane”.

You can find such keywords with SEO tools like Semrush or Google Keyword Planner that give insight into the search volume for keywords in your industry and the competition. You can also check the keywords that other doctors and competitors are using and ranking for to find the right kind of visibility and find ways to outrank the competition.

Once you determine the keywords, develop high-quality, original content that meets the health and safety attributes and is relevant to your practices. Medical content is not just about targeting patients but rather educating them first. If the information is coming from a trusted source, it increases the value of your website for both Google and its users. The best way to execute your keyword strategy is to outsource the task to an SEO agency that provides SEO services for doctors.

2. Build PR and Customer Reviews

While customer reviews are important for any industry, they take it up a notch higher for doctors. Doctors’ SEO services include building a strong PR and customer review portfolio online so that you can garner trust and build authority. Most patients will do their research before booking an appointment with you and they want to ensure their doctors are good at what they do.

Majority of healthcare consumers believe online reviews influence their decisions. You can get reviews through your Google Business Profile listing and other official websites like WebMD and RateMD where you can list your medical facility. Encourage your patients to list down reviews after they receive treatments or you can even send emails and follow-up messages to gradually build reviews in your business profile.

3. Improve your Local SEO

For any service-based company to thrive in a local market, local SEO is a must. Think about it, Why would anyone search for a medical facility that is miles away from where they are? And what about emergency cases where visitors need to quickly reach a hospital or a doctor that is nearest to them?

Local SEO essentially is improving your visibility to the target audience in your vicinity, city, or neighbourhood so that whenever someone types in a query like, “dentists near me” or is specific to the city like “dentists in Perth”, they can access your information on Google.

One of the best strategies to ensure local SEO is listing your profile of your clinic facility in Google Business Profile. Make sure you fill in all the details of your Google Business Profile page such as your practice’s name, address, and phone, your website URL if you have one, your social media link, a description of your healthcare practices, your location, and photos and videos of your staff and practice. You can also add an appointment booking option in your profile to facilitate patients to directly book a doctor’s appointment online.

4. Ensure E-E-A-T in your content

Sure, a medical blog or informative content about a disease and its symptoms can prove to be valuable to readers. For example, as a cardiologist, you can publish a series of articles that talk about the best practices to keep your heart healthy, or things to consider for a patient with a heart condition. Engaging and accurate articles can encourage visitors to explore your services and even help you establish authority.

But the content you produce needs to come with caution. Any form of content or website that has the ability to affect the mental, physical, financial, or emotional health of the reader falls under “Your Money or Your Life” websites. Google emphasises establishing E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) on these sites to ensure quality websites are on top and that whatever information the reader is consuming is correct.

From your end, you need to take care that the content you publish needs to come from a person who is highly experienced in the field, has expertise, is authoritative, and is trustworthy. Only then can your medical blog garner authentic views and build an online reputation for your service.

5. NAP & Office Hours Consistency

Almost 62% of visitors leverage Google Business Profile to find the contact number and address of a small business or a service provider. It shows that regardless of whether you have a website or not, adding valuable information to the Google Business Profile is a must. NAP consistency is putting the correct information about your name, address, and phone number.

As a doctor, imagine the repercussions if any of your information is incorrect. Say you’ve listed that your hospital is open 24 hours from Monday to Saturday, while it’s only open for 12 hours on a Saturday. In the case of patients who urgently need to see a doctor and check Google to find the information untrue, you can expect frustration and even negative reviews that can tarnish your reputation.

If there are any changes to your timings or even your contact number, quickly make the changes on your business profile. Also, keep the information across all your consumer touchpoints.

6. Earn Quality Backlinks from Healthcare Websites

The search engine builds the authority of a website by considering various off-page SEO factors. One of the most significant factors of these is backlinks. Google favours sites with a high volume of quality backlinks since it reflects their trustworthiness and authority. They are essentially a vote of confidence from other high-authority websites. As a doctor, you can target various local healthcare listings, national magazines, and official medical websites of the government to link to your website.

While it seems challenging to seek a backlink from high-domain authority websites, you can adopt certain practices to improve your chances. Publish original and valuable content, including real-life examples, statistics and studies in your article.

You can also invite a reputed guest contributor to write your blog. To consistently follow white-hate backlinking practices, hire an SEO agency like Supple that ensures your practices are ethical and do not violate the terms of Google or other search engines.

7. Local Landing Pages

You can have practices in multiple locations within a city or a state. Your small business site pages need to address the target audience within their areas through location-specific keywords. In that case, just one location page isn’t enough. For example, say you have multiple branches of your eyecare business in Sydney and its suburbs.

You then need to create separate pages for your practices in say Surry Hills, Pyrmont, Greater Western Sydney, The Rocks, etc. Unique landing pages for each location can keep things organised and effective. It also gives you a chance to get specific with your web copies, give driving directions, and embed maps within your content.

8. Optimise your Site for Mobile

While you keep checking the performance of the speed of your WordPress or your Wix website, you need to do the same for your mobile too. Considering that a majority of visitors search queries through their phone and also since phones are more accessible, optimising your site for mobile is not an option but a need.

An SEO agency that provides SEO services for doctors will ensure your medical site is loading at an optimal speed, the design is clean and capable of adapting to a variety of screens. It also uplifts the patient experience and satisfies Google’s mobile-first indexing policy.