Healthcare SEO Services

Digital Marketing for Healthcare Industry

Australians constantly turn to Google for healthcare products and services. This is why you need to stay on top of the latest trends and digital marketing strategies. When paired with a well-executed SEO campaign, digital marketing is a great way to get more patients down to your clinic or market specialist medical products and devices.

So, what are your options?

Pay-per-click or ‘PPC’ advertising and email marketing are two ways to gain instant traction and present your services to certain audiences. If you want to share medical advice and information, blog articles are an excellent way to do so. Here, you can partner with content writers to create engaging, informative, and value-driven articles that further complement your SEO campaign.

These days, video content is something that you can’t forget. Both YouTube SEO and social media give you the opportunity to use the visual medium as a highly effective marketing strategy. Each approach also allows for real-time tracking of views, impressions, and a variety of other valuable insights.

Interested in how digital marketing could benefit your medical clinic or business? Speak to the Supple team today!

Common SEO Challenges in the Healthcare Sector

The healthcare industry frequently encounters unique SEO hurdles. From evolving Google algorithms to crafting compelling calls to action (CTAs), staying ahead in SEO is crucial. Understanding these challenges helps in formulating effective strategies to overcome them.

• Constant Changes in Google’s Algorithms: Staying updated with Google’s ever-changing algorithms is crucial for maintaining SEO relevance.
• Effective Call to Action (CTA): Crafting CTAs that resonate with the audience while maintaining medical professionalism.
• High Competition: Navigating through intense competition to secure a top spot in search engine rankings.
• Adapting to Mobile-First Indexing: Ensuring websites are optimised for mobile devices, a key factor in modern SEO.
• Local SEO Optimisation: Targeting local audiences effectively, especially important for healthcare providers serving specific regions.

Steps to Execute an Effective Healthcare SEO Strategy

1. Create Quality Healthcare Content

Content marketing is at the heart of any SEO strategy. For healthcare professionals, there is a bigger burden to have quality content that provides some value to its readers. The content needs to come from experts and experienced professionals who have the authority to give medical advice.

The content marketing strategy can range from publishing case studies, blogs, guest posts, webpages, and social media. However, all these forms of content need to be infused with the right keywords. For publishing blogs, you can use SEO tools for topic research, check what’s trending, and call in a medical expert to write informative blogs and the keyword research needs to be implemented into all your content strategies.

If your content doesn’t meet the quality requirements set by Google, it can result in dangerous and unintended medical consequences. Long-form education content that is accurate and engages the audience can help Google recognise you as an authoritative figure and can increase your ranking.

2. Focus on Local SEO

Think about what a prospective patient who’s in need of urgent medical help would search for on Google. Something like, “Multi-specialty hospital near me”, or “hospitals in central Brisbane”. How do you get featured on search results if you’re the hospital the visitor is looking for?

With local SEO.

Local SEO strategies involve building and optimising a Google Business Profile for your business to improve organic search results. Google Business Profile requires you to add the details of your hospital or pharmacy, such as the name, contact number, address, location, opening and closing hours, reviews, etc. Maintaining the NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) consistency with positive reviews can help your hospital show up in Google’s local pack.

The point of local search in healthcare SEO service is to appear before the generic results as Google believes local results are more valuable for specific search terms where visitors are looking for a local business nearby. You automatically get a free boost in ranking considering you’re closer and have an edge over other hospitals and clinics.

3. Choose Medical-Oriented Keywords

Any impactful SEO strategy starts with identifying and infusing relevant keywords into their content marketing strategy. Keywords are essentially the words and phrases your potential patients would type into the search engines. It is also one of the major ways through which Google determines your ranking and the amount of organic traffic your site will receive.

Keyword research can be tricky to figure out but it can become a lot easier if you understand the mechanism of keyword research tools. Look out for both short-tail and long-tail keywords. Start by figuring out the basic keywords that users would type to find your facility. For example, “top cardiologists in Adelaide” or “paediatrician near me”, etc. However, you should know that the more generic the term, the higher the competition, and the higher the difficulty of ranking on search engines.

To counter that challenge, you can use long-tail keywords. Identify them by doing a competitor analysis and even checking the user intent behind the keywords. People also just want genuine information rather than directly booking an appointment. Before finalising the keywords check the following metrics in the research tool:

• Keyword difficulty
• Cost-per-click for each keyword
• User intent
• Volume

You can attract that traffic by integrating relevant keywords into blogs and other long-form content. Keyword research is something you can outsource to an SEO agency that provides healthcare SEO services like Supple since we have a detailed understanding of SEO tools and can come up with the best keyword combinations suited for your medical facility or healthcare institution.

4. Build Backlinks

The medical industry is such that other authoritative sources vouching for your website are all the more important, considering the sensitiveness of the information online and the impact it can have on people’s lives. Backlinks are the source of their votes where one website links to the other, indirectly vouching for them and giving them traffic.

The higher the relevancy and authority of the website that provides you with a backlink, the higher the chances of getting featured on search engines. You cannot get backlinks without any effort. To do so, consider the following activities:

Guest Blogging: Consider hiring a medical expert to contribute to articles on reputable websites like HealthTimes or healthline.com and write valuable content that can lead to receiving a backlink to your website. Again, do sufficient topic research to get the most traffic.

Directory Listings: There are numerous health directories in Australia like MDA and Healthdirect where you can list your website or practice. Consider these as online yellow pages that people would surf while conducting research. If you have a presence on relevant healthcare directories, chances are that you can get considerable traffic from them.

Use HARO (Help a Reporter Out): HARO is a place where you can connect with journalists looking for genuine sources. You can look for medical-oriented topics and contribute to them. If selected, you can earn a backlink from a website or a magazine that has high viewership. Just ensure that your content is differentiative and has original information for the viewers. Also, ensure the E-E-A-T factor in your piece if you want to increase the chances of getting featured.

Press Releases: If you have a new clinic opening or are unveiling a new department, you can issue a press release and publish it on platforms to attract media attention and generate backlinks.

5. Interlink your Webpages

While backlinks are important, they’re just one aspect of the link-building process. Link-building is a mixture of both internal and external linking. Linking from one page of your website to another is called internal linking. If you link a high-traffic page to another relevant page with comparatively lower traffic, it can help that page’s SEO.

Internal linking helps a lot with technical SEO and user experience. It helps search engines understand a website’s structure and hierarchy by ensuring easy navigation. When you link to high-quality pages, it will improve the authority of a website and improve the search engine rankings.

Internal links also stop the pages from becoming orphan pages which have no incoming links. A page you worked hard for can get no viewership if there is no internal linking. You can have a pillar-cluster content marketing strategy to enhance your internal linking efforts.

6. Add Reviews using Google Business Profile and Social Media

Reviews are another vote of confidence, but this time from the people who have actually visited your healthcare institute and can improve your reputation by leaving positive reviews on your business profile and social media. Considering the nature of the service, patients aren’t going to compromise on the quality and are more likely to believe other patients who have visited the hospitals before.

Research suggests that 72% of patients trust online reviews. It is how patients develop trust and choose your practice over others. There are various methods to collect online reviews such as having notices and stickers in your clinics, sending follow-up emails, or an SMS after booking an appointment or the completion of the treatment.

Just ensure that it’s easy for the customers to reach out to you and you ask for reviews while the experience is still fresh in their minds. To improve the chances of getting reviews, you can also reach out to patients who have visited your facility more than once and have positive experiences throughout.

7. Check the Technical Health of your Website

While doing everything else, this part of healthcare SEO is where things can get tricky. Checking the technical health of your WordPress or your Wix website includes evaluating many on-page elements such as site speed, checking Google penalties, crawling and indexing, checking HTML tags, site security, etc.

Doing a hygiene check for the technical aspects of your website can help you uncover issues early on and improve your site’s performance leading to a consistent user experience. You can utilise SEO audit tools to check technical issues. However, it is advisable to consider leaving this to an SEO agency that provides healthcare SEO services.

Choose Supple for your Healthcare SEO Needs

Amidst patient treatments, surgeries, and uplifting the standards of your medical practices, you don’t have the time and energy to focus on healthcare SEO services. Supple can look over these tasks for you and ensure that your online reputation is as solid as your offline one. Get in touch with us to know how we can implement the discussed healthcare SEO strategies and set up your medical facility for long-term success.