Healthcare SEO How to Boost Rankings and What It Costs

Healthcare SEO: How to Boost Rankings and What It Costs

Patients expect effortless services from their healthcare providers, and that process starts with finding the right medical professionals online. Healthcare SEO helps medical organizations get in front of new patients by boosting online visibility.

We’ve got you covered with a complete guide to healthcare SEO featuring tips and strategies from our own Matt Smith, Associate Director of SEO at IndeedSEO, as well as other industry experts with experience in healthcare SEO.

What is Healthcare SEO?

Healthcare SEO involves strategies that boost a healthcare provider or business’s web presence. The goal is to create more visibility and achieve higher rankings on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

In other words? Healthcare SEO builds more brand awareness, authority, and organic traffic, all of which lead to greater success.

Examples include helpful blog content, having user-friendly website forms and features, creating reliable and authoritative visual and written content, and multichannel (web and social media pages) content.

It sounds a lot like traditional SEO, but healthcare SEO is unique with these caveats:

  • Stricter Google guidelines like Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), which apply to topics that can significantly impact the readers’ health, safety, well-being, or financial stability
  • HIPAA compliance and legal issues

Plus, you’re catering to potential patients who might have more urgent intent behind their search terms, which your digital marketing strategy should handle with care. For example, someone who discovers an alarming new medical issue will hurry to Google for answers.

Bottom line, healthcare SEO gets you in front of your audience and maintains your authority. But what does that mean for your business?

Why Does SEO Matter in Healthcare Marketing?

Here are just a few of the reasons why medical providers and companies need to focus on healthcare SEO.

Can’t rely just on referrals

Whether you own a medical practice or a niche SaaS business, you know that potential patients aren’t relying on referrals as much anymore.

One consumer survey found that patients search for medical services online twice as much as relying on referrals, services they’d only find if a provider has a solid SEO strategy.

Of course, you can reach them quickly with PPC marketing, but building trust and fostering long-term relationships requires a holistic SEO strategy.

Rising Customer Expectations

Customer expectations continue to increase in healthcare. Today’s healthcare consumer looks for “transparent, predictable, and mobile-friendly experiences”—qualities many healthcare companies and providers have not caught up with.

A mobile-friendly website is one that can be accessed on mobile devices really effortlessly. However, mobile-friendliness relates to a better user experience which SEO supports.

Transparency comes with regularly updated, reviewed, and authoritative content on relevant healthcare topics.

Reliable Customer Experience

Finally, healthcare SEO helps you provide a reliable experience with consistent marketing practices that cater to your audience’s interests and needs based on audience demographics and keyword research.

In turn, healthcare SEO gives you:

  • More leads and website traffic
  • Improved customer loyalty
  • Increased brand awareness and authority

How Does SEO Further a Healthcare Company’s Mission?

As a healthcare business, your mission and values are central to your reputation and impact. You could have the greatest mission in the world— like to help people manage their chronic illnesses or make access to fertility clinics universal for all—but without healthcare SEO, no one’s going to know about it.

Why? Because your business will be buried on the SERP. You can circumvent this obstacle by rolling out an effective SEO strategy.

At the core of this strategy is the goal to build trust with authoritative content and transparency. When you do this, your mission reaches more people, and you help more people.

What healthcare business doesn’t want that?

How Much Does SEO For Healthcare Cost?

The costs of SEO for healthcare range from $3,000 to $10,000 and more per month. Cost varies depending on whether you are managing SEO efforts in-house or hiring an SEO agency to support you.

Whether you hire an agency or manage SEO in-house, some factors that impact cost include:

  • Competitiveness of the keywords you target
  • Amount of content you need to produce
  • Size and experience of your SEO team
  • Tools and resources the team uses

The best way to determine the actual costs of working with a healthcare SEO agency is to book a consultation to discuss your company’s specific needs. Sign up for a free consultation with the IndeedSEO team for more details.

5 Healthcare SEO Tips From Industry Experts

We’ve brought together some of the best SEO experts in the healthcare industry to provide tips on how to help your medical website rank on the first page of Google.

1. Use Strategic Medical Keywords

Your healthcare SEO plan depends critically on keyword research. Keyword research is to identify the terms and phrases prospective patients search for businesses similar to yours online.

To get going, jot a list of terms potential patients would search for you. Broad terms like “dental office” or “dental services” will probably be rather competitive. Instead, go for long-tail keywords that are more specific to the problems your patients face.

For example, if you’re a dental healthcare provider, you likely offer various services for dental health issues. But to build authority, you could cater to people searching for general information about dental topics and symptoms, like:

  • How to get white teeth
  • Common cavity causes
  • Sore tooth remedies
  • Phone consultations

2. Create Credible, Trustworthy Content

High-quality content is the engine that keeps your SEO efforts going. Consistently creating relevant content that uses strategic keywords while adding real value for readers helps search engine algorithms understand what your content is about and serve it to the right audience.

Semrush shares that healthcare content should answer your audience’s questions at every point in the customer journey, whether they’re new leads seeking general info or ready to convert.

“The #1 tactic I recommend to healthcare providers is creating content that answers the most specific, impactful questions people have that are related to their area of expertise,” says Nick Gibson, a B2B marketing consultant who’s worked with healthcare companies like Hims & Hers Healthcare.

3. Make An Impact With Local SEO

If you’re a brick-and-mortar healthcare provider, local SEO is a vital box on your healthcare SEO checklist because patients want quick service that’s close to home.

Say you’re a marketer for a heart specialist in Columbus, Ohio. Your boss has specialized medical expertise, which means patients will travel from all over to see them.

But why not attract the ones close to home, too? Those are easy wins, at least for these Columbus-based specialists who prioritized local SEO:

But people don’t need to specify their city to see businesses with local SEO. A Columbus resident can type “heart specialist near me” and still see the results above.

4. Power Up Your Link-building

Any publicity is good publicity, right? Not in the healthcare space, where bad press can be disastrous.

But if other authority figures in your vertical quote you and say lovely things about your business? That’s the chef’s kiss for healthcare SEO.

Since your business affects people’s well-being, it’s crucial to build trust. And the best way to gain trust is through link-building.

Link building happens when authority figures add backlinks and citations to your site from their website or blog. This shows both the search engines and readers that you are an authority on the topic that is trusted to provide relevant, valuable, and truthful information.

“You should identify particular pages and content you want to rank based on business goals in the healthcare space,” says Smith. “From there, determine the best way to acquire those links.”

5. Provide a Stellar User Experience (UX)

Web experts at Lion+Mason describe UX as potentially life-saving.

Consider access to patient care. It doesn’t start in a hospital or healthcare clinic anymore; it starts online. A strong UX makes healthcare information more accessible for potential patients, accelerating their process of finding a suitable service.

The Takeaway

We know how busy healthcare marketing teams are, and keeping tabs on all these best practices is a full-time job. Not to mention, Google keeps a close eye on healthcare businesses, and for a good reason — people’s well-being is at stake.

With support from a digital marketing agency, healthcare businesses can use medical SEO to boost their organic search rankings, bring in new patients, and earn patient loyalty.

Ready to scale your healthcare marketing strategy? Reach out to us today to get started.

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