September 11, 2024

SEO For Medical Practices: 6 Best Strategies

If you want to acquire more patients and grow your medical practice, you need to follow best practices for search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a collection of strategies and techniques, like publishing keyword-rich content, aimed at improving your website's ranking in Google searches. When you rank higher in search engine results pages, it increases your online visibility, helps more patients find your medical practice, and enhances your team's reputation as skilled and compassionate healthcare providers.

While there are powerful benefits to implementing a healthcare SEO strategy, there are also some major challenges. For example, your medical practice needs to compete against massive healthcare systems for clicks, Google's algorithm prioritizes expert-reviewed medical content, and strict regulations like HIPAA impact how you interact with patients online.

To help you navigate these hurdles successfully, we created this comprehensive guide to SEO for medical practices. It covers important healthcare SEO topics for doctors, dentists, hospitals, and clinics, including:

  • An overview of healthcare SEO, including # different types of SEO for doctors
  • 4 benefits of search engine optimization for medical services
  • 6 strategies and best practices to improve your healthcare site's SEO in 2024
  • Tips for managing online reviews of your medical practice
  • Answers to frequently asked questions about SEO for medical practices

Let's jump straight in by reviewing some different categories of medical SEO. 

What is SEO for medical practices?

To reiterate, SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization.

The purpose of SEO is to help Google find, navigate, and understand your website, which will boost your rank in search engine results pages (SERP). 

The higher your medical website ranks in Google search results and local searches, the more potential patients are likely to find it. In fact, a mere 9% of Google searchers reach the bottom of Page 1 search results, painting a stark picture of why it's crucial to rank as highly as possible. 

There are multiple types of healthcare SEO, including local SEO, on-site SEO, technical SEO, and others. There are also multiple ways of improving your SEO, from increasing your website speed to creating a Google Business Profile.

We'll explore ways to improve your search engine rankings, including your local SEO rankings, later in this guide. But first, let's break down the major SEO categories and why each one is important for healthcare websites. 

On-site SEO 

On-site SEO, which is also called on-page SEO, refers to changes you make to your website to improve its search rankings and overall user-friendliness.

The goal of on-site SEO is to optimize your site's content, along with various elements of your website's individual pages, so that they're more relevant to the searches your target audience is performing. By ranking for relevant keywords, you can draw in more unpaid ("organic") search traffic and boost the online visibility of your medical practice.

A well-optimized medical website should be:

  • Visually appealing with graphics or images
  • Easy for visitors to load and navigate
  • Helpful, relevant, and rich in keywords — without sounding artificial or relying on spam-like "keyword stuffing" 

Technical SEO 

Technical search engine optimization is a subcategory of on-site SEO. The difference is that on-site SEO is broadly focused on improving user experience and content quality, while technical SEO — as its name implies — deals specifically with the technical components of your website, like its architecture (structure), speed, and mobile-friendliness.

Since websites have so many technical components, there are numerous opportunities to improve your SEO in this category. For example, you can optimize the images on your site by compressing them to make the files smaller and increase load speeds. We'll talk more about strategies for upgrading your site's technical SEO later in this guide.  

Local SEO 

While SEO aims to boost your ranking in general Google searches, local SEO is focused on boosting your ranking in searches with local intent — for instance, getting your website into the Google Map Pack, which are the top three web pages displayed when someone performs a geographic or "near me" search.

The example screenshot below shows the Map Pack that displays when someone searches the term "pediatrician Los Angeles": 

Why is local SEO so vital for healthcare services? Here are a few statistics that put it into perspective:

Other types of healthcare SEO

On-site, off-site, technical, and local SEO are all key components of a successful medical SEO strategy. Here are a few other types of SEO for healthcare industry professionals to be aware of.

Mobile SEO

In the section on technical optimization, we briefly mentioned the importance of optimizing for mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. Mobile SEO involves tasks like:

  • Ensuring that all components of your mobile site, like "Make a Payment" buttons, are touchscreen-friendly
  • Testing your mobile site speed
  • Using responsive design that automatically resizes to display properly on various devices in portrait and landscape mode 

White hat vs. black hat SEO

White hat SEO exclusively uses legitimate, Google-approved strategies to boost page rank, while its opposite, called black hat SEO, uses unethical, high-risk tactics to try and quickly manipulate Google's rankings. Always avoid the temptation to fall back on black hat strategies, which can lead to penalties that, ironically, end up hurting your ranking in search results. 

4 benefits of SEO for medical practices

In 2024, every dental and medical practice needs a robust SEO strategy — but why?

Here are four ways healthcare businesses benefit from search engine optimization. 

1. Find potential patients

SEO helps increase your online visibility and get more organic traffic, which can translate to more referrals and bookings. According to research by Backlinko, the top Google search result receives almost 28% of all clicks — and according to SparkToro, Google organic search accounts for more than half of all global web traffic (57.8%). 

2. Retain more patients

High patient churn costs your medical practice money — but optimizing your website can help. In fact, according to Semrush, more than 40% of marketers say they use SEO to increase customer retention.

You can improve patient retention by continuously publishing helpful, informative content that keeps readers coming back to learn more, such as guides to managing conditions, articles about what to expect after specific procedures, and/or guides to various treatment options. This strategy keeps existing patients engaged, while helping boost your organic web traffic. 

3. Build trust and establish authority

By optimizing your website and boosting your online visibility, not only can you connect with more patients, but also enhance your reputation and credibility. For instance, by publishing peer-reviewed articles that answer search engine users' FAQs about a procedure or condition, you can position yourself as a leading expert in your field.  

4. Gain a competitive advantage

Research shows that consumers are significantly more likely to visit high-ranking websites than sites that appear on the second page of Google. For example, according to Backlinko's research, "Only .44% of searchers” — less than half of 1% —  “go to the second page of Google’s search results." 

6 ways to improve your medical website SEO

Now that we've explored some categories and benefits of search engine optimization, let's dive in with actionable SEO tips and strategies for medical practices.

Here are six ways for healthcare providers to improve SEO in 2024:

  1. Identify relevant keywords to incorporate into paid ads, blog posts, homepage content, and other content, including a blend of "short-tail" vs. "long-tail" search queries 
  2. Follow Google's best practices for improving your site's EEAT or E-E-A-T score, which is based on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
  3. Complete a technical SEO checklist and ensure that Google's bots can easily crawl and index your healthcare website
  4. Take steps to improve your local SEO, like building local citations and responding to Google reviews, to help your website rank higher in local searches
  5. Build high quality backlinks, which are links to your website from other websites, to increase your site's authoritativeness and boost your credibility
  6. Request, track, and respond to business reviews on multiple platforms, such as Google, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, and healthcare industry review sites like Healthgrades 

1. Optimize your website content for keywords

Conducting keyword research is an integral part of developing your content strategy. Use keyword research tools, like the Google Keyword Planner, to identify relevant keywords that potential patients search for.

Here are some other tools that can help you find relevant keywords, compare keywords by search volume, analyze search intent, and conduct other keyword research:

  • Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Trends
  • Keyword Difficulty Checker
  • Moz Keyword Explorer
  • Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
  • SERP Checker
  • AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT

You can integrate keywords into all types of content, from blog posts, landing pages, and homepage content to meta descriptions, page headers, and paid advertisements.

What types of keywords should medical practices rank for? 

It's important to target a mix of "short-tail" and "long-tail" keywords for your content. Short-tail keywords have higher search volume but, due to their generic nature, are usually more difficult to rank for. Due to their specificity, long-tail keywords are less popular searches, but are also easier to rank for.

Short-tail keywords are short, succinct, basic terms and phrases, like "heart surgery" or "chest pain." Long-tail keywords are more detailed — for instance, "most common causes of chest pain for men over 60" — which indicates that the searcher is getting closer to purchasing a product or service.

It's also useful to think about keywords in terms of search intent and stages of the patient journey, like searches made pre-treatment vs. mid-treatment vs. post-treatment. For example, a person who's researching potential dentists might perform a search like "when is the right time to take out your wisdom tooth?" while an existing patient might perform a post-surgery search like "when is the best time to check my wisdom tooth wound?"

2. Boost your E-E-A-T score with medical reviewers 

Google gives businesses a rating known as an E-E-A-T (also styled EEAT) score. E-E-A-T is an acronym that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which are the factors that your Google E-E-A-T score is based on.

As Google's developer blog explains in this post from December 2022, "While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor, using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful. For example, our systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health... or safety of people, or the... well-being of society. We call these 'Your Money or Your Life' topics, or YMYL for short." 

So, what does this mean for you as a healthcare provider? To ensure that your website content ranks as highly as possible, you need to get it medically reviewed. 

There are a few different ways you can approach this challenge, like consulting with medically licensed freelance physicians and/or working with your own in-house team of physicians and medical reviewers. Whichever approach you take, your reviewers should pay special attention to details like:

  • Making sure medical terminology is spelled correctly
  • Ensuring that medical information is up to date and reflects current standards and best practices within the healthcare industry
  • Removing or editing language that sounds too sales-focused or promises specific outcomes, such as references to "guaranteed results"

If you’re interested in taking a deeper, more technical dive into how E-E-A-T scores are determined, check out Google’s search quality rater guidelines, which includes the criteria Google’s raters use to evaluate content. 

3. Improve your site’s technical SEO

Google uses bots called "crawlers" that attempt to access your website and compare it against Google's algorithm — a process that typically occurs anywhere from once every few days to about once per month, according to Safari Digital

If Google's crawlers can't easily access and evaluate the pages of your website — for instance, if they run into crawlability obstacles like slow site speeds or poorly structured URLs — they won't "index" or add your site to Google's database. 

Needless to say, that massively hurts your ability to rank. Therefore, you need to ensure that your page is crawlable and indexed.

However, that's just the beginning of technical SEO: from there, you need to take additional steps to help your site rank highly. Here are just a few examples of the numerous strategies for improving technical SEO:

  • Organize your site structure in a logical, hierarchical fashion with topic-specific pages nested beneath broader landing pages
  • Use HTML tags, title tags, alt tags, and meta tags
  • Locate and submit your XML sitemap to Google using Google Search Console (GSC)
  • Test your website speed to ensure fast load times
  • Identify and remove any duplicate content, or content that appears on your site more than once
  • Use code called "schema markup" or "structured data" to help search engines understand what your content is about
  • Use file compression software to help manage large HTML, CSS, or JavaScript files
  • Use HTTPS to improve site security 
  • Optimize your website for both desktop computers and mobile devices like iPhone, Android, and iPad

4. Build quality backlinks

Link building is an integral part of any medical SEO strategy. When authoritative, reputable websites link back to yours, it sends a signal to Google — and to potential patients — that your website content is trustworthy and accurate.

Links that go back to your website are called "backlinks," and the snippet of text containing the link is referred to as "anchor text." In the example screenshot below, "responding to Facebook reviews" is the anchor text: 

Websites with .edu or .gov URLs are generally high-authority, high-quality opportunities to get backlinks. We'll share some strategies you can use to request and build backlinks in just a few moments. 

Interlinking or internal linking is another important component of SEO. Unlike backlinks, which link from external sources to your website, interlinking involves linking between the pages on your website — for example, linking from a blog post to a landing page.

It's helpful to use a mix of anchor text on your healthcare website, such as:

  • Anchor text that exactly matches the title of the destination page
  • Anchor text that partially matches the title of the destination page
  • Branded anchor text that uses the name of the business
  • Compound anchor text that features a brand name plus additional terms
  • Generic anchor text, like "here" or "this article"

Exact-match or partial-match anchor text has more SEO value than generic anchor text, which should only be used occasionally. Try to keep anchor text brief but descriptive, and perform regular site audits to identify opportunities for improvement.

Link building strategies for medical SEO

While you have complete control over your internal linking strategy, building backlinks requires more outreach and collaboration. Here are a few tips and strategies for getting more backlink opportunities:

  • Network with the organizers of medical conferences you've appeared at or are speaking at
  • Include the name of your medical practice in your author bio anywhere your content is featured, and ask the publisher to include a link
  • Submit your healthcare business to .gov directories of service providers
  • Consider reaching out to universities and colleges to collaborate on research
  • Increase the amount of content you publish, and/or diversify the topics you write about, which creates more opportunities for other sites to link back to yours 

5. Invest in local SEO 

According to Think With Google, "76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours and 28% of those searches result in a purchase." Google also reports that "near me" searches increased by a whopping 400% from September 2020 to August 2021.

The bottom line? Boosting your local SEO efforts is a worthwhile investment for healthcare services.

Here are some tips and strategies to help your medical practice rank higher in local search results:

  • Set up your free Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)
  • Complete and optimize your Google Business Profile page with accurate, up-to-date information and photos, such as your hours of operation, physical address, and special features or amenities (such as "accepting new patients" or "wheelchair accessible")
  • Actively monitor and respond to online reviews from patients
  • Use local keywords in your content, such as the names of towns, cities, or counties
  • Build local citations, which are references to your medical practice on social media, local directories, and other websites
  • Ensure that your NAP data, which stands for "Name, Address, Phone," is accurate and consistent across each business listing  

6. Leverage your online reviews

You might not think of your online reviews as a factor in SEO — but in fact, they actually play an important role in your local search visibility. 

This has been confirmed by Google, which recommends responding to reviews as one of its tips to improve your local ranking (along with taking steps like verifying your business locations, maintaining accurate hours, and uploading photos of your medical facility). 

As Google explains, "When you reply to reviews, it shows that you value your customers [or patients] and their feedback. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers [or patients] can improve your business visibility and increase the likelihood that a shopper [or patient] will visit your location." 

Using a review response service, like ResponseScribe, makes it faster and easier to reply to patient feedback, giving you more time to focus on treatment and care. 

Of course, Google isn’t the only place where your business should be listed. You should also add your medical practice to other doctor review sites, along with social media platforms that support reviews and ratings. Some examples include: 

  • Apple Maps 
  • Facebook
  • Healthgrades
  • Rate MDs 
  • The Better Business Bureau (BBB) 
  • Vitals 
  • WebMD 
  • Yelp 
  • Zocdoc 

Learn more about how responding to reviews helps SEO for doctors. 

The takeaway is that by following these six strategies, you can optimize both the technical and visual structure of your healthcare website, ensuring easy navigation for crawlers and potential patients. The more you optimize your website, the higher it will boost your ranking on Google and help you dominate local search results for the medical services you offer. 

How to manage online reviews of your medical practice

Manual review management is an inefficient use of time and resources, particularly for large healthcare systems with multiple locations and listings. ResponseScribe offers a faster, more streamlined, more economical alternative.

ResponseScribe is a review monitoring and response service with use cases for inpatient and outpatient clinics, dental offices, family practices, urgent care centers, and other types of healthcare providers. Services we provide include:

  • Review Monitoring — ResponseScribe tracks patient ratings and reviews on more than 50 platforms, including Zocdoc, Vitals, Healthgrades, Rate MDs, Facebook, Google Maps, Yelp, and others upon request. Reviews are centralized in one secure, easy-to-navigate dashboard, eliminating the hassle of monitoring separate platforms. And custom notifications alert you when new ratings and reviews are published, ensuring you never miss any patient feedback.
  • Review Responding — Set the right tone with polished, professional review responses that comply with patient privacy rules and match your brand's voice and messaging. Human-written responses are ready in 24 hours, and AI-generated responses are ready within just minutes. Get notified about negative patient reviews, all patient reviews, or only reviews that meet custom criteria. Plus, our revision request feature ensures every response meets your standards. 

AI-powered review management for medical services and healthcare providers 

Boost your search engine ranking and connect with local patients by using ResponseScribe to manage online reviews of your healthcare business. With ResponseScribe's powerful AI features, you can generate personalized responses to patient reviews within minutes, get detailed insights into your review performance, and build your reputation by sharing positive online reviews on your website.

Discover our all-in-one review management platform for medical practices and healthcare services. Schedule your demo today to explore how ResponseScribe can help your business grow.  

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