When you think about it, search engines are your best allies when it comes to marketing your business. After all, a well-optimized website gives interested visitors the information they need in as few clicks as possible. With that in mind, here are 5 tips for improving your SEO for healthcare organizations.
Start with a baseline analysis
First things first: Before you begin any SEO efforts for your healthcare organization, you’ll need to conduct a baseline analysis to ensure you’re starting with a clean slate. With a baseline analysis, you’ll take an existing website and run it through a series of checks to see how it ranks on Google, Bing, and other relevant engines. You’ll look at the following factors in your search engine optimization efforts:
Write clear, concise descriptions of your website’s content
Writing SEO-friendly content is essential to ranking well in search engines. As a healthcare organization, your content needs to be compelling enough to entice people to click through to your site and, ideally, book an appointment. While your content doesn’t need to be as long or in-depth as a magazine article, you should still keep an article’s length in mind when writing for SEO purposes. After all, Google’s algorithm is going to be scanning your content for key phrases and keywords (e.g. “breast reduction” or “dysphoria”). A keyword-laden article is not going to help you rank well for these phrases.
Build out your site with split testing and mobile optimization
Building out your website with split testing and mobile optimization is essential if your healthcare organization is serious about SEO. With these two tactics, you’ll be able to optimize your website for both desktop and mobile users. To implement them, you’ll need to set up a content testing tool like Optimizely. With this tool, you’ll create a small testing app on your website. You’ll then create a series of test articles that you can use to run split testing against your desktop website. You can then run tests to see which articles result in the best conversion rates on your website. Lastly, you should optimize your mobile website with tools like MoPub.
Track your rankings and make adjustments accordingly
Search engines rank websites based on a variety of factors, such as the number of pages on your site, the domain authority of your website, and the number of backlinks to your site. The number one factor, however, is the quality of your website’s content. To track your SEO rankings and make adjustments accordingly, you’ll need to use a tool like Excel. With Google’s suite of tools, you can view the rankings for your main pages, sub-pages, and individual URLs. You can then use these rankings to see what factors contributed to your site’s being ranked as high as it is. Using your rankings data and SEO best practices, you can then make adjustments to your website as needed to ensure your SEO is as high as possible.
Don’t forget about social media presence
Healthcare organizations need to be present on social media platforms to build lasting relationships with their customers. Unfortunately, many healthcare companies are guilty of neglecting social media. To boost your social media presence, you should post content that helps your audience find you—i.e. content that promotes your social media channels. This content can take the form of blog posts, videos, images, and podcasts that focus on your business and its best features. To ensure your social media presence is up to par, you should use a tool like Buzzsumo to find which of your posts get the most engagement. Use these stats to determine which posts you should be posting more often.
Bottom line
Google is the undisputed king of internet search. It controls more than 80% of the search engine market, and it’s still growing. Understanding how to optimize your website for search engines is an important step toward increasing your online visibility. With these tips in mind, you can improve your search engine optimization for your healthcare organization’s website.
