How To Do Healthcare And Medical SEO As Per The Latest Google Update

What Is Healthcare SEO? What Makes it Unique?

Healthcare or medical SEO is simply a process of optimising the website of a healthcare facility to get more
visitors and gain more attention from the prospects. Unlike others, healthcare SEO requires a different
approach. It requires you to think like patients and be predictive about their requirements meanwhile
performing SEO according to Google’s latest updates.

Now, the question is, what makes medical search marketing unique?

Every single online business needs SEO to ensure its success. However, the key to getting more traffic is
different for different businesses and different niches. This is especially true for the healthcare
industry. The traffic from search engines can help almost all healthcare services. Be it doctors, hospitals,
pharmacies, medical software developers, or any other service providers, everyone can benefit from the best
medical SEO practices.

Why Does the Healthcare Industry Need SEO More Than Ever?

It’s 2022, where everything around us is digital. The advancements in technology and deep internet
penetration are the key driving factors of today’s world. The healthcare sector is no different.

For instance, just like any other service, most people prefer reading online reviews before deciding whether
or not to use any service. Following are some other important stats that shows that healthcare providers
need robust SEO practices if they want to survive the competition and shine through it:

• The healthcare market of the UK recorded a worth of $1,192 Million in
  2018. This figure is expected to reach a whopping $1,951 Million by the end of 2026.
• Nearly 71% of prospects look for online reviews before choosing a
  doctor.
• Around 39.2% conversions in the healthcare businesses take place over
  the phone.
• Nearly 52.3% of patients are likely to call a medical facility after
  searching it on Google.
• A study found that one in every 20 searches on Google is related to
  health.
• About 77% of patients use search engines before making an appointment
  with a doctor.
• A whopping 43% of patients are willing to select an out-of-network
  healthcare service provider if they have excellent online reviews.

These are just a handful of stats that show the increasing need for search engine optimisation in the
healthcare sector. There are many more benefits of a robust healthcare SEO in 2023. Let’s take a look at
some of them:

Perks of Robust Healthcare SEO 2023

• More Patients
• More Leads
• More Sales
• Higher ROI
• Instil Trust in Patient
• Beat the Competitors
• Be an Industry Leader

That’s all about the importance of healthcare SEO services in 2023 and the perks it can offer your business.
Let’s now address the big question: how to perform medical SEO as per the latest google updates?

Before jumping onto the steps of performing healthcare SEO, there are a few points that need your attention
and “Google raters” are one of them. So, what exactly are Google raters? How can they help you improve your
site’s rankings? What great qualities are they looking for in your healthcare website? We have all the
answers. Keep scrolling!

What Are Google Raters and How Can They Help in Improving Your Site’s
Ranking?

Google raters, as the name suggests, are contractors hired by Google, whose job is to rate the quality of
websites on the search engine. They are basically given a set of guidelines, also known as Google rater
guidelines, which provide a framework that helps in evaluating the quality of different sites on the
internet.

Business owners and SEO professionals can use these guidelines or Google rater framework in order to gain
detailed insights into how Google’s latest algorithms work and how they can act accordingly to dominate the
search rankings.

Wondering what is the evaluation criteria used by Google raters? We’ve got you covered!

What Google Raters Are Looking For? How to Prepare Your Healthcare Site for Better Rankings?

In a nutshell, Google’s quality rating is done under two areas:

• Page Quality
• More Leads

1. Page Quality:

As the name suggests, page quality is basically the quality of any website based on a number of factors.
Some of the most important factors are as follows:

• Goal of a Website: Each website must have a goal. The goal can be
  anything, but what matters the most is whether or not your website is serving added value to the users.
  This is the reason why YMYL websites should be of the highest quality. For those who don’t know, YMYL
  stands for “Your Money, Your Life”. These are the sites that offer information on critical topics like
  health and finance. So, if your healthcare site doesn’t provide any added value or is negatively
  affecting the end-user, it will be rated with the lowest quality level.
• Content Evaluation: As per the Rater Guidelines, Google raters must
  focus on the “Main Content (MC)” of the website and evaluate its quality, including all the text,
  images, or other media files. The second attention is given to the Supplementary Content (SC), which
  comprises the sidebars, navigation and other elements intended to improve the user experience. Finally,
  the third area of content evaluation is related to monetisation, specifically the placement of ads.
  Although placing advertisements is not something abnormal or harmful per se, the ads that are too spammy
  and irrelevant can badly harm your rankings.
• E-A-T: E-A-T is a short form for “Expertise”, “Authoritativeness”, and
  “Trustworthiness”. These three factors determine the credibility of your website. Again, this is
  especially true for YMYL websites, such as pages on a healthcare site.

2. Needs Met (NM)

Needs Met is the second quality evaluation criterion for websites. In the simplest terms, NM translates into
the intent of the website. This means the primary goal of your site should be to meet the needs of the
users. If your website doesn’t serve its purpose or is inaccessible due to reasons like language barriers or
any similar, it will be flagged by the Google raters.

What a Successful Healthcare Website Should Have?

There are millions of websites on the internet. However, not all of them are running successfully. If you
want your healthcare website to rank on the top of SERPs, then make sure it meets the file requirements:

• Very Higher E-A-T Score
• Swift & Easy Navigation
• User-friendly Interface
• Faster Loading Time (> 3 seconds)
• High Credibility
• Higher Transparency Regarding Source of the Content

So, healthcare folks, we have just discussed what Google is looking for and what can be done to improve the
ranking of your medical website. Now, let’s look into how it’s done!

How to Perform Healthcare SEO in 2023: 10 Steps to a Successful Healthcare Website

1. Leverage the Power of “Google Business Profile” & Social Media for Positive
Reviews

As we’ve already discussed in the startling of this article, a big majority of patients check the online
reviews of a healthcare service or a service provider before making an appointment. This is the reason why
you must make efforts to gain reviews from your existing prospects.

Note that the positive reviews show the authenticity and worthiness of your healthcare business. They
encourage your potential prospects to trust you and use your services. But how to get such reviews? Through
your social media accounts and Google Business Profile.

First things first, make your social media profiles asap, if you don’t have already. Platforms like
Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter are like huge pools of potential customers.

By making your online presence on such platforms, you can maximise your client base as well as conversions to
a great level. The best part is, asking for reviews on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn is much easier.
All you need to do is, create a post requesting reviews and attach a link where users can directly submit
their reviews.

Another good way to encourage reviews is by reaching out to your potential customers via their email or SMS
and asking them to post reviews.

Whatever way you choose, your goal should be to encourage the users and make it easier for them to leave a
review on your site.

2. Create Phenomenal Content Based on Most Searched Keywords

Content is like a lead magnet. In other words, you can’t really expect good search traffic if you don’t have
interesting content on your healthcare website. So, creating useful but catchy content should be the main
goal of your healthcare SEO strategy.

Confused? Where to start? Don’t worry, we will tell you everything.

So, you’ve to work on both on-page and off-page content.

• Optimise Your Important Web Pages

Always begin with optimising the main pages of your healthcare website. Here is what your site may look
like:

• Homepage
• About Us
• Our Services
• Areas Serviced
• Payment Information
• Contact Us

All you need to do is, perform strong keyword research and include the required number of those keywords in
your web pages. Your goal shouldn’t only be the keyword stuffing, but you also need to make sure that you’re
providing answers to the most searched keywords you’re using.

Now, coming to the second but crucial part that will help you generate high-quality and converting leads.

• Create and Maintain a Healthcare Blog

On-page SEO is important, but is not enough to catch the attention of potential visitors. That is only
possible through an interesting and helpful healthcare blog. It can not only boost your website rankings but
can also provide value to internet users. What’s more? It can significantly improve your reputation and
offer more credibility to your business.

Below are some basic guidelines for setting up a healthcare blog on your website:

• Aim for providing valuable information to the searchers and not
  merely for ranking your site. In short, create high-quality helpful content.
• Always uses trusted and credible sources of information
• Stick to the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
  Act) guidelines and make sure to NEVER violate them. This is extremely crucial for a healthcare blog
  otherwise may bring storms to your fruitful business.
• Make sure your content is not negatively affecting the reader’s
  well-being. This is another important consideration being a YMYL website.
• Ensure that your content is either written by someone from the medical
  field or reviewed by an experienced medical professional. The recent Google algorithm has made this
  point even more critical than it used to be. So, take special care of it.

3. Maintain a Hierarchy Through HTML Tags

HTML tags are used by websites for a special purpose. That is to give your site a proper visual as well as
technical structure. Not only it helps viewers understand your content easily, but it also allows the search
engines to do the same.

Always add your main keyword(s) in the title tag
H1. Then, your secondary keywords should be used later in the article, in descending order. Moreover, make
sure to include the keywords in the below-mentioned tags of your website:

• Meta Description
• Title
• Alt Tags

Using the keywords in a proper manner is extremely important. However, this in no way means you should
stuff
the keywords at the places they don’t even fit. This is the biggest mistake committed by most of the SEO
professionals. Note that this habit can negatively impact your website. Not only does it diminish the
quality of your content, but also irritates the reader.

So, always use the keywords in a natural manner and try to include their synonyms and variations in your
content. Also, avoid stuffing a lot of keywords in a single paragraph. Instead, spread them evenly
throughout the blog or article.

4. Interlinking Is the Way to Go

Think of your healthcare website as a network of roads. It’s no surprise that the roads connected to a
highway are likely to get more traffic than the single ones. You can safely say that a highway can bring a
lot of traffic on these small roads. Here, the highway is your top-ranked pages, and the smaller roads are
your fresher content pieces.

So, all you need to do is, interlink your top-ranking page to your latest articles to drive more traffic
automatically. Besides improving your healthcare SEO, this practice also helps web-crawlers to traverse your
site and evaluate its quality in a better way. In short, it helps your healthcare website to get in the good
books of Google’s crawlers.

5. Robust Local SEO

No one can deny that the “Google My Business” feature has given the taste of success to many businesses. If
you want to make your healthcare business successful, you first need to dominate in the area where you’re
operating, before targeting the other locations. This is where local SEO
practices can help you. It simply
helps you in optimising your off-page as well as on-page SEO to rank in a particular area.

For this, you need to target location-based keywords. For example: Use keywords like best dentist in London,
dentist in Greenwich, etc. instead of using dentist in the UK.

6. Make Sure Your Site is Technically Sound

Believe it or not, the technical health of your site can greatly impact your healthcare SEO. This means, if
there are existing issues lying in your site’s code, then they will mess with the on-site experience of your
visitors. The sad part is, you won’t even realise what’s happening.

Naturally, if the potential patients find your site tough to navigate or too slow, they will instantly leave
it and visit your competitor’s site. This is the reason why it is extremely important to keep your site
technically fit and healthy.

Here is an important piece of advice, never mess with your site’s code unless you’re tech-savvy or have
enough knowledge/experience to do the same. It’s always better to take help from professional SEO agency like RVS Media, who can ensure the overall well-being of your site by performing in-depth technical SEO.

7. Improve User-experience (UX) Through Site Architecture

User-experience (UX) is a factor that can alone decide whether or not a patient will book an appointment on
your site or move to your rival. The best way to improve the UX or page experience of any site is through
its architecture.

Site architecture is nothing but how you structure or arrange the pages and folders on your site. A good
architecture keeps your user engaged, while a poor one shoos them away. Thus, keep your site architecture
clean and simple.

How to do that? It’s simple. All you need to do is, make all the important pages on your site easy to
navigate so that the readers don’t get lost. Apart from helping the users, it also helps web crawlers to
index your website easily.

8. Earn High-quality Backlinks

We have discussed how reviews help in gaining the trust of your potential prospects. Backlinks work in the
same fashion.

Good quality backlinks, or simply external links are the links from credible and reputed websites to your
site. It’s their way of encouraging a reader to check out your website.

If you wish to earn a remarkable online presence and reputation, then focus on gaining backlinks from reputed
sites in your niche. To make one thing crystal clear, there is absolutely no point in earning hundreds of
low-quality backlinks from irrelevant sites with no credibility. For instance, getting your healthcare site
mentioned on a fashion-related website is not going to help you. So, as a general rule of thumb: prefer
Quantity over Quality!

9. Include Schema to Offer Detailed Outlook of Your Healthcare Business

Schema is basically the syntax you can include in the theme of your website. It works by showing more details
about your website whenever it appears in the search results. This simple step offers you a good edge over
your competitors and lets you stand out from millions of websites in your niche.

Below are some details you can have shown in the Google search with the help of Schema:

• Reviews
• Medical speciality
• Medical tests
• Latest plans and offers
• Location serviced
• Contact details, etc.

Note: This step involves revamping the code of your website. So, save it for professionals

10. Always Keep an Eye on Your Healthcare SEO Results and Track Your
Growth

While this step is a no-brainer, most people still ignore it. Results? They couldn’t get the idea of what is
working for them and what’s not!

See, each website is different and has some different requirements. So, a healthcare SEO strategy that has
worked wonders for your competitor, may not work for your site. If you don’t track your results, you’ll
never be able to find out the best SEO strategies for your site.

The good news is, tracking your progress is not as difficult as it sounds. There are many tools like Google
Analytics and other position-tracking tools that can help you monitor your performance.

While Google Analytics provides you with detailed insights into the progress of your campaigns, a position
tracking tool can help you keep an eye on your search rankings.

Final Words

Medical SEO is definitely the key to generating more leads and maximise conversions. Therefore, it should be
done on priority to ensure the success of your healthcare business. We have discussed everything you needed
to know about healthcare SEO in 2023. Now it’s time for some serious action and we can help you with that.
At RVS Media, we can help you revamp and revitalise your healthcare website according to the
latest Google algorithms. From Search Engine Optimisation to improving the user-experience and ensuring the
great
technical health of your site, we are here to help you in every aspect. Contact us TODAY!