SEO strategy for healthcare

When it comes to SEO for healthcare, it seems it is difficult, too risky, highly compliant, etc. But that isn’t the case. I have done SEO for most pharmaceutical companies by following the best practice of Google’s guidelines.

On-page SEO for healthcare

On-page technical SEO for Healthcare refers to the code, images, and words that make up your website. From the type of content you have on your health services website to its site loading speed and your site’s mobile responsiveness, there are various factors that impact aspects of SEO.

Title Tags

These are an HTML (coding) element within the backend of your site that specifies the titles of your web pages. This is what’s displayed on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as the clickable headline for a given search result.

SEO Metadata description Tags

These show up just beneath the title tags in SERPs and are comprised of a ~160 character or less description that summarizes the web page’s content.

Core web vitals and site Speed

Also called page speed, this is a measurement of how fast your web pages load, an important algorithm for Google to determine where your page will show up in SERPs.

Mobile Responsiveness

Your website content should display in a mobile-device-friendly way. With more and more customers going mobile and searching for hospitals and practices “near me,” this is vital for your SEO strategy.

A responsive design adapts to different screen sizes.

Keyword Meta Tags

These aren’t visible to online visitors but are visible to search engines. Your keywords determine what you want to be found for in SERPs.

Alt Tags

An alt tag is an HTML attribute applied to image tags, which provides a text alternative for search engines.

H1’s and H2’s

These are called header tags and are an important on-page SEO factor. They’re used to communicate what your website is actually about to search engines.

Anchor Text Links

Anchor text is the clickable text within a hyperlink in your content. SEO best practices indicate that your anchor text should be relevant to the page you’re linking to.

Bold, Italics

Google bots tend to like bold and italic formatting for text, as it emphasizes what should stand out, helping Google crawlers determine what’s relevant.

Footer

How you optimize the footer menu of your website further identifies to Google your site’s relevance on SERPs.

Sitemaps

• XML for search engines: XML stands for Extensible Markup Language and is similar in context to HTML. An XML sitemap is an invitation for search engines to crawl the URLs that are listed within that sitemap.
• Visible for user experience: A visible sitemap that your site visitors can see is vital for strong SEO practices.

Changing Content

Updating old healthcare/medical content will help increase the effectiveness of your Healthcare SEO efforts and boost your overall search engine traffic.

Off-Site Healthcare SEO Techniques

Websites linked to other relevant healthcare-related websites are seen as “more important” to Google than sites without these backlinks. You want these backlinks to be relevant because it gives your web pages authority and credibility regarding search engine results. It would help if you aimed to get backlinks pointing to your website from the following “off-site” sources:

Press Releases

Press releases serve as a way for your practice to let journalists and major healthcare publications know about big events such as winning an award or launching a new product or service.

Healthcare Directories

Directories are how existing and new patients find your practice and play a role in SEO. Ranking factors include where and how often practices are listed in directories and consistency across those directories–more on that below!