Healthcare SEO has a lot of different factors at play that will help you increase the rankings on your website, your traffic growth, your goal completions, but most importantly, bringing new patients through the door. I want to talk about a few of the healthcare SEO strategies that I think matter the most when it comes to watching your site grow in local search environments for what it is that you do from a treatment and condition standpoint.
Number one, it starts with the structure of your website and the content inside of that structure. 9 out of 10 times, when we do an audit on a website, what we find is the improper utilization of keywords in the title tag, which is that blue hyperlink when you do a Google search on each individual page on the site, and making sure that you're going after the right key word on each page that matches the content on that page. Sounds simple enough, but what I mean is your homepage needs to focus on what it is you primarily do as a practice. Then you need to rely on individual condition and treatment pages to rank for those moneymaker things that it is that you do or want to do more of and rank higher in search.
Next up is now that we're looking at that individual condition or treatment page, is making sure it is built out with good structures, good title tag, good H tag, and supporting keywords and FAQs. You want to try to answer a lot of the questions that patients are searching for around that topic, and that includes what is it, how was it diagnosed, how do we treat it at the practice, what is the recovery time of surgeries involved? All of that different information is going to strengthen the page as well as give more information to a patient that's on the site to build credibility in your practice.
Next up is if you're a multi location practice, you must get individual location pages for each one of your major locations. The reason being is it will allow you to focus that location page on each geographical area that you reside in, which is really what matters the most, that 10 or 15 mile radius that a patient could potentially search and walk through the door. And it gives you the benefits of being really focused on the title tag, mentioning the city names, mentioning the things you do at that practice location, the providers or surgeons that are at that location, integrating the Google My Business for that location. All of the above can be done, which are going to go leaps and bounds and focus you in each of those geographical markets.
Which brings me to my next point, and that is the Google My Business. Your Google My Business carries a massive amount of local search weight when it comes to healthcare SEO, so you need to make sure your Google My Business is well optimized and integrated back into your website, just like I was talking about on those individual location pages, as well as, funny enough, your practice physicians. Physicians are one of the few individuals, outside of maybe lawyers, that can actually have a Google My Business. So you want to make sure you have a Google My Business and you have it integrated on the individual physician's page, which leads me to believe, or it leads me to that next point, you need an individual page for each of your surgeons or your physicians.
All the time we do audits, physician names, especially if they've been around for a while, are a major driver of traffic to a website. That's great, but it's unfortunate when we see other listing sites like Vitals and Healthgrades ranking above your provider page on the site. So you want to make sure you have a well-thought-out provider page that's got their bio, their certifications, any awards, their Google My Business, the areas of expertise that they focus on, all of those different kinds of things. And if they do specialize in something, like say they're an orthopedic surgeon that specializes in hand surgery, is make sure that you say they're a hand surgeon on that page, as well as in the title tag. Again, that's going to help not only their Google My Business, but their individual page rank when someone's looking for a hand surgeon in their area. So if you follow these tips, they're going to be really, really effective in helping you rank and improve your health care SEO strategy over the short and the long run.
