Does your healthcare facility’s online visibility need a boost?
An NCBI Journal reports that up to 6.75 million daily searches are healthcare-related.
When I hear about a new medical term or condition, my first instinct is to look it up on Google. I expect to find the answers I need within five minutes of my search – and I almost always do.
Thanks to healthcare SEO.
How many people are looking for your specific services?
Healthcare covers a wide range of specialties, and the internet has provided you with an opportunity to make a global impact in your niche. However, if your medical practice is not visible online, you will miss out on this opportunity and lose likely patients to your competitors.
How can you position your website at the top of search results so that more people can access your services and materials?
Use the healthcare SEO strategies that work!
We’ve carefully selected 3 of the top-ranking healthcare websites and analyzed them to understand why they get so much traffic. Rest assured that these strategies can also work for your website.
If you’re in a rush, here’s an overview:
- Healthcare SEO defined
- Four advantages of Healthcare SEO?
- What makes a good healthcare website?
- Eight reasons why Healthline, WebMD, and Drugs websites get a lot of traffic
Let’s get to the crux of the matter at hand.
What is Healthcare SEO?
Are you looking for a way to connect more patients to your brand?
Healthcare SEO simply refers to a strategy that can increase your online visibility, drive more traffic to your site, and make your services more easily accessible to prospective patients. Additionally, ranking high on search engines will increase your chances of getting new patients as you get more clicks.
Unlike ads, a good healthcare SEO strategy will not require too much maintenance and will continue generating leads for a long time.
With over 60% of patients using search engine results before booking an appointment at a healthcare facility, it is crucial to take advantage of these searches by increasing your website’s visibility.
(Source: Invoca)
What Are the Advantages of Healthcare SEO?
When people want to get information on any issue, including their health, they visit search engines like Google first. Google reports that 5 percent of searches done on their search engine are health-related.
In addition to SEO bringing consumers to your healthcare website, we’ll show you four other reasons to incorporate SEO in your marketing strategy.
Why is healthcare SEO important to doctors and healthcare websites?
1. Your Healthcare Facility Will Easily Stand Out
The healthcare industry is a highly competitive one. With most facilities seeing the need to have a digital presence, you will benefit from SEO in your marketing strategy.
SEO will expose you to Ahrefs competitor analysis which will help you spy on your competitors’ online activity. When you master how to do competitor analysis SEO, you will know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ websites and easily outperform them.
Healthcare SEO will help you position your website at the top of search results to attract more consumers to your healthcare facility and build a more powerful online brand.
2. It Improves Your Healthcare Marketing Efforts
Are you struggling to make your online marketing work?
A good SEO strategy is key to your online marketing success. With SEO tools like Ahrefs, you can perform keyword research and Ahrefs competitor analysis. In addition, you will get to know the kind of healthcare services people in your area are searching for on Google and the questions they are asking.
Armed with this knowledge, you can create relevant online and offline materials (such as brochures and journals) to answer these queries. You can also make facilities available in your facility to meet the specific needs of people in your area.
Do you notice how targeted your marketing becomes with a good SEO strategy?
3. You’ll be More Accessible
People often live or work very far from your healthcare facility and cannot always connect with you through phone calls. SEO makes you more accessible to customers and prospects alike.
SEO makes your website easy to navigate on any device, including mobile, thereby improving user experience and increasing your ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). As your facility pops up in SERPs, more people will come to rely on you for medical advice.
4. SEO Raises Your Brand Awareness
Without SEO, people will have to specifically search for your facility’s name online before they find you. Branded searches like this work better if your facility has a unique name; otherwise, people may not see you in SERPs.
Organic searches are preferred because they attract customers who have never heard of your healthcare facility before performing a Google search. They also tend to carry more weight and authority since Google ranking poisitions are earned unlike paid media strategies like Google Ads or Facebook advertising for healthcare.
So, SEO is an indispensable tool for your healthcare facility because it drives traffic to your website from people who are simply looking for your medical services or seeking health-related guidance. With your SEO-friendly content right there for people to access, your brand will become more prevalent in both local and global searches.
What Makes a Good Healthcare Website?
Do you want to beef up your investment in digital marketing?
A good healthcare website uses the best SEO strategies to increase its visibility and drive traffic. According to the Search Engine Journal, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, making them indispensable in your medical practice.
Therefore, optimizing your healthcare website is the best way to make it rank higher in search engines.
8 Reasons Why Healthline, WebMD, and Drugs Websites Get a Lot of Traffic
This section will feature three top-ranking healthcare websites in the United States and give you the primary reasons why they get so much traffic. The three healthcare websites are:
We used Ahrefs Site Explorer to analyze some of the significant Healthcare SEO strategies that make these top websites stand out in search results.
What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is a toolset used for SEO and backlinks analysis. It offers handy tools like Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker, and Site Audit.
An overview of Healthline, WebMD, and Drugs’ websites using Ahrefs Site Explorer
These snapshots show an overview of Ahrefs Site Explorer’s analysis on our three featured healthcare websites.
Healthline’s Website Overview
WebMD’s Website Overview
Drugs’ Website Overview
Let’s get on with the eight reasons why the featured healthcare sites get a lot of traffic.
1. They are Optimized for Local Search
Managing your local presence is crucial because the medical field depends on people living close to or in the area where you located your medical facility.
Suppose your medical practice is in Boston, for example. In that case, potential patients searching for “gynecologist in Boston” on Google should see your medical facility listing on the first page of search engine results.
You can use online tools like Google My Business (GMB) and Moz Local to develop a page with important information about your healthcare facility, including your address, phone numbers, services, and work hours.
2. They Create and Publish Relevant SEO-friendly Content
Creating relevant, quality content for your healthcare website is a great way to establish yourself and your brand as an authority in the medical field.
You can provide content in the form of SEO-friendly blog posts, interviews, product reviews, videos, podcasts, seminars, eBooks, infographics, slideshows, whitepapers, apps, patient testimonials, and any other information on breakthroughs in the healthcare sector.
What are good content marketing and SEO tips for healthcare?
Here are some essential content marketing and SEO tips you need to consider.
- Create content based on popular demand using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
- Avoid too much jargons
- Use heading tags
- Include a landing page
- Proofread your content and check for readability
- Optimize your content for SEO
- Update your site with new content every week
- Use the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool to analyze your content.
One thing Healthline, WebMD, and Drugs have in common is rich content. Their content is so rich that it attracts lots of backlinks and traffic.
Healthline’s Top Pages
Ahrefs Site Explorer shows that Healthline’s website attracts total traffic of 83,827,199. Its top page alone gets traffic of 233,873 at the value of $144,509. It makes use of 4,093 keywords, with its top keyword being “turmeric.”
Take a look at a summary of the top 10 pages on Healthline’s website:
WebMD’s Top Pages
WebMD, according to Ahrefs Site Explorer, has total traffic of 65,039,520. Its top page, which occupies a number 1 position in SERPs, gets traffic of 675,866 at the value of $686,581. It contains 9,639 keywords, with “WebMD” being the top keyword for that page.
Here are other details of WebMD’s top pages:
Drugs’ Top Pages
The total traffic this healthcare website has attracted is 13,773,290. It gets traffic of 1,030,746 at the value of $1,414,474 for its top ranking page. The top page has 3,490 keywords with “pill identifier” as its top keyword.
Check the image below for more details on Drugs’ top pages:
3. They Use Targeted Keywords
Keyword research will come in handy when you want to create content that your target audience will find helpful. Although you should not abuse keywords in your content, you can focus on keywords your target audience is searching for in their queries. Also, get keywords that your competitors use to outrank you.
Feature your primary keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions to make your content more SEO-friendly.
The three top-ranking sites we are featuring use this effective healthcare SEO strategy to market their brand and gain traffic.
Healthline’s Organic Keywords
Below, you can see the organic keywords that Healthline ranks high for:
WebMD’s Organic Keywords
These are some of the top keywords that WebMD is ranking for:
Drugs’ Organic Keywords
These are the top 7 keywords that this healthcare website is ranking for:
4. They Use Trusted Outgoing Links and Backlinks
Links can significantly impact your organic rankings and determine your website’s authority. Avoid link farming and ensure that the links are relevant to your site and from sources that search engines trust.
Why are backlinks important in SEO?
Backlinks from trusted sites will increase the value of your content and get more visitors to your website. Ahrefs offers comprehensive SEO backlinks services you can leverage to improve your site ranking.
Let’s look at snapshots of the outbound links and backlinks of each of our top-rated healthcare websites from Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Healthline’s Outbound Links and Backlinks
WebMD’s Outbound Links and Backlinks
Drugs Website’s Outbound Links and Backlinks
5. Their Websites are Mobile-friendly
Is your healthcare website responsive?
If it isn’t, you miss out on an excellent opportunity to grow your online presence and get more patients to visit your practice. Give your users a memorable experience on mobile as well as on desktop. Add a search bar to their screen, add on-page CTAs, make the menus organized and straightforward, and increase your site’s speed.
A quick visit to our case study websites on several mobile devices shows that they are mobile-friendly. Since NBC News reports that 62% of people who check for healthcare-related information online use their smartphones, you should also optimize your site for mobile devices to get more traffic and increase your ranking in search results.
6. Go Multilingual
People from all over the world are visiting search engines with questions on different issues from time to time. Take advantage of your audience demographics and close the language barrier. Doing this will help you reach a wider audience and get more people to trust and stay loyal to your brand.
7. Do Not Ignore Your Competitors
The healthcare sector has become a highly competitive one, with most facilities creating a website to increase their reach.
Your competitors want to do better than you in search rankings and close rates.
Ahrefs competitor analysis is vital for healthcare website owners and marketers to watch competitors and understand their strategies.
You can learn how to do competitor analysis SEO on your own using Ahrefs Site Explorer. An insight into your competing domain and pages, competitors’ backlinks and keywords, and other healthcare SEO factors will help to improve your SEO and content marketing strategies.
We conducted an Ahrefs competitor analysis on our three featured websites, and this is the result for each website:
Healthline Website’s Competitor Analysis
WebMD’s Competitor Analysis
Drugs’ Competitor Analysis
8. They Incorporate Social Media Platforms
Most top websites leverage social media as an effective healthcare SEO strategy. It has a lot of link-back potential and will increase the likelihood of getting your brand noticed.
When you create and publish content, share it via your social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter.
You can also embed YouTube videos and provide share buttons on the website for users to easily share your content on their preferred social media platforms. Doing this will encourage more patients and users to stay loyal to your medical practice.
Do You Covet the No. 1 Spot on Google Search Result Pages?
At FlyingVGroup, we understand that the healthcare industry is a time-sensitive one, and you may not have enough time to carry out the necessary SEO processes that will take your website to that coveted No. 1 spot on Google search results.
Let’s help you cover all the aspects of your healthcare SEO campaign so that you can focus on helping your patients. You can reach out to us here.
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