The seismic shift to the use of internet marketing has drastically changed how medical practitioners promote their services. Now more than ever, healthcare providers need to optimize their websites regardless of the size of their practice.

In the past years, marketing strategies such as TV commercials and posters would do. Times have changed. Today, you need to be armed with an optimized website with backlinks to outrank your colleagues by showing up in the Google local "3 pack." So, what do you gain when your medical practice dominates the search results?

• Increase in new leads, consultations, and new patient appointments
• More high revenue procedures
• The attraction of new patients without paid ads
• Gaining prominence as an industry leader in your medical field
• The overall growth of your practice

The benefits outlined above are within your grasp. All you have to do is jump on the Medical SEO bandwagon and optimize your practice's website. Below are some of the ways of determining whether your medical practice website is SEO optimized.

1. Check on the mobile-friendliness of your website

When it comes to SEO for doctors, how mobile-friendly your website is, is crucial to ensuring that you acquire new clients. How does your website look on mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones? If your visitors find it hard to access your website via mobile devices, you are in trouble.

According to a recent study by Statista, 92.6% (4.32 billion people) of internet users access the internet via mobile devices. As such, if your medical practice's website is not mobile-friendly, then you are missing out on this large pool of potential new patients.

Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional. Some of the ways of making your website mobile-friendly include ditching text blocking ads, and pop-ups and making your button sizes large enough to work on mobile devices.

2. Optimization of keyword target pages

Today, medical SEO is part and parcel of medical marketing. One way of ensuring that you achieve it is by optimizing the keywords of your target pages. There are numerous ways of attaining this, including:

• Adding images and videos: Suppose your content has too much text with no images and videos, then you've probably been scaring away numerous patients. Inserting a few images that relate to the keywords can help reduce or eliminate the bounce rates from your website.
• Using simple and easy-to-read language: Don't use too much industry jargon in your content to the point that your patients need a thesaurus to understand the message you are trying to pass across.  

3. The speed of your website

In the early '90s, people were willing to wait up to five minutes for a picture to load. That was then. Today people want a fast-loading website. If your website is slow, visitors will probably leave your site. So, how can you check how fast your website loads? Well, Google's free site speed tool has got you covered. Suppose it's slow you can increase its speed by taking the following measures:

• Remove unnecessary coding
• Speed up the processing of huge files such as videos, or numerous images
• Increase your hosting speed

4. Availability of an active social media profile for your medical practice and doctors

Today, approximately 4.66 billion people use different social media platforms. As such, having a social media profile for your medical practice is essential for healthcare SEO. The links from various social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can give your website's SEO a massive boost. This is because these platforms have reliable backlinks (they have a high domain authority). Posting on your social media platforms regularly will impact your SEO campaign positively.

5. The quality of content on your website

Content is king in online marketing. As such, it should be at the top of the list in your medical SEO strategy. Prospective patients use Google search to look for answers to various medical questions including, where to get a particular type of treatment, or which facility offers the best kind of treatment for a given ailment, among other questions. If your website does not answer such questions, then Google won't place you at the top of search results. Consequently, the prospective patients won't be able to have access to your content.

Fortunately, there are ways of improving the quality of your content.  For starters, ensure that it's valuable to the readers. Also, ensure that when someone visits your page, they immediately know what it is all about.

6. Availability of Google My Business profile for your medical practice

When it comes to SEO for doctors, creating a Google My Business Profile for your doctors and medical practices is one of the best strategies to use. Apart from it enabling you to appear on the Google map that shows up at the top of the search results, it also gives you great statistics such as the number of people who asked for directions to your practice and the number of calls to your practice.  

7. The traffic of your website

Just like in other industries, the world of online medical marketing is a numbers game. If you are not seeing traffic on your website, then your SEO strategies aren't working. The more you have traffic on your website, the better your medical SEO campaign is. Below are some tips you can use to increase traffic on your website:

• Send newsletters to your patient's mailing list
• Advertise your practice via Google Ads and Facebook
• Build up an audience on various social media platforms to increase your traffic

SEO is an essential tool in your digital marketing strategy. It not only helps you promote your medical practice but also helps you attract new patients'. That said, attending to your patients medical needs and managing your online medical marketing can be challenging. And that's why you need to have an expert medical SEO team in your corner.

DearDoc offers top-notch SEO services, web design and management, social media marketing, and cloud-based software solutions that are guaranteed to grow your practice. Reach out today via (646) 585-9734 or share your practice's details with us and let us help you grow your medical practice:

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Would you like to learn even more about SEO? Download our Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Medical Providers and discover how to boost your website rankings and increase discoverability.

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