THE PATH TO HEALTHY WEB TRAFFIC RUNS THROUGH SEO
A successful hospital, medical spa, or urgent care facility thrives by staying ahead of the curve. Patients must be able to find you online in the modern age, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one tool you have to get seen organically as people search your services online.
When searching for a healthcare provider or treatment center, 73% of patients turn to search engines. You need a marketing agency that specializes in crafting a winning healthcare SEO strategy—one that can drive your health services to the top of search results!
As a top SEO company in the medical services industry, Stream Companies serves:
- Community Health Centers
- Medical Spas
- Telemedicine Practices
- Cosmetic Surgeons
- Hospitals
We Specialize in
URGENT CARE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
You dream of being the go-to for urgent care in your area. To do that, your clinic(s) need to be front and center the moment patients search for your services, night or day. SEO strategies for urgent care centers can help drive your services to the top of the organic search results online.
It can seem like new urgent care facilities are popping up every day, and the competition is fierce. When you realize no two clinics are the same, though, you can use that to your advantage. By identifying your Unique Selling Points (USPs) and services, you can build a local SEO strategy around them.
We’ll target the communities you already serve—and those you want to reach. And we’ll create content with keywords connected to your services, so you’re found by the right patients.
SEO FOR TELEMEDICINE: WHAT IS IT?
Today, people young and old are more comfortable than ever using video conferencing platforms. If you want to leverage this trend to expand your services with telemedicine, our SEO specialists can help.
What makes telemedicine unique in the medical field? It’s essentially a service without borders, and that will affect your approach to SEO. When you target keyword searches like ‘telehealth services near me,’ it isn’t just in your own backyard: You’re competing nationally.
We strategize your telehealth SEO with this in mind. On a scale like this, the more specific the keywords, the better your chances of ranking for them. We research keywords and build 100% unique web content around them to engage searchers and help Google see you as the top authority in your field.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SERVICES FOR COSMETIC SURGERY
Prospective patients are searching for cosmetic surgery options on Google every day. Before you deliver a brighter smile, younger face, or clearer complexion, you need the tools to be found first.
A smart cosmetic surgery SEO strategy can help you be seen by a more specialized, relevant audience. If your site isn’t optimized for the communities you serve and your specializations, you could be losing out on business in a big way. We can help with that.
Cosmetic surgery is a major decision, and people do a lot of research before they choose a surgeon they can trust. Quality web content (like blogs and educational web pages) can boost your expertise in the eyes of patients. It will also keep them on your website longer—and Google will notice! Be ranked for quality in a field where quality counts.
ON- AND OFF-SITE HEALTHCARE SEO
No single factor will cause your healthcare website to rank highly in search results. You must do many things right—and then get the right response from customers and your fellow authorities in the healthcare field.
SEO for health services relies on a combination of on- and off-site optimization factors. Some are directly in your control, and some depend on how the wide world out there responds to your content.
SEO is never an overnight success. It takes time for search engines like Google to recognize the signals you’re sending and push your content to the top of the search results. With these strategies, our team will get your healthcare search engine optimization services off to a running start!
OUR ON-SITE HEALTHCARE SEO AGENCY TECHNIQUES
On-site or on-page healthcare SEO refers to the code, images, and words on your health services website. So many factors impact your site’s search engine optimization, from the type of content you offer to the site’s load speed and responsiveness on mobile devices. We focus on these ones:
Mobile Responsiveness
Your website should display in a way that is mobile-device friendly. This is optimal for more than simply user experience (which helps keep users on your website). It’s also crucial to your SEO strategy, as more and more of your audience goes mobile to search for hospitals and practices “near me.”
Headings: H1s and H2s
The H1 and H2 markers refer to the headings and subheadings on the pages on your website. They help readers and search engines understand your content. It helps to have relevant healthcare keywords and search terms in your H1s and H2s. For long-form content, we may even throw in some H3s—sub-subheadings!
Go Bold, Go Italic
Bold and italic formatting for text allows Google bots to identify what text is most relevant. In the content creation phase, our copywriters can bold and/or italicize the information that would be most important to the reader of that article. We emphasize what should stand out, so it will!
Anchor Text
It’s good practice to link to other pages on your site. When you create a hyperlink in your content, the anchor text is the clickable text within it. The text itself should be relevant to the page you’re linking to. For example, the hyperlink to a hospital’s cancer center page could read, “Learn what makes our cancer center unique.”
Title Tags
These HTML (coding) elements specify the titles of your web pages. They are what users will see on a search engine results page (SERP) as the clickable headline for the page in question.
Description Tags
These are the roughly 160-character-or-less descriptions that summarize the web page’s content. Users see them below the title tags on SERPs. They should be optimized with the relevant healthcare search terms and contain messaging that entices readers to click through to your health services website.
Sitemaps
A visible sitemap is great not only for user experience but also SEO. Your website should also have an XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap, which allows search engines to crawl the URLs that are listed within that sitemap. Together, they create a website experience that both people and search engines can appreciate.
Footer
Yes, even the footer menu on your website can affect SEO. Optimize it correctly so Google can identify your website’s relevance on the SERPs.
OUR OFF-SITE HEALTHCARE SEO AGENCY TECHNIQUES
The most important ranking factors are the ones that happen off-site—or rather, between sites. Websites that are linked to by other healthcare-related websites are seen as more important by search engines like Google. You want these backlinks to be relevant to establish authority and credibility for your site.
At Stream, we use healthcare SEO strategies to encourage backlinks to your website via “off-site” sources like these:
Press Releases
Here’s a potential off-site link that is fully within your control. Press releases allow you to let journalists and major healthcare publications know about big events. Has your company recently won an award, released a new product, or launched a new service? Get the word out and get those backlinks.
Blogs and Articles
If authorities in the healthcare field link to your website, Google will recognize your website as an authority as well. As this happens, you’ll see your search engine rankings begin to increase over time. The best way to get experts to link to your website? Provide 100% unique inbound content—our specialty here at Stream.
Healthcare Directories
New and existing patients can find your healthcare practice through directories, which also play a role in SEO. Where and how often practices appear in directories affects search engine rankings. Google needs to see that your business is legitimate, so information should be consistent across directories.
Healthcare Social Media
Social media pages, in and of themselves, do not appear to affect SEO rankings. However, a higher number of followers who engage with your social media pages means more opportunities to drive traffic to your website via linked content. And more website traffic? That affects SEO.
OUR LOCAL SEO STRATEGIES FOR HEALTHCARE
Our Local SEO Strategies for Healthcare
Some healthcare practices draw their customers from highly localized areas. Others—like those that offer telemedicine—may draw customers across an entire state or region! Even health services with the broadest reach, however, probably draw a significant amount of business from specific localities.
When you’ve identified those areas, you can apply local SEO (also known as local search) to optimize your website for location-based searches. We employ on-site strategies, such as mentioning cities and counties in content, but we also use off-site techniques to optimize for local business:
Citations
Citations are simply online references to your organization’s name, address, and phone number. Google uses these to evaluate the online authority of your business, so once again, they should be present and consistent.
Directories
Above, we mentioned the importance of consistency in information across directories. All this means is that your business should be presented exactly the same in every directory. For instance, if you are listed as “Jane Doe, MD,” on one directory, you shouldn’t appear as “Dr. Jane Doe” on another one.
Online Review Sites
Responding to customer reviews on the most popular review sites—Yelp, Facebook, and Google itself—is not just a matter of courting public opinion. How your health services organization is rated on these sites is a very important factor in rankings—again, as a marker of authority and legitimacy.
At Stream, our reputation management team will help you respond to positive and negative reviews (as well as identify fake negative reviews and work to have them removed). It’s essential to address any issues behind negative reviews, as the right response by you may lead a customer to change their review.
CONTENT: THE KEY TO MEDICAL SEO
So, what’s the single most important factor in the SEO success of your medical website? The phrase “content is king” didn’t come from nowhere! Inbound content has long been—and remains—an essential piece of a successful SEO strategy, if only because it influences so many ranking factors. Here’s why.
CONTENT ENHANCES EVERY DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNEL
Social media loves good content. Many medical practices leverage social media to increase their patient count, and other healthcare services are doing the same. But medical care is serious business. The best way to show potential customers you mean business is linking to content that answers their questions.
The same enhances email opening rate in email marketing. Content shows you’re not just there to “market” to them. You have vital information to offer—information that they or a friend or family member may find useful. It may even affect how they approach medical care.
In general, people tend to deeply trust their teachers. As their physician, trust is a vital component of the relationship. Show that you’re a trusted source of knowledge in the medical field—and maybe in their own backyard—and that sense of trust will be easier to build and maintain.
Quality content will drive more people to your website—whether from social media, emails, paid search ads, or simply organic searches. And those people will stay on your site longer once they are there. This will boost your healthcare website’s authority in the eyes of Google.
WE OFFER 100% UNIQUE, WELL-RESEARCHED HEALTHCARE CONTENT
What makes healthcare content high quality? For one, it must be 100% unique. Duplicate content—whether from somewhere else on your website or another website entirely—negatively impacts rankings.
Our in-house copywriters produce well-researched medical content that answers common search questions about your field (“What is laser eye surgery?” for example) while positioning your business and its unique selling points (USPs) as a possible solution for what readers are searching for.
Of course, you’re the truth expert on your business and your healthcare specialty! If you like, we can set up a content approval path in which you have final input in every piece of content we produce. That way, you can feel fully confident that the content we produce is 100% accurate and on brand before we post it!
With our eyes and your eyes on the content, we know it will turn out well. Our copywriters and search engine optimizers alike will research your competitors and see what medical keywords and phrases they are ranking for. We’ll use those details to create the content that earns you a larger slice of traffic.
HOW TO CHOOSE A MEDICAL SEO AGENCY
You know you need an SEO agency to take your healthcare website to that next level. How will you choose your agency partner? As you prepare to optimize your site for Google, use these tips to decide who to partner with for the best SEO results in the long run.
CHECK OUT THEIR HEALTHCARE PORTFOLIO
Does the agency in question have experience in SEO for health services? Check out their portfolio and see what kinds of clients they have worked for in the past. These could be signs that a medical SEO agency is a good match for your organization’s digital marketing needs.
At Stream, we’ve partnered with teaching hospitals, biomedical research facilities, medical eye care centers, and more. Our breadth and depth of experience in search engine optimization for healthcare has positioned us well as an SEO agency for all manner of health services organizations.
Remember, an agency that doesn’t have experience in your specialty may still be a strong fit. Ask about their approach to SEO strategy for other clients and consider whether it might translate to the needs of your healthcare organization. If they can articulate how they will adapt their general approach to your niche, you may be in business!
ASK QUESTIONS—LOTS OF QUESTIONS!
Never choose an agency partner lightly. Healthcare SEO takes time to ramp up—and, just as importantly, consistent effort to maintain. You don’t want to have to change providers just as you get the ball rolling. It can cost you valuable time and progress as you strive to make your website the best it can be.
You deserve a strong partner for the long term. It’s the only way your SEO strategy can be put into place in an integrated, uninterrupted way. So, find an agency with the right answers to these questions:
- What’s your philosophy for driving SEO that delivers results? Look for an agency that:
- Offers all facets of SEO (on- and off-page SEO), not just one service (say, link building).
- Can effectively implement the strategy they have researched.
- How will you adapt your strategy to our brand/business/industry/niche? SEO has never been a one-size-fits-all solution. Choose an agency that puts in the work to understand how healthcare is different—and how your niche and business within that field are different.
- How will SEO integrate with our overall marketing strategy? The best marketing campaigns are integrated. They give your audience a consistent experience across media and devices. And they save you money as the various digital services work together to enhance each other’s value.
- How will you stay up to date on industry changes and Google updates? You know how rapidly the healthcare field changes. Well, updates to Google’s search results algorithm can be just as frequent. SEO specialists should know what your audience is searching for—and follow the latest from Google.
- What do you need from us? Look, healthcare and medicine are complex. You’re the experts in both. You have invaluable experience, and you should look for an agency that wants your input. They will need to know your:
- Audience
- Industry
- Goals
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Current digital platforms
An agency that is committed to you will seek to create a true partnership—a relationship of give and take. If they seem to need very little from you, that’s a red flag. They are unlikely to help you build an SEO plan that will achieve success in the long-term.
READ THEIR CASE STUDIES
Your prospective partner agency says all the right things. That’s a step in the right direction, but how do you know they’ll deliver? Simple: See how they have delivered before. If your agency has case studies on their website, read the ones most relevant to the medical SEO services your healthcare organization needs.
See what story the hard data tells. Determine whether the SEO approaches that produced these results can be adapted to your business—and if the agency has seemed interested in making that happen. A good case study can tell you so much more than words, so make room for the data as you weigh your options.
To see success in health services SEO, you need an agency that (1) can measure by your metric of success and (2) can give you a time frame to see real results—typically by Month Six.
These two points will keep them accountable to you, and you’ll know you’re truly on the same wavelength. At Stream, we work hard every day to meet all the above criteria and provide white-glove SEO services.
SEO MATTERS IN HEALTHCARE. STREAMLINE YOUR STRATEGY TODAY!
Did you know that roughly 90% of people click a link on Google’s first page when they search for something? When you move to page 2, that number drops to less than 5%. You need to rank among the very best to be seen, and there’s little room for error.
Climb to the top of organic search rankings with Stream Companies at your side. We’ll help you master on- and off-page SEO and send the signals you need to be ranked by search engines everywhere.
Healthcare SEO is the foundation you need to grow your medical practice! Reach out to us and have a chat with our specialists. Start strategizing your search engine optimization today!