Is your healthcare SEO strategy meeting your goals yet? Over the last decade, many health care businesses of all sizes have invested heavily in innovative inbound strategies to increase their online presence. But despite all of those efforts, healthcare sites continue to fail to meet the same objectives as other industries. What gives? Here are some of the main reasons why your healthcare SEO plan could be a failure:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about getting noticed by the Search Engines. When people perform searches on Google or other search engines related to healthcare, it’s not uncommon for them to encounter your website. As a result, the purpose of your website becomes more about generating higher organic traffic, resulting in higher search ranking, and ultimately, more profit. For this reason, healthcare SEO strategies should focus more on the search ranking aspect.
Many healthcare organizations make the mistake of treating their web development as a one-time task that they can tackle alone. The truth is, search optimization needs to be performed regularly to see consistent and long-term improvement. Doing so means that your website must undergo regular content analysis and keyword research, along with the implementation of strategic link building strategies to bring more quality traffic to your site. Only by conducting regular and thorough web development activities will you be able to ensure that your healthcare organization’s search results become better and more consistent.
Without a doubt, the most common mistake in a healthcare SEO strategy is the lack of focus on generating more organic traffic. Link building serves well to boost your organic traffic numbers, but you need to ensure that you’re building these relationships with trustworthy and relevant websites. By creating partnerships with other health websites, you can greatly improve the amount of backlinks pointing towards your website. This is important because your backlinks will be approved by search engines and will be more likely to generate organic traffic over time.
Just as importantly, when it comes to creating an effective healthcare seo strategy, you must keep the focus local. While it’s great to have a presence on the world wide web, it can be quite detrimental to your marketing efforts if your business focuses its attention only on areas where people are likely to be searching. You need to understand that a person performing a search online will be looking for answers related to what he or she is looking to cure. In other words, in the case of a healthcare search result, the individual looking for answers is most likely searching for doctors, hospitals, or clinics in his or her local area. If your optimization strategy is to take advantage of this fact, you’ll probably end up losing visitors to your website rather than drawing them in.
Search engines value local pages the most. They are also reluctant to algorithmically expand your content. This means that if your content is too long or contains non-relevant keywords, your pages may not see the light of day for several months or even years. This is why optimizing your websites for both local and organic searches requires a great deal of care. It is one of the few healthcare SEO strategies that requires a great deal of effort, time, dedication and creativity.