These proven SEO tips will help grow your organ­ic search vis­i­bil­i­ty, make your sales fun­nel more effi­cient, and result in high­er rev­enue.

Organ­ic vis­i­bil­i­ty can be a chal­lenge for most indus­tries, but it’s espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing and com­pet­i­tive in the health care indus­try. If con­sumers can’t find you at the moment when they’re look­ing for a provider, you’ve missed your oppor­tu­ni­ty to get that con­ver­sion (or at least get con­sumers into your sales fun­nel). Not only do you have to devel­op rel­e­vant and help­ful con­tent, but it has to be opti­mized appro­pri­ate­ly so peo­ple will actu­al­ly see it in the search engines.

Here are sev­en SEO tips and tricks for health­care providers that will help grow your organ­ic search vis­i­bil­i­ty, make your sales fun­nel more effi­cient, and result in high­er rev­enue.

1. Optimize For Local Search

Man­ag­ing your local pres­ence is, by far, the most valu­able to-do item for any health­care provider. Accord­ing to Google, an esti­mat­ed 73 per­cent of all online activ­i­ty is relat­ed to local search­es. Your busi­ness for the most part relies on the peo­ple who live near where you’re locat­ed.

For exam­ple, when a per­son search­es for “ortho­pe­dic sur­geon in Tam­pa” on Google, var­i­ous options come up on the first page of search results. If you’re an ortho­pe­dic sur­geon in Tam­pa, then you’d want your place of busi­ness to appear in the first posi­tion of the search engine results, right?

Google My Busi­ness is Google’s busi­ness list­ing ser­vice. Google My Busi­ness lets you devel­op a page where you can add vital infor­ma­tion peo­ple are search­ing for (e.g., your address, hours, phone num­ber, and ser­vices).

Accord­ing to Search Engine Land, 50 per­cent of con­sumers who con­duct­ed a local search on their smart­phone vis­it­ed a store with­in a day, and 34 per­cent who searched on computer/tablet did the same. This means rank­ing in local search has a direct impact on in-store traf­fic.

Anoth­er help­ful tool for local search is Moz Local. You can use Moz Local to cre­ate and main­tain busi­ness list­ings on the sites, apps, and direc­to­ries that fac­tor most into local search engine results. You can also devel­op and main­tain your list­ings, man­age your loca­tion infor­ma­tion at any time, re-ver­i­fy your list­ings, and find and resolve dupli­cate list­ings.

2. Encourage Online Reviews

Anoth­er part of that local search equa­tion is reviews. Direc­to­ries or page list­ings like Google My Busi­ness and Yelp are places where indi­vid­u­als can review your site.

Online reviews are impor­tant for many rea­sons. Reviews affect your local search rank­ings, con­sumers’ pur­chase deci­sions, and which search results actu­al­ly get clicked on. Look at the exam­ple below:

Hav­ing an over­all high­er sat­is­fac­tion rat­ing, even if you have less reviews, might encour­age more peo­ple to click on your list­ing (or not if you have a low­er rat­ing).

In sur­veys, such as one report­ed on by Mar­ket­ing Land, 90 per­cent of the peo­ple said that pos­i­tive online reviews influ­enced their buy­ing deci­sions.

Here are some ways you can encour­age cus­tomers to review your facil­i­ty or prac­tice:

• If you send out a newslet­ter, ask your patients to review your prac­tice on Google or Yelp.
• Place a sign in your office, encour­ag­ing patients to review your prac­tice.
• Place direct links and calls to action on your site, ask­ing peo­ple to review your busi­ness.

3. Choose & Use The Right Targeted Keywords

Devel­op­ing con­tent with key­words that describe your busi­ness and indus­try help with peo­ple find your facil­i­ty.

Build­ing a key­word list is rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward. When build­ing a list, get togeth­er with co-work­ers with­in your prac­tice to brain­storm and decide which key­words are most impor­tant you want to be found for.

Also, if you can, con­duct a sur­vey. Ask patients what types of key­words they would use to search for your busi­ness online.

Once you’ve com­piled around 20–50 key­words, use Google Key­word Plan­ner to find out which key­word phras­es have a fair amount of local month­ly traf­fic. This tool also lets you search for new key­word ideas, in addi­tion to devel­op­ing pay-per-click (PPC) cam­paigns.

Not only should you opti­mize your web­site pages with your brand’s name, but also devel­op con­tent around these three vital types of key­words:

1. Non-Brand­ed Key­words

Non-brand­ed key­words are words that describe what you spe­cial­ize in as a prac­tice, but don’t include your brand name. For exam­ple, a chi­ro­prac­tor in Jack­sonville, Flori­da would want to devel­op pages with key­words relat­ing to chi­ro­prac­tic med­i­cine (e.g., chi­ro­prac­tic med­i­cine, chi­ro­prac­tic adjust­ments, and phys­io­ther­a­py).

2. Loca­tion-Based Key­words

Anoth­er urgent need for health­care providers: opti­miz­ing your web pages to focus on the loca­tions you serve. This will tell Google that when some­body is search­ing for a chi­ro­prac­tor in Jack­sonville, your list­ing is rel­e­vant, so it will help raise your local and organ­ic search vis­i­bil­i­ty.

3. Long-Tail Key­words

A long-tail key­word con­tains a vari­a­tion of a core key­word (e.g., “chi­ro­prac­tor”) plus oth­er terms. “Best chi­ro­prac­tors in Tam­pa” or “afford­able chi­ro­prac­tors in Dade City” are just a cou­ple of exam­ples of long-tail key­words. The long-tail con­tains hun­dreds of mil­lions of unique search­es that might be con­duct­ed a few times in any giv­en day or month, but, when tak­en togeth­er, com­prise the major­i­ty of the world’s search vol­ume.

4. Optimize Your Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

In addi­tion to using your key­words with­in the con­tent you pub­lish on your web­site, you must also make sure to use your key­words in your meta data.

Meta­da­ta con­sists of the HTML meta tags that lie between the open and clos­ing head tags in the HTML code of a doc­u­ment. This infor­ma­tion helps search engines know what the page is about by using the con­tent with the title tag, the meta descrip­tion, and head­ers to deter­mine what the web­pages are all about.

The title tag acts as the title of the page at the top of the brows­er and in the blue text in the search engine results. It should be between 55–65 char­ac­ters. You also want to add key­words you’re try­ing to tar­get with­in this sec­tion, but the key­words should make sense and describe the page at hand.

A meta descrip­tion describes the con­tent of the page. It should be no longer than 150 char­ac­ters. Think of this area a place where you can add help­ful infor­ma­tion and even calls to action. Your meta title and descrip­tion are impor­tant to focus on, as when your web­pages get indexed in search engines, these sec­tions become your adver­tise­ment.

Last­ly, head­ers added through­out a piece of con­tent using head­er tags will help to fur­ther describe the con­tents of the page to search engines and users. Con­sid­er these head­ers equiv­a­lent of a head­line in a news­pa­per that fur­ther encour­age the user to read on. Although head­er tags tech­ni­cal­ly go from H1-H6, search engines place the most empha­sis on H1 tags.

5. Create Unique Content To Build Trust & Authority

Many health care providers sim­ply stop after they’ve cre­at­ed a web­site that details their ser­vice across var­i­ous pages. But if you want to build your brand and make your prac­tice stand out to con­sumers as a thought leader, then you should devel­op con­tent that edu­cates and builds trust.

Here are some types of con­tent health­care providers can devel­op:

• Tes­ti­mo­ni­als from patients.
• Case stud­ies.
• Blogs.
• Edu­ca­tion­al videos.
• Info­graph­ics.
• Inter­views.
• Med­ical break­throughs.

Cre­at­ing more con­tent relat­ing to the health­care indus­try will help dri­ve more val­ue to your web­site and nat­u­ral­ly increase the usage of rel­e­vant indus­try key­words on your web­site, which can aid in your pur­suit of high­er search rank­ings.

With regards to blog­ging, busi­ness­es who blog receive 97 per­cent more links (which assist in search engine rank­ing) to their web­site and con­sid­ered the fifth most trust­ed resource for accu­rate online infor­ma­tion. When devel­op­ing blog con­tent it’s impor­tant to keep your key­word strat­e­gy a part of this process.

Devel­op­ing a diverse con­tent mix while focus­ing on your tar­get­ed key­words will help bring more eye­balls to your web­site.

6. Be Active In Social Media

Being active in social media is no longer an option­al part of your mar­ket­ing mix. Social media is now required for all busi­ness­es that wish to not only enhance their dig­i­tal efforts, but improve rela­tion­ships with exist­ing and new patients.

Social media sites have high domain author­i­ty, mean­ing that they are con­sid­ered an impor­tant web­site, thus search engines give them pri­or­i­ty in rank­ing. Your busi­ness should, at min­i­mum, cre­ate pro­files for the biggest plat­forms – Face­book, Twit­ter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

These social net­works also let you have anoth­er dig­i­tal space where you can pro­mote your con­tent and edu­cate con­sumers, in the hopes of increas­ing trust with your patient base.

Using social media is a great way to devel­op a com­mu­ni­ty hub to not only use it as a cus­tomer ser­vice oppor­tu­ni­ty, but also pro­mote your con­tent and recent news and reg­u­la­tions relat­ing to health care.

If you plan to pro­mote con­tent on social media, you’ll need a bud­get to boost your reach  – espe­cial­ly on Face­book. With lit­tle organ­ic reach to speak off, you’re bet­ter off spend­ing a few bucks to tar­get your ads at the audi­ence you want to reach.

7. Optimize For Mobile Devices

Your exist­ing and poten­tial patients are on the move and search­ing for health­care providers. These are crit­i­cal moments where you can win sim­ply by mak­ing sure your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate and access from a mobile device.

More Google search­es take place on mobile devices than on com­put­ers in 10 coun­tries, includ­ing the U.S. and Japan. Despite this, busi­ness­es still for­get to make sure their mobile expe­ri­ence is opti­mal for their users.

A mobile-opti­mized site loads quick­ly, sizes text so it’s easy to read, and makes links easy to tap on. You shouldn’t need to “pinch in” or mag­ni­fy the site in order to use it or nav­i­gate.

You want to make sure your site is respon­sive so it can be eas­i­ly viewed on any devices. To find out if your site is mobile friend­ly, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friend­ly Test tool. Sim­ply drop in your website’s address and click “Ana­lyze.” Using this tool will also give you a screen shot of what it looks like with­in a mobile device.

Because 53 per­cent of mobile search­es have local intent, your web­site should make it easy for your patients to find help­ful infor­ma­tion, such as:

• Your phone num­ber.
• Your address (or address­es if you have mul­ti­ple loca­tions).
• Insur­ance providers you accept.
• The var­i­ous ser­vices you offer.

Hav­ing your phone num­ber and loca­tion infor­ma­tion above the fold should be a pri­or­i­ty.

As a health­care provider, your web pres­ence is much more than just your brand’s name. Hav­ing a web­site that is actu­al­ly attract­ing con­sumers to your site and dri­ving patients into your facil­i­ty is crit­i­cal. The tips out­lined above can def­i­nite­ly help you to start rank­ing for terms that your cus­tomers are search­ing for.