As an SEO Agency for healthcare providers in South Africa we have seen how Covid-19 has reshaped the way information is found and accessed. New treatments, medicines, technologies and treatment mediums are emerging.
Many patients use Google to locate the best and closest healthcare provider in their area, so SEO in South Africa is an essential part of the modern day marketing approach for businesses like this. Some of these clients or patients will also be preferring to meet with you online. For Health Services providers, this means that the use of SEO consulting services has become a key online marketing tactic.
Patients are more likely to make an appointment if your website is at the top of the list.
Following an earlier piece on digital marketing for healthcare providers, In order for your practise to be found online, it must be at the top of search results.
This means you are no longer just competing with other providers in your town or city. Your competitors are now virtual and can be anywhere.
You may therefore miss out on potential new patients if your website does not rank well on Google.
That’s why any Post Covid-19 healthcare providers need healthcare SEO.
The Role of a SEO Agency for Healthcare Providers
If you aren’t taking advantage of organic queries, you’re essentially handing those patients over to your rivals.
If you follow Google’s most recent SEO guidelines, especially when it comes to healthcare content, you’ll be able to outrank your competitors and increase your online visibility.
If you are working with a SEO Agency for healthcare providers they will tell you about the more recent announcements by Google
Some of these guidelines from Google for healthcare providers include the following:
Reliability Checking
It is common for medical professionals to believe that PPC advertising, or pay-per-click, is enough to bring in the visitors they need.
When it comes to PPC, it’s like applying an adhesive bandage. Just for a short period of time.
In order to attract new patients to your website, you must incorporate SEO into your digital marketing strategy.
Ongoing Consistency
Your search ranking will suffer if your website and its content aren’t considered high quality by Google.
E-A-T and YMYL
Speaking of quality, E-A-T and YMYL are two critical terms in healthcare SEO which have been used for quite some time now.
There are three E-A-Ts: expertise, authority, and trust.
In order to help third-party raters rate Google’s search results, the concept was created to standard what these third party raters will look for.
In spite of its lack of direct influence on search rankings, E-A-T provides valuable insight into the kinds of websites that Google values and wants to promote.
E-A-T is critical to the success of any medical information website.
It’s possible that your healthcare clients who look at articles on eatmentstr nhealth will be influenced by the facts and figures you provide.
Those who visit and read your website are doing so because they want to know why they should put their health in your hands.
The information you provide must be of the utmost quality, with an abundance of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Then you have a shot at making it in the healthcare industry.
YMYL, an acronym for “Your Money or Your Life,” is a logical next step.
Content that can have an impact on the reader’s health, finances, or safety is considered to be YMYL.
The competitive nature of the healthcare industry necessitates an understanding of this concept.
You’ll have a harder time ranking if your content doesn’t meet these standards (e.g., if it contains errors or is lacking in information).
Strategies for Healthcare SEO That Are Critically Important
We have found that as SEO Agency for healthcare providers in South Africa, we have been able to compete with the bigger healthcare providers for certain niece search terms.
If you use the right kind of SEO to get your medical practice’s website in front of the right people, you can outrank your rivals.
Using the Correct Healthcare Keywords Is Essential.
The right keywords for your industry should be your primary focus when it comes to content optimization.
The healthcare services you provide should be your first point of focus, since that’s what the majority of people doing a search for will be looking for.
Using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, you can find the best keywords for your industry by comparing what people are searching for and what they aren’t.
Avoid stuffing your content with keywords at all costs.
Google will penalise your website if it uses this spammy tactic. Instead, use relevant, readable, and natural language to incorporate long-tail keywords into your content.
Aside from the fact that this separates you from the Amazons of this world, you’ll also begin to attract the patients you want – those who live in your area and are looking for the specialised expertise your practise provides.
Keyword research in the field of healthcare
You won’t receive any organic traffic if no one is looking for your content. A successful healthcare SEO relies on keywords, so knowing what terms your patients and customers use when searching for your product or service is critical. According to one study, only 9% of all web pages get any traffic from Google at all.
As a starting point, think about how your target audience is searching for you. Searching for one of your primary keywords and seeing who comes up first on the results page is a good way to see what keywords your competitors are already using. Another option is to use a free keyword research tool, such as Google Keyword Planner, to find relevant keywords. Plug in one of your keywords into the Google keyword database and see how it generates ideas.
These methods can generate a large number of keyword suggestions, but they do not allow you to zero in on the ones that are most relevant to your campaign. To help with this, keyword metrics have been introduced to the picture. Try out tools like SEMrush or SimilarWeb, which offer free trials, to help you focus your efforts and determine which keywords are most relevant to your service or product. For a better understanding of how many times a keyword is searched and how many people click on it, look at these metrics:
- Volume of searches (starting from 1K)
- Difficulty ranking
- Click-through rate (CPC)
- Clicks the volume up and down buttons.
It’s a good idea to search for keywords over the course of three to six months in advance when working with healthcare providers on SEO.
Let’s take a look at some of the most effective healthcare SEO strategies.
In order to attract more patients, you must have a successful website for your hospital, practise, or healthcare organisation. This is great, but if patients can’t find your website on the internet, it’s not worth much. You’ll need a strong SEO marketing agency, a solid website, and an even stronger healthcare SEO strategy and tactical SEO team to rank on page one of an organic search.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a term used to describe the process of improving a website’s visibility in organic search results on search engines like Google and Bing. In order to rank on the first page of search engine results, you’ll need to hire a healthcare SEO agency that’s willing to put in the time and money necessary. Your Healthcare SEO agency’s SEO efforts must be unwavering and all-encompassing.
Sophisticated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the Healthcare Industry
Higher search engine rankings for healthcare practises can be achieved through the proper use of SEO techniques and the avoidance of black hat tactics. The term “black hat” SEO refers to the practise of using “secret tricks” to boost a website’s ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. As a result of the algorithmic changes Google has implemented to combat black hat SEO, healthcare providers who use it will be penalised.
In the event that an SEO “organic marketing professional” approaches you and makes promises of “quick results” that sound too good to be true, it’s likely that they are. A long-term strategy involving three core SEO techniques is the best approach to healthcare SEO.
How SEO Agencies for healthcare providers use On-Site optimisation
The code, images, and words that make up your website are referred to as on-site, or on-page, technical SEO in healthcare. SEO is influenced by a wide range of factors, including your health services website’s content, loading speed, and mobile responsiveness.
Using Headings as Metadata
In the backend of your website, you’ll find an HTML (coding) element that specifies the titles of your pages. SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) display this as the clickable headline for a particular search result.
Metadata: Description Tags for Search Engine Optimization
A 160-character-or-less summary of the page’s content appears just below the title tag in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Page Load Time
For Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), this is known as page speed and measures how quickly your website’s pages load.
Mobile first Strategy
It is imperative that your website’s content is optimised for mobile viewing. This is a critical component of your SEO strategy, given that more and more customers are searching for medical facilities and practitioners “near me.”.
- Website for primary care that is mobile-friendly and responsive
- A responsive design is flexible enough to fit on a variety of devices.
Meta Tags for Keywords
These aren’t visible to the general public, but search engines can see them. What you want to be found for is determined by your keywords.
Alternative Metadata
Alternate text is provided for search engines by the use of HTML attributes known as alt tags.
The H1 and H2
These are known as header tags, and they are an important SEO factor on your website’s page. They serve as a means of informing search engines about the content of your website.
Direct Hypertext Links (Anchor Text)
A hyperlink’s anchor text is the text that can be clicked on when the link is included in a piece of content. As a rule of thumb, anchor text should be relevant to the page that it’s being referenced from.
Italics and Bold
Bold and italic text formatting appeals to Google bots because it highlights important information and aids Google crawlers in determining what content is important.
Footer
Optimizing your website’s footer menu helps Google determine the relevance of your site in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Sitemaps
Google uses XML, which stands for Extensible Markup Language, to index web pages. Google and other search engines can easily find the URLs listed in your XML sitemap.
Visible for the benefit of the end user SEO practises require a clearly visible sitemap that visitors can access.
Changing the Material
Increasing the efficiency of your Healthcare SEO efforts and increasing your overall search engine traffic can be accomplished by updating dated healthcare/medical content.
Add a Large Number of Pages of Content
The information on your content pages should be of high quality and optimised for your target keywords.
If you’re in the medical field, you want your content to benefit the people who will be reading it.
High-quality content is king for healthcare businesses, whether it’s a detailed description of your services or blog posts that target their specific search query.
Medical websites are held to a higher standard by Google than those in other fields.
This is because the information on these pages could have a significant impact on the long-term well-being, contentment, or financial security of those who access them.
These pages could have dangerous or unintended medical consequences if they contain low-quality content.
When writing for your website, keep your intended audience in mind at all times.
What exactly are they trying to find?
What information can you give them that will be most useful in their quest?
Google will elevate your position as an industry authority if you write long-form educational content.
Off-Page SEO Strategies used by SEO agencies for healthcare providers
When other healthcare-related websites link to your site, Google considers your site to be “more important” than a site without any backlinks. When it comes to search engine rankings, you need relevant backlinks to help establish the authority and credibility of your web pages. The following “off-site” sources should be used to get backlinks to your website:
Journalistic Announcements Using press releases, your practise can inform journalists and major healthcare publications about significant events, such as winning an award or launching a new product or service.
Directories of Health Care
In addition to helping patients find your practise, directories also play a role in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of listings in directories, the frequency with which they appear, and the consistency with which they appear across directories all play a role in the ranking process.
Articles and Blogs
SEO-friendly blog posts and online articles position your website as a resource for customers who are searching for information on a particular topic.
Social Media in the Health Care Sector
SEO experts disagree on how much social media influences SEO, but the majority of them agree that having more likes and followers on social media pages, particularly Facebook, increases your site’s relevance and its chances of showing up on Google’s first page.
Managing Your Online Reputation
Before putting their faith in a company, the average customer reads seven reviews online. To avoid HIPAA violations while responding to both positive and negative reviews, you should respond to both. Patients’ identities should never be revealed in your responses.
3. Off-Site Local SEO for Healthcare Providers
Optimizing your site for local search traffic (also known as “local SEO” or “local search”) is the goal of local search engine optimization, or “local search.” The Google Map Pack, also known as a carousel, is a concept you’ll learn about when working with our Healthcare SEO experts.
For Google searches, this is a cluster of nearby businesses that are similar in nature. As an illustration, if a person in Cape Town, searched for “Women’s Health,” a list of businesses in the area that fit that description would appear.
Citations
References to your healthcare provider’s contact information can be found online in the form of citations. Google and other search engines use these in the same way as links to your website when determining the online authority of your company.
Directories
Directories need to be consistent, as we discussed earlier. Search engines can become confused when they see listings that are too similar. There should never be more than one listing for the same person under the title “Dr. Piet Roodt,” such as “Dr. Sandy Shaw, MD,” etc.
You can get help updating your directory listings if you’re unsure of their accuracy or consistency.
4. Technical SEO
Technical SEO plays a crucial role for especially competitive search terms of industries such as healthcare. For example, a secure connection, a responsive design, or a fast loading time are all examples of technical SEO. Technical SEO is the work you must do to ensure your website is crawled and indexed by Google.
For the sake of saving you time, I won’t go into great detail about technical SEO in this article. No matter how basic your knowledge of SEO is, it can mean the difference between a well-ranked site and one that doesn’t appear in any search results. While technical SEO is not a walk in the park, we’ll walk you through what to look out for when it comes to your website’s technical foundation.
The term “technical SEO” refers to improving a website’s technical aspects in order to improve its search engine rankings. Speed, crawlability, and search engine understanding are the foundations of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving your website’s elements in order to rise in the search rankings. Unlike off-page SEO, on-page SEO focuses solely on increasing the visibility of a website.
Why is it important to optimise your website’s technical aspects?
If you type in a search term into Google or any other search engine, you want the best results possible. In order to make this possible, Google uses robots to crawl and evaluate websites. The speed at which a page loads is one such factor that relies on the user’s experience. Search engine robots are aided in their understanding of your pages by a variety of other factors. Structured data, among other things, accomplishes this.
As a result, by improving your site’s technical aspects, search engines will be able to better understand it. Higher rankings or even rich results could be yours if you do this well.
If you make a serious technical error on your website, it can cost you money as well as time. Adding a trailing slash in the wrong place in your robots.txt file won’t be the first time you’ve accidentally blocked search engines from crawling your site from indexing.
However, it’s a common misconception that you should focus on the technical aspects of a website in order to satisfy search engines.
As a SEO agency for healthcare providers, one of the first things we will reiterate to you is that, a website should work well for your users – be fast, clear, and simple to use. For both users and search engines, a strong technical foundation often results in a better overall experience.
Outdated SEO methods?
A Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) When Creating Content
When it came to ranking well in search engines, the old rule was that you needed a high keyword density. As a result, content was written for search engines rather than humans, and as a result, it often read poorly. It didn’t provide any useful information, didn’t pique the reader’s interest, and was frequently misspelt and created just for the sake of having content. A 500-word article is considered to have thin content and to be of little use. The most important aspect of content is that it enlightens and entertains the reader, which may lead them to click a link to learn more. Articles that offer solutions to problems or sufficiently explain a topic are more likely to be helpful than those that do not.
Using the Same Words Over and Over Again
We used to place a lot of emphasis on keyword density. Many Internet experts advised us to repeat keywords as many times as possible so that search engines would be able to decipher what our content was about. As a result, the text became clunky and difficult to follow. The importance of keyword density is diminishing as more and more content is written for human consumption. Search engine spiders can figure out what your content is about and rank it appropriately if your text contains words related to your primary topic and some additional words to support your primary idea.
There is no evidence to support the notion that using your keywords three to ten times in a row will elevate your content above its naturally occurring position.
You’ll see an increase in your ranking over time as more people see your content, especially if they share it on social media. The best way to incorporate keywords into your content is to use the following structure: (1) main keyword, (2) secondary keyword, and (3) related keywords.
Too Many Keywords Are Being Targeted
It’s ideal if your content’s keywords are what people type into a search engine to find it. We can now use a variety of good keyword tools to help us identify keywords that are frequently searched. To avoid making your content too difficult to read, you should stick to a maximum of three to five keywords in each paragraph. The keywords you choose should relate to your main point and provide context for the rest of your article. You can’t get good results by trying to target multiple keywords or keyphrases that contain the same words.
SEO tools such as Yoast, which can analyse the density of keywords and recommend related terms, can be used instead. A call to action and well-written content are the best ways to persuade readers to take the next step. You won’t be penalised if your site has quality content, and you’ll get more visitors as a result.
Spammy websites Links
The number of other websites that link to yours has an impact on your site’s search engine ranking as well. The quantity of links is important, but the quality of those links is even more critical. To engage in link spam, you must obtain links from a wide variety of sources solely for the purpose of building a link profile.
Guest blogging on unknown or unrelated websites and submitting articles to article directories are common sources of these. If the content is solely focused on your targeted keywords, these two things are not necessarily bad, but they are not good links.
Using Guest Bloggers Correctly
Your site’s best source of backlinks is to get links from high-ranking, relevant websites. Because of their importance in search engine rankings, these are not always the most straightforward to acquire. Inquire about guest blogging opportunities with high-profile websites in your field. As part of a larger community, collaborate with others to produce valuable, informative content. Expert blogs like Neil Patel‘s or our digital marketing soap box here are good for collaborations. Links from high-ranking websites help newer websites with informative content gain credibility.
In Conclusion
To increase the number of people who visit your website and to increase the likelihood that they will convert to customers, implement sound SEO strategies. Also, don’t forget to make your site responsive to mobile browsers. This is also critical in an age where more and more people shop on their smartphones and tablets.
If you and your team want to understand more about the basics of SEO or digital marketing for startups, one option would be to take one of our short courses on digital marketing. Alternatively, contact us for a free conversation.
