In today’s digital world, patients from all over the world including India rely on the internet for their health problems even if they have a common headache! And if your medical website is search engine optimized (SEO), it would show at the top of the search results and your guess is as good as mine that most of the patients would check out the medical website which will appear at the top 5 results of a Google search.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught Health-Care Industries just how important a digital presence is.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the Indian Health-Care infrastructure to the limit but amidst all the chaos, companies like Pharmeasy, NetMeds, etc. capitalized on SEO techniques and delivered medicines at the doorsteps of the patients, and attracted a large number of website traffic from their targeted audience.

Therefore, there is an immediate need for the healthcare industry to adopt SEO strategies to make sure that their website appears on the first page of a Google search.

What is SEO for the Health-Care Industry?

Simply put, SEO for the Health-Care industry means increased visibility of your website to your potential patients to attract website traffic.

Suppose you are a patient and suffering from a cold that has gone longer than 3 days, what would be the first thing you will do? 

Call your doctor and schedule an appointment? No!

You would unlock your mobile phone and start typing the symptoms you are experiencing and then research these symptoms on various websites and look for possible treatments available at home.

If you are a General Physician who lives in Delhi, SEO techniques for your website can boost up the ranking of your website in a Google search result.

Why is SEO critical for the Health-Care Industry?

The Health-Care Industry in India is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. Its market share in India is expected to reach US $132.84 billion by 2022.

In India, for a long time, the Health-Care Industry was considered to be the slowest in terms of digital transformation. Health-care companies used to rely greatly on the traditional methods. 

In the old times, a patient got to know about a doctor in his area through word-of-mouth references and even if the patient had just a common cold, he/she used to pay a large sum as visitation charges.

In some cases, patients used to travel long distances to see a doctor due to a lack of information about doctors in the local area.

But that all changed with the introduction of the Internet and various government policies targeted at digitizing the Health-Care Industry in India. The healthcare sector in India has digitized for ease of marketing.

The Digital India program has speeded up the digitization process in the healthcare industry. The number of mobile and internet users has increased significantly over the past decade or so.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become very unsafe for people to visit a doctor physically anymore. Due to the COVID-19 effects, the number of people relying on the internet for Health-Care services has increased now more than ever before. 

62% of people use smartphones to search for health information. If you go to Google search, you will find more mobile websites than desktop websites.

Today, the number of people searching for hospitals using their mobile book an appointment is more than those booking appointments using a desktop.

In this digital era, where most of the patients now look for treatments and healthcare services available online, it has become very critical for the healthcare industry to digitize themselves and adopt SEO techniques to make their products or services available for the needy in their local area.

Needless to say, adopting SEO techniques will reduce patient acquisition costs as well as traditional methods of posting ads on billboards, newspapers, etc., which costs more than the patient pays you!

How to do SEO for your Medical Website?

We have already discussed why it is so critical for the healthcare industry to adopt SEO techniques.

Here are a few tips on how to do SEO for your Medical Website: –

1. Start with the content of your medical website

The content of your medical website should be unique and should be the best out there. The content of your website should stand out against your competitors and should be relevant and comprehensible.

Posting various blogs, videos on medical-related topics and methods to increase immunity and posting about various diseases’ symptoms and treatments will not only attract a wider audience, but it will help boost your ranking in google search results.

Make sure your website has an “about us” page and various qualifications of the medical team to gain customers’ trust and credibility.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing compete with each other and all of them want to provide the most relevant search results for a user. Therefore, your content should be the best out there and relevant so that your medical advice can reach the needy.

Symptoms and medical conditions are the most searched topics for patients before visiting a hospital, therefore having extensive information about them will help in improving user experience.

Here is an example of a medical website. As shown in the above screenshot, this website has posted 100s of blogs on medical-related queries and medical wellness. The website has also posted various stuff about COVID-19 to attract a large audience.

2. Do Proper Keyword Research

Keyword Research plays a very important role in SEO for the Health-Care Industry. Having the relevant keywords in your medical website will help your website’s ranking in search engine results.

For example: – best Cardiologist in Delhi, best heart surgery in Delhi, etc.

Having keywords like the ones mentioned above will help you to receive major website traffic from your targeted audience.

There are tools for researching keywords as well like Google’s keyword planner. 

If you have a Google Ads account, this is a great way to see how many people are searching for terms related to your industry and how many other businesses are competing for traffic from those terms.

3. Focus on Local SEO

There are many big players in the healthcare industry in India like NetMeds, pharmacy, etc. Competing with them in a wider market is almost impossible because they are doing search engine optimization for a long period.

Therefore, focusing on Local SEO is the best method to optimize your medical website.

After you have researched the search terms used by the potential patients, it’s important to optimize them for a particular local area so that your website is visible to your targeted audience.

For example: – Instead of putting “Best Cardiologist in Delhi”, but something like, “Best Cardiologist in Kamla Nagar (local area in Delhi)”.

Therefore, when your potential patients living in Kamla Nagar search for something like, “Best Cardiologist Near Me” or “Best Cardiologist in Kamla Nagar”, your medical website will be the first one they see!

SEO Strategies and Tips for Health-Care Industry

SEO for the Health-Care Industry is not easy, especially since the increase in competition from big players like pharmacy, NetMeds, etc.

Here are some strategies and tips for SEO:

1. Perform an SEO Audit

Before you develop an SEO strategy, you need to examine where you are on the search engines and how well your pages are performing.

To put it simply, an SEO audit is a process of identifying issues within your website that are preventing your website from appearing on the first page of a search engine result.

If there are issues, it might mean that your website is not easy to navigate and its readability is not good or your content is not relevant according to the keywords you have inserted or your content does not stand out against your competitors. 

SEO audits assist in identifying technical and on-page SEO issues, keyword gaps, competitor website metrics, organic vs paid traffic, individual page metrics, etc. You can assess the goals and conversion rates and tweak your strategies accordingly.

2. Create a Google My Business Page

As shown in the above screenshot, if your website has a Google my business page, it can show at the top 3 results like this.

This page covers almost half of the screen and users are most likely to click on these websites rather than scrolling down.

You can create a google my business page on google.com/business.

Make sure that you fill out all the information required like name, address, phone number, etc. Google ranks only those websites on this page that have the most complete and relevant information.

Creating this page will help you to generate constant leads from your targeted audience in your local area.

3. Focus on Reviews

As shown in the above screenshot, having good reviews on your website will earn your customer’s trust and improve your website’s credibility.

Make sure you have good reviews as it also helps in improving your SEO ranking.

In the above screenshot, the second website is not #1 but still, the number of reviews and ratings will grab more attention and traffic.

If you have a lot of happy customers, make sure you are actively asking for reviews on Google, Instagram, Facebook, and other important third-party review sites.

Reviews and Ratings are the first things we look at before trusting a service, therefore it is very important to have good reviews.

4. Use Free or Paid SEO tools

Imagine if you already have a website, but you are not getting the kind of response you wanted and your website is not showing up on the first page of a google search result. There arises a need for certain tools to identify the problem in your website and optimize it.

SEO tools provide information on backlinks and keywords as well as insights into SEO competition on the Internet.

SEO tools are important to get customers. They help you increase your website’s ranking on search engine results and improve user experience.

No matter how ingenious and creative your website is; if there aren’t sufficient viewers on that particular site, then the product you are offering won’t reach your target audience. 

There are many tools like Google AdWords, Mobile-Friendly Test, etc. which helps in optimizing your website.

5. Review Your Redirects and Identify Broken Links

If you have a website, you may have worked hard and put in long hours to make it user-friendly and well organized. But if your links are not working, all your hard work will get wasted. Broken links on your website can be harmful:

Bad user experience – When your website has broken links, it redirects to a page with a 404 error page not found. Users will get frustrated when they see these errors.

Your SEO efforts will go in vain: – Bad user experience will ultimately decrease your rankings in search engine results as Google sees user experience as a ranking factor.

To avoid these problems, you should regularly check for broken links and redirect them. There are several tools you can use to identify broken links like Google Analytics, Xenu, etc. 

6. Your Medical Website should be Mobile-Friendly

Your website should be mobile-friendly. It should be easy to navigate through the content and the different tabs. Blogs about different medical-related queries and the services you offer should be indifferent tabs and have proper headings.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, you run the risk of not being found on google searches!

No one wants to spend hours reading the contents of your website if the text is too small and impossible to understand. People nowadays are just a click away from moving to a different website, so do not give them a reason to!

Google marks your website as mobile-friendly and non-mobile friendly. If your text is too small and difficult to navigate, Google will mark it non-mobile-friendly which adversely affects your ranking on the search results.

7. Make sure your website is 100% secure

Imagine if you are looking for a dentist in your local area, and you click on a website and as you are looking for various home remedies and the contact information of the dentist, you find there is a not-secure message next to the website’s URL, would you still want to stay on that website

No, right?

No one wants to stay on a website in which there are constant pop-ups and malicious links which take you someplace else when you accidentally click on them. 

That’s where site security comes in. Online security measures, or a lack of them, can impact your SEO rankings and user experience.

Google will rank your website negatively if it is not secure. It will place a not-secure msg next to the website’s URL thereby leading to customers not trusting the website which will affect the ranking of your website in search results.

Securing your website using HTTPS will keep your website safe from hackers and keep customers’ trust.

8. Gain High-Quality Backlinks

One of the best SEO strategies for your medical website is to gain high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher you are likely to rank on Google.

A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. In simple terms, it is all about credibility. If your website’s link is on a reputable website, it increases the credibility and trust of your website. 

Google will rank your website in the search results according to the credibility and trust of your website. 

9. Social Media Marketing Strategies

Social media has emerged as the new and popular form of digital marketing.

If something is generating buzz, those conversations are likely taking place on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

Any business needs to use social media, but it’s even more important for healthcare.

For starters, healthcare is a people-focused industry. You need to understand what people want and what motivates them, so you can tailor your communication to their interests. 

Social media offers all of this and it also helps in boosting your website’s rank on search engine results.

A search engine’s chief aim is to provide high-quality, relevant content to users. Search engines search the web for high-quality and relevant content to give to its users, and as more web communication has moved to social media, Google and other search engine providers use social signals as a ranking factor.

Google’s partnership with Twitter, which added tweets to search results, is further evidence of the growing significance of social media in search rankings.

Conclusion

The competition is fierce in today’s market. Other healthcare brands that have adopted SEO Services and digital marketing are getting constant leads and growing rapidly. We’ve said enough about it already!

Healthcare is one such industry that aims to use SEO as a method to improve its client lists. Therefore, you should not underestimate the importance of SEO in healthcare.

Your website plays a significant role in your business success in the healthcare industry. SEO has worked, currently works, and will continue to work, contributing to bringing more visitors and generating leads