In today’s digital age, a strong online presence is crucial for any healthcare practice. Patients increasingly turn to search engines to find the care they need. But how do you ensure your practice stands out amongst the competition? The answer lies in On-Site Healthcare SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
By optimizing your website content and structure, you can significantly improve your search engine ranking, attract more qualified leads, and ultimately, grow your practice. This comprehensive guide will equip you with the essential strategies for mastering On-Site Healthcare SEO.
A successful hospital, practice, or healthcare organization website facilitates patient communication and helps you win more of the patients you want. But this means little if patients can’t find your website online.
Here are factors that impact aspects of On-Site Healthcare SEO for healthcare brands
Title Tags
These are an HTML (coding) element within the backend of your site that specifies the titles of your web pages. This is what’s displayed on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as the clickable headline for a given search result.
SEO Metadata: Description Tags
These show up just beneath the title tags in SERPs and are comprised of a ~160 character or less description that summarizes the web page’s content.
Site Speed
Also called page speed, this is a measurement of how fast your web pages load, which is an important algorithm for Google to determine where your page will show up in SERPs.
Mobile Responsiveness
Your website content should display in a way that is mobile-device friendly. With more and more customers going mobile and searching for hospitals and practices “near me,”, this is a vital part of your SEO strategy.
A responsive design adapts to different screen sizes.
Keyword Meta Tags
These aren’t visible to online visitors but are visible to search engines. Your keywords determine what you want to be found for in SERPs.
Alt Tags
An alt tag is an HTML attribute that’s applied to image tags, which provide a text alternative for search engines.
H1’s and H2’s
These are called header tags and are an important on-page SEO factor. They’re used to communicate to search engines what your website is actually about.
Anchor Text Links
Anchor text is the clickable text within a hyperlink in your content. SEO best practices indicate that your anchor text should be relevant to the page you’re linking to.
Bold, Italics
Google bots tend to like bold and italic formatting for text, as it emphasizes what should stand out, helping Google crawlers determine what’s relevant.
Footer
How you optimize the footer menu of your website further identifies to Google your site’s relevance on SERPs.
Sitemaps
XML for search engines: XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, and is similar in context to HTML. An XML sitemap is an invitation for search engines to crawl the URLs that are listed within that sitemap.
Visible for user experience: A visible sitemap that your site visitors can see is vital for strong SEO practices.
Changing Content
Updating old healthcare/medical content will help increase the effectiveness of your Healthcare SEO efforts and boost your overall search engine traffic.