Consistent high rankings in the search results pages ensure constant visibility online, which increases the chances for people visiting your site. That’s organic search performance, and search engine optimization (SEO) is a collection of strategies to ensure high rankings. It requires websites to be made quick loading, more user-friendly, and easily navigable – these are all the more important for medical and healthcare manufacturer websites.
Organic search, much of which is from the mobile phone, makes up around 64% of the traffic of a website and that’s what you need to target. The following SEO steps could help in improving your organic search performance:
Racking up the Backlinks
Links from other healthcare or related websites to your site really work to bring in users to your site – and your website gets more popular with the search engines too. Backlinks improve credibility, and here’s how to accumulate them:
- Submitting content such as articles and press releases to sites frequently visited by audiences
- Generating content with specific platforms in mind, in order to secure more links from them
- Guest blogging on popular sites belonging to your niche
- Building broken links
- Influencing users to mention you in their blogs, social media posts, reviews, etc
Useful, Relevant and Engaging Content
Valuable content can never be overemphasized for quality websites, particularly medical sites. Useful and quality content can lead to more backlinks, more recommendations on social media networks, higher rankings on the search results pages, and improved reputation. Content should be informative and relevant on your web pages, and the articles and blogs submitted to other sites. Content should also be interactive and include videos, Flash animation, slide decks, infographics, etc which would engage readers and also motivate them to share the content.
Keyword Optimization
This is a no-brainer, but apparently many website owners still do not realize how important it is to use appropriate keywords. All it takes is keyword research with smart tools, and you can identify relevant keywords for improving your search rankings.
The idea is to select keywords that are among the most popular but also those that do not have too many competitors using them. Use these keywords in your content, but we don’t mean senselessly flooding with keywords which would brand your site a spam in no time. Judicious use of keywords in content helps. It is also important that you continue keyword research and refresh your keyword list to continue ensuring good ranking.
Here’s a research page from WordTracker:
On-page SEO
We mentioned content first, but before you do that you must spruce up your on-page SEO. It doesn’t take much effort, yet webmasters so easily overlook this aspect which can bring about significant improvements in search rankings.
- Meta titles must indicate the page content, include – but not be stuffed with – primary keywords, and ideally consist of 55 characters and an important keyword.
- Create XML sitemap to provide information about your site, so search engines will know the kind of content you post.
Ensure that meta descriptions appearing beneath your URL in the search result pages contain secondary keywords so that they are persuasive to users.
Social Media Optimization
If you need to get your presence felt quickly you need to embrace social media. You need to engage with users through the social networks, and this does lead to better search rankings. You would have seen that Twitter interactions are now directly integrated into Google SERP – it makes Twitter quite important, with estimates that a minimum of two tweets each day of the week is necessary to secure at least 30% of the amazing organic reach Twitter has.
For a healthcare organization there surely is some health tip, disease prevention information, or healthy lifestyle thought you could tweet on, or post on Facebook. Get a thought-provoking photo on Instagram, and post a useful health tip video on your YouTube channel – there are so many possibilities out there and many more social networks too.
Reviews by Users
With social networking, the users, who could be your existing or prospective customers, take over the promotion of your brand with good intentions. One of the ways they do it is through reviews. Reviews play a significant part in user decision and conversions. Obviously, positive reviews about the care and treatment you provide at your hospital or practice or about the healthcare products you manufacture or sell can positively influence the average user. The more you encourage users to post reviews on your site and in their social media interactions, blogs, etc the greater is the credibility you earn – very important for an organization dealing with healthcare.
Tactics of Market Leaders
Sometimes, merely observing the market leaders can do you more good than doing anything yourself. Your niche has market leaders who may be there because of the SEO techniques they employ. It’s time to do some research, discover the kind of content that works better, the keywords that get ranked well, and the backlinks that are used. A digital marketing company would be using tools such as SimilarWeb and other powerful tools to gauge competitor strategy.
These steps are foundations for your medical website to:
- Get conspicuous
- Build authority, and
- Drive traffic consistently
These will eventually translate to greater conversions and improved ROI. For busy hospitals, physician clinics and medical equipment & service providers, outsourcing these processes to a reliable search engine optimization company can bring about great results thanks to experienced professionals devoted to getting their client’s website performing well.
