Medical SEO has become a prime requirement for healthcare websites with the increasing demand to maintain a robust presence online. Therefore, setting apart an SEO budget is also important. However, most businesses either don’t have a clear search engine optimization strategy, or they don’t have a budget in place. This is not advisable because it would lead to waste of time and money on a service that will not provide a positive outcome. SEO professionals and marketers across the globe are constantly evaluating their strategies and trying to finalize a budget for improving website’s visibility.
First, determine how much you want to spend on your overall healthcare digital marketing efforts – along with SEO this would include email marketing, paid search, social media, display ads, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, remarketing campaigns. After that, you have to determine what percentage of that budget should be assigned to SEO.
To plan the budget for your SEO campaign, here are some helpful considerations:
- Set Your Goals
The first and foremost step is to check last year’s budget and it can serve as a framework for this year’s budget. If you have gained profit from previous years’ spending, then this year you can increase that amount by some percentage. If you feel that your money has not been spent well, invest a lesser amount on a more robust strategy. Spending some time and money on campaign strategies based on business goals will be useful. To improve traffic, use historical data or market research from external sources and find out how you should spend to get optimum results. Your budget may need to be more flexible if your goal is to outrank a competitor.
- Content Generation
The next step is to distribute your money to certain areas to improve your performance and achieve your business goals. Content continues to play a crucial role in SEO but it is important to determine the amount of content marketing required and which type of content will gain more importance in 2018.
- Videos: Video traffic has grown significantly over the years. It is predicted that by 2021, 82 percent of all web traffic will be for videos. So if you want your content to reach your audience quickly, the ideal way is to dedicate a portion of your budget towards producing and distributing videos that are relevant.
- Quality: Content marketing has always remained important for SEO and millions of medical brands and individuals are publishing various types of content to reach out to potential customers or patients. So it is vital to invest time and resources to create informative and useful content. It is better to invest bigger portion of your SEO budget on generating more content as long as the quality is top notch. Publishing poor quality content in large numbers will not be beneficial, so spend for good quality content.
- Promotion of Content: If you are posting informative content, users will surely share the content and with time, the content will become viral. This will make your medical brand or business popular. However, in this competitive world this alone is not enough to succeed. If you want to be successful with your content, it is important to set apart a good amount to be spent on support and promotion of your content through social media channels, press releases and advertisements.
- Mobile optimized: Today, a majority of users access the internet using their mobiles. By 2015 mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic. Therefore make sure that all you content is mobile optimized. So more importance should be given to mobile users and your SEO efforts should focus on providing optimum experience for people using smartphones and other mobile devices.
- Whom to target
Targeting the right audience is very important for digital marketing. Users now prefer personalized and specific content. Following are the different ways you can target your audience:
- Demands of the audiences keep on rising; they want personalized and targeted content. So keep a sum of money for market research or interviews that will help you learn more about your audience and create content specifically for them.
- Voice searches have increased phenomenally over the last decade and today it is the age of smart speakers that have increased voice search. So focusing more on voice search is important. Better long-tail keyword research and featured snippet optimization are great tools in this regard.
- Another important element is local search. This is more rewarding for medical businesses. If your business is locally relevant, your local SEO efforts should be strong enough. This helps users to find you easily. So, some amount should be invested on local review development and other local SEO strategies.
- Link Building
Link building is still important for a successful SEO campaign, and this must be taken into account when planning your SEO budget. Building authority is not possible without engaging in link building. Assigning resources to gain a few high authority links is important to achieve business goals.
Every month a certain amount of money should be spent on the above mentioned strategies. If you own a small business, that should get you a minimum threshold of quality and quantity of content, which will in turn allow you stay competitive. Spending money on poor quality content and outdated SEO strategies is of no use whereas spending some money on a single piece of outstanding content or another effective SEO strategy can give your campaign a huge boost.
SEO is a long-term strategy and you cannot expect to see results overnight. Keeping an eye on the latest trends and evaluating and planning for the future are important to gain positive results. Generally, it takes about 4 to 6 months to see a positive change in ranking and a span of 6 to 12 months for more complete results.
Digital marketing for healthcare includes various techniques that focus on engaging with potential consumers and ensuring more conversions. Spending your money, time and resources wisely on the right SEO strategies will help you improve traffic and ranking. While making your SEO budget plan, make sure that that your in-house team is well equipped with the right tools. Another option is to hire a professional medical SEO service provider that understands search engine algorithms and ranking, and will work to bring your practice’s page at the top of the search results page. Reliable SEO experts strive to understand your medical business and design marketing campaigns that will bring more benefits to your organization.
