Healthcare SEO is quite competitive, with a great deal of hospitals, nursing homes, specialized healthcare centers and physician clinics capitalizing on the increasing health awareness of the public. So there are certain strategies your healthcare website really needs to include to avoid results that can be unpleasant.
Voice Search Optimization
The importance of voice search can never be overemphasized. It’s rising rapidly, with Google reporting 20% of its Android devices and mobile app searches as being voice searches. That figure gets higher when you factor in Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Amazon’s Echo that function solely on voice recognition.
The content in your pages needs to be optimized for voice search. When it comes to healthcare, people often search for disease symptoms and treatment details. When they speak out “What’s causing my lower abdomen pain?”, “Why are my eyes red and watery?” or “Where to do colonoscopy?” your pages need to come up in the results, depending on the relevance of what’s being asked. Create content and optimize it in such a manner that it gives searchers the best answers to what they’re looking for.
So how do you optimize your content for voice search? By incorporating conversational language.
- Voice search optimization requires content creation of a slightly different kind, since, as you’ve seen from the examples above, people search in a conversational manner, with question words often involved such as “why”, “where can I find”, “how can I”, etc. These question words need to be incorporated in the pages of your site. For that you need natural, conversational language. Creating Q&A pages with these question words and phrases would really help here.
- People also perform voice search with phrases such as “nearby”, “near me”, “in my neighborhood” or “in my city”. They could also mention names of cities, towns or neighborhoods. So make sure the FAQ and other content in your pages highlight the neighborhood, city and state where your practice is located so when they search for relevant treatments in your city or neighborhood, your site comes up.
Carrying out Site Audit
A site audit is absolutely essential so you can know how your SEO efforts are performing. This needs to be emphasized since the 2017 State of Digital Marketing report by the Search Engine Journal reveals that only 43% of SEO professionals carry out a site audit for their new clients every time. But experienced medical SEO companies know the importance of site audit and will surely do one for your site. It’s only with a site audit that you can identify any issues in your site, which will help you make the required changes.
Before starting any search optimization improvements for your site, an experienced SEO company will carry out site audit. The discoveries in the audit are vital indicators to design your SEO strategy. Most SEO tools provide SEO audit features that help you identify issues in the ranking and indexing on search engines. In any case, an experienced medical SEO company can get it done for you.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is one of these. Google’s professed goal has always been to render users the most relevant search results. That’s what its complex algorithms work for, to serve user-friendly websites that are relevant to the user’s search terms. The schema markup code helps Google’s algorithms to understand what your website is specifically about. So it makes it easier for the search engine to render your site among the search results when the user searches for a relevant topic.
Schema helps organize the information about your site, which helps Google get a clear map of the content it carries. What schema markup does is enable you to define the various elements of your website such as disease information, treatment details, reviews, address, events, FAQs, etc. You get to tell Google what the various pages in your website are about so the search engine’s algorithms can easily detect your website when someone searches for something relevant. This structured data is used by the search engines to display your website’s content appropriately.
The JSON-LD markup code (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is preferred by Google. It is also quite an easy schema code to implement. JSON-LD schema is easier to read and write and provides a description of the structure of the other data on a page.
In any case, you can hand over your SEO to a professional healthcare SEO company that can get the right schema code done for your pages. Remember, there are tools such as Schema App that can help your write schema code even if you don’t have expertise in Schema.org.
HTTPS Security
Google gives a warning on non-HTTPS sites, or insecure HTTP sites. This warning, “ot secure”, that appears on the side of the URL bar, could make people leave your site immediately, rendering all your health content marketing strategies worthless. It also doesn’t do your reputation any favors. Making your site secure may need more than just an SSL certificate. That’s probably the reason why many websites have refrained from shifting to HTTPS. With Google’s user warning system though, HTTPS is becoming increasingly necessary. As we mentioned before, healthcare SEO companies can help you by carrying out all the technical steps required.
Get your medical website really visible in the competitive medical SEO arena with these steps. Your strategy cannot take off without the aforementioned elements in place.
