Technical SEO for healthcare

According to recent findings from BrightEdge, two-thirds of online journeys kick off with a search engine query. Health Care Professionals (HCPs) increasingly turn to search engines to research conditions and delve deeper into treatment options, and this means your SEO strategies need to be robust, planned and comprehensive in order for your website to rank and be visible online.

Technical SEO is the key to creating a winning healthcare digital marketing strategy. It works behind the scenes, ensuring your website is discoverable and seen by the search engines. Even the most helpful and informative content will go unnoticed by potential patients and HCPs if your technical SEO takes a backseat.

By prioritising technical SEO, you will build a strong foundation for all of your marketing activity. It’s important to acknowledge that technical SEO is a long term and ongoing process and will help you to focus on creating high-quality content, building trust with patients and HCPs and ultimately making your healthcare organisation discoverable in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are a few quick changes you can make to your healthcare website to improve your SEO and search rankings.

• Encourage patients to review you on Google Business or social media – Positive reviews play a crucial role in building trust and credibility for healthcare providers. A top SEO tip for healthcare is to encourage patients to leave reviews on platforms like Google Business, Facebook, or specialised healthcare review sites, significantly enhancing your online reputation. Not only do reviews influence potential patients’ decisions, but they also contribute to your website’s visibility in search engine results.
• Optimise your HTML tags – HTML tags, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and heading tags, are vital elements for technical SEO. Title tags provide concise descriptions of each web page’s content and appear as clickable headlines in search results. Meta descriptions offer summaries that can entice users to click through to your website. By effectively optimising these tags with relevant keywords and compelling descriptions, you can improve your website’s visibility.
• Check your site’s technical health – Technical issues can hinder your website’s performance in search engine rankings. Ensure that your website loads quickly is mobile-friendly, has secure HTTPS encryption, and is free of broken links or crawl errors. Conducting regular audits to identify and address technical issues will serve as a medical marketer’s guide to website optimisation.

Technical SEO focuses on the backend or behind the scenes elements of your website, such as crawlability, website speed, mobile optimisation and structured data markup. On the other hand, on-page SEO focuses on optimising individual pages on a website to improve rankings. This includes optimising content, meta tags, headings, URLs, and multimedia elements for relevance and usability. Technical SEO is focused on website performance and on-page SEO focuses more on content. Both are crucial components of an effective SEO strategy aimed at boosting a website’s search engine visibility and driving organic traffic.

A technical SEO strategy helps to identify any issues in the backend of our healthcare and pharma websites so they can be fixed. It’s important to conduct regular site health checks to ensure that no issues affect the ranking of your website. Having an optimised website with minimal technical issues will likely increase your website’s performance in search.

Anyone within the healthcare industry, from medical clinics and practitioners to healthcare professionals can benefit from optimising their medical website.