Healthcare SEO – Why you should optimise your medical website to ensure it ranks in a search
7th Feb 2023
SEO is a critical marketing strategy that’s often neglected in the medical sector, whether it be due to a lack of knowledge and understanding or uncertainty about how a medical website can be optimised whilst adhering to strict compliance. It’s critical for medical websites to harness the power of SEO as the healthcare digital space becomes increasingly crowded. Effective SEO strategies will guarantee that your website, brand, healthcare product or medical device will be seen by your targeted audience on the search engines. At Varn Health, we have extensive expertise in SEO and technical search marketing, particularly tailored to the compliance-heavy healthcare industry.
Patients and Health Care Professionals (HCPs) often turn to the internet to research conditions and treatments, build knowledge and seek providers or resources. With millions of searches related to health and wellness happening every day, optimising your medical website for search engines isn’t just advantageous—it’s now essential.
This article explores why investing in healthcare SEO for your medical brand can be so beneficial.
Understanding your market and building a brand strategy
Gaining an understanding of your target market is essential for any successful brand-building strategy. Through effective healthcare SEO, you can gain valuable insights into the online behaviour and preferences of your target audience. Analysing keywords and search trends related to your medical speciality or services means you can tailor your content and messaging to better resonate with your target audience.
With the help of an experienced SEO agency, who can make recommendations and implement changes on your healthcare website, you’ll be able to improve Google rankings, brand visibility, traffic and conversion/click-through rates. They can support you in tailoring all of your online activity for the most impact with your target market.
Build brand visibility with quality backlinks
Backlinks are an essential component of SEO and play a big role in determining your website’s authority and credibility. In the healthcare industry, backlinks for reputable sources like medical journals, universities, and healthcare organisations or blogs can significantly boost your brand visibility and search engine rankings. Securing these links can be achieved with an effective off-page SEO strategy.
Secure brand awareness and trust
HCPs and patients are turning more and more to search engines for resources, diagnoses, treatments and solutions in healthcare. By understanding the specific phrases and keywords HCPs and patients are searching for, along with their buyer intent, you can gain the insights needed to create a robust keyword strategy. By optimising each page on your website with respective targeted keywords, this will ensure that your content resonates with the audience you aim to reach.
Additionally, making sure your brand gains the trust of the search engines and your audience, plays a key role in securing its visibility. HCPs and patients want to find the information they’re looking for quickly and without difficulty, so if you can answer the queries HCPs or patients clearly and these can be found easily, you’ll start to build brand trust as well as awareness. At Varn Health our team helps our clients to ensure their website doesn’t just rank in searches, but also effectively communicates it’s brand story, setting them apart from competitors and establishing themselves as an authority in their specific healthcare space. We understand the importance of crafting a digital presence that not only captures attention but also reflects the values and identity of your brand.
Make sure your website is intuitive and useful
User experience (UX) should be a consideration for your healthcare website. Search engines tend to prioritise websites that provide a seamless and intuitive user experience, as this indicates their relevance and value to users. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your medical website is well-designed, easy to navigate, and provides useful information for visitors. In addition, this will make it easier for web crawlers to crawl and index your site which is how you rank better in searches.
Consider a paid search strategy
While organic search traffic is essential for long-term brand sustainability, a paid search strategy can complement your healthcare SEO efforts and provide immediate results. Understanding how paid social and search adverts can help drive traffic to your website and build brand awareness for medical brands is important. We can support you in creating adverts, monitoring ROI and optimising campaigns, all whilst adhering to medical sector regulations for paid promotions dependent on the country.
Supporting your SEO journey long-term
By upskilling your healthcare marketing team in SEO, you not only enhance the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts but also future-proof your brand against changes in search engine algorithms and industry trends. Investing in SEO training for your healthcare marketing team and developing your in-house expertise fosters a culture of continuous learning and development. At Varn Health, we often support medical businesses on their journey to SEO success by crafting bespoke training courses to upskill and inspire internal teams.
If you’re interested in learning more about healthcare SEO and how Varn Health can help your medical brand get more visible online, get in touch with our expert team.
