Staying Current with Medical Practice SEO

Making Certain Your Online Marketing is Fully Optimized

You’re starting a new medical practice or looking to grow an existing one. You know you won’t survive without a solid web presence, and you know that means more than just throwing up a website or posting occasionally on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. With the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing, though, it can be difficult to know if you’re taking all the necessary steps to maximize your online visibility to potential patients. Where should you be putting your focus? Let’s look at the top search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing strategies for 2022 and looking ahead to 2023.

• You have to be mobile-friendly—This has been the biggest shift in the last five years, as more and more online shoppers conduct all or most of their searches on mobile devices. Industry experts anticipate that within the next two to three years, about three of every four queries online will be made on a smartphone or tablet. There are a number of key factors to optimizing for mobile, but the most important are probably the speed at which your mobile site loads and ensuring that your site looks the same on mobile and desktop devices.
• Video will play a greater role in your search engine rankings—Videos are rapidly replacing written content across the web. There are ways to optimize your videos to maximize traffic to your site. An experienced and knowledgeable online marketing specialist can help.
• Expect more and more searches to be initiated by voice—The advancements in voice recognition technology mean that more than half of all searches are now conducted using Siri, Alexa, and other similar platforms. To optimize for voice-activated search, make certain your keywords and key phrases are longer and more natural sounding.
• Optimize all images on your site—Graphics and other images all have filenames and tags that can be crawled by search engine bots. Take the time to carefully craft that information to boost your search engine results.
• Use featured snippets to bolster visibility online—Those question and answer boxes that appear at the beginning of a search engine results page (SERP) are referred to as “featured snippets.” If you want one of those snippets to link to your online marketing content, there are a number of SEO strategies you can try, including ordered lists and tables.
• For Google, content remains king—Google tends to give greater weight to sites that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (the “EAT” factor). Google also considers the format of your content and how it relates to your potential audience. For example, if your services are geared toward seniors and older patients, you may rank higher with written content than video content.
• Longer pages tend to rank higher—Even though most people tend to scan online, search engines generally give greater weight to pages with more content. Research indicates that online pages with 3,000 or more words typically have three to four times the visibility than those under 3,000 words. A caveat, though—the “EAT” factor still applies, so don’t add a lot of fluff to your pages and expect to improve your ranking.
• Most searches remain local, particularly for services—People don’t want to travel long distances for most services. Be certain to complete your Google Business Profile and keep it up-to-date in order to maximize your chances of appearing at or near the top of a SERP.

Contact InjuredCare Practice Builder

To learn more about how we can improve the digital marketing for your medical practice, contact us online or call our offices today at 866-952-7045.