3 Vital SEO Tips For Your Clinic’s Health

SEO is one of those acronyms that instills confusion into the hearts of the uninformed. This fear could lead to a variety of costly circumstances, however, here are some tips to alleviate some potential stresses:

1) Find the Right SEO Firm

2) Take Advantage of Free SEO Tools

3) Content is King

Stop running around in circles with your SEO, and start determining fact from fiction.

The following techniques will help you run in more strategic circles with your clinic's best interests in mind.

1) Find the Right SEO Firm

First and foremost, don’t fall prey to the 90% of SEO scammers populating the SEO industry. If you come across catchy slogans such as:

“20 top Ten Rankings Guaranteed”

“Your business to be found on hundreds of search engines”

“First page of Google in 48 hours”

RUN the other way, because if it sounds too good to be true...well, you know the saying.  Additionally, some excellent SEO companies may not be the perfect fit for you and your company. Here’s a quick SEO tip with layered benefits:

The first SEO company that pops up on your search results is not necessarily the best. There could be a variety of different reasons that they have come up first in organic search results. For example, the domain name could have been older, and if the company has remained in the same geographic area, Google will reward these two factors with high organic rankings. The lesson here is to do your research before jumping to conclusions.

SEO is a combination of precision planning and the appropriate team. Determine your goal, and build your SEO strategy around said goal. For example, will you be engaging in Pay-Per-Click Management, retargeting, link-building or will it be simply content marketing? What is your goal with these tactics? Is it to grow your sales by 75% in the next 3 months or are you simply trying to increase organic rankings for a short product or service offering?

Different SEO firms will have expertise in different SEO services, so when choosing, it is important to be clear and concise with your goals and expectations. Additionally, do not be afraid to request precedential stories that highlight their successes as an SEO company.

2) Take Advantage of Free SEO Tools

Usually you get what you pay for, but in this case, some of the best things in (SEO) life are free. I’d like to introduce you (or hopefully reintroduce you) to Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Keyword Planner. I would encourage you to communicate these tools to your webmaster to see if any or all of these have been implemented into your SEO strategy.

Google Analytics

Arguably one of the most common tools in your SEO arsenal, Google Analytics can offer you in-depth metrics on traffic generated towards your website, sources of this traffic, and the conversions associated with the millions of viewers on your clinic website. If you haven’t already, do yourself and your clinic a favor, and have Google Analytics immediately installed, and start receiving measurable results.

Google Webmaster Tools

In short, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to view your website the way that Google would view it. It helps monitor the visibility of your website, and allows your web-person to see which pages are being indexed. There are a variety of other complex functions that this tool provides, and understanding the versatility of this program, and capitalizing on the different options will yield you stronger results.

Google Keyword Planner

Lost in your own words? This tool will help you find solutions for choosing keywords, which will help to identify and describe your website. This feature also displays common words your competition will value and how much volume these specific words receive from search enquiries. My suggestion is to use this planner to perform the manual research, and then refine the process with the other Google tools.

As a healthcare clinic owner, you will likely not participate in the direct monitoring of these programs within your SEO strategy, but it is important for you to understand the significance of these tools and the consequences that could entail, should you choose not to engage. Talk to your web-person!

3) Content is King

So, by now you’ve found the right SEO company to help you manage all of the tools in your proverbial SEO tool belt, but you want to take the content into your own hands, because you know that content is king. Your goal, has a healthcare expert, is to appropriately communicate your proficiency to your prospective patients and existing patient-base. When writing the content for your website, the primary focus should be quality. Step into the shoes of your online visitors and create something of real value and substance, that will entrance them into staying on your website for a couple more minutes. Since you’ve done all of the research with your existing Google tools, you can now optimize your website by using the strong keywords that will effectively act as answers to the questions indirectly posed by your viewers.

You are a master of your craft and you have all the technical jargon in your wordbank, but remember to cater to Google and your searching audience. For example, if you are a dermatologist, you might not want to use technical terminology such as “dermatosis”, because Google would be more inclined to skip this page during it’s “crawl”. Instead, it might be more Google-friendly to replace this word with “skin disease”, as this would be considered significantly more relevant, and thus will help you rank higher.

Additionally, keep your content fresh and new, as Google has an algorithm called “Query Deserved Freshness” that rewards new search queries that are trending at a higher rate than normal. Everybody on the bandwagon will likely jump up in the rankings, but unfortunately, like any trend, when the fad dies off, chances are, your site will fall back into the original ranking, so enjoy it while it lasts!

Closing Remarks

By now you are undoubtedly an SEO master, right? False. Success in SEO is recognizing that the only consistent aspect of SEO is the ever-changing landscape that it inhabits. What works for one might not work for another, but the key to success is patience and constantly educating yourself throughout this trial and error game.

Good luck and happy optimizing!