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Stumped By Your Doctor’s Office Website Search Rankings? Don’t Agonize, Optimize!

You know you want your doctor’s office website to rank well in Google searches.

After all, potential patients perform more than 50 million healthcare related searches on Google every day. Landing high on Page One for searches in your area puts you right in front of patient’s when they’re looking for a physician, and that means a busier and more successful practice.

And SEO—search engine optimization—may be simpler than you think. It starts the same way medical practice does: first, assess and diagnose your current condition. A clean website without clunky code, no bad backlinks out on the web, and online profiles for your doctor’s office that are properly filled out on various healthcare, business listing, and local search websites gives you a healthy foundation

After that, carefully keyworded content is all you need to SEO your way to more patient visits and a thriving 21st century medical practice.

Here’s how you can get started!

Find Out What Your Patients Are Searching For

The first step in building great keyworded content for your medical office’s website is figuring out what keywords to target. In other words, what are your ideal patients searching for?

You probably have some idea of the types of searches you want to target. Whether you’re building a general family practice or you’re putting out your digital shingle as a specialist, there are certain conditions, treatments, and healthcare concerns you’re specifically trying to address. To attract the right kind of patients, you need content that addresses those concerns—that part’s pretty obvious.

What may be less obvious are the questions your prospective patients are asking and the exact words they’re using when searching for solutions to their medical problems. Before you begin crafting content, you need to do some keyword research to make sure your content is speaking your patients’ language.

Google’s own keyword planner is a good place to start. Enter in the keywords that come to mind when you think about the service you provide patients in your office—from terms as general as “orthopedics” to those as specific as “double knee replacement surgery”—and Google will tell you the monthly search volume, the competition level for those keywords, and it will even suggest other related keywords to consider.

There are also other products and services that can help with ongoing keyword research to ensure your content stays up to date and is effectively targeting prospective patients in your region and practice area. Don’t try to guess what your patients are searching for. A bit of time spent on research will make your content keywording far more effective.

Building Your Medical Practice Through Better Practice Area Pages

Once you know what keywords to target, it’s time to build your content.

Devote at least one unique page on your website to each condition you treat, and build out from there with pages devoted to each treatment your provide.

From there, use a blog or resources section on your website to answer specific questions that focus on more detailed and “long-tailed” keywords—keyword phrases that make up full questions your patients might type into Google (“Do I need a double knee replacement surgery?” is an example of a long-tailed keyword).

The focus keyword(s) for each page should appear in the page’s title, and different iterations of the same keywords should be included in headings throughout the 750-1,000 word article you write to fill up the page. Google gives special attention to the words used in titles and headings when determining a page’s relevance to search keywords, so don’t skip ’em!

You’ll also want to use the keywords you’ve identified throughout your content, but don’t overdo it.

Keep the content focused on providing accurate, easy to read information for your patients about a specific medical topic, and the keywords should flow naturally.

Make the article even more readable and authoritative by using bulleted lists, citing facts with links to other authoritative websites, and linking to other articles and pages on your own site that delve deeper into detailed topics and answer other related questions.

Readers and search engines alike love it when you make additional information easy to find, so don’t be shy when it comes to links.

Medical Office SEO Starts With a Single Step

If SEO still seems like too much, don’t worry! It’s easy once you get started—you just have to take that first step! And we do happen to know a great team if you need a little help…

Garrett Smith

Garrett is the Founder, and Chief Marketer at InboundMD. Garrett has been successfully leading internet marketing campaigns for health care practices across the US for almost a decade. He's a frequent speaker at events, and author of "Book Now! Internet Marketing for Healthcare Practices", and the host of The Practice Marketing Podcast that details how successful practices are winning online.

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