The ultimate 2020 SEO guide for healthcare companies. A successful practice, hospital, or healthcare organization helps you win more of the patients you want and facilitates patient communication. However, if patients cannot find your website online, this means little. You will require a strong SEO strategy, a solid website, but an even stronger healthcare SEO strategy and tactical SEO team to get on Page #1 for an organic search.
Search Engine Optimization refers to the science and art of ascending to the top of organic search results across major search engines like Google, and so on. An investment of both time and money is an essential requirement for a reliable healthcare SEO agency to get your website found on page #1 of search engines. SEO requires comprehensive efforts and relentless focus from your healthcare SEO agency. These below are the best google SEO guidelines 2020.
Changing algorithm and rules for organic healthcare
Higher search engine rankings for your healthcare practices and organizations can be achieved by avoiding black hat organic marketing and by employing the right techniques. Using ‘secret tricks’ to get pages on top of Google and other major search engines are what black hat SEO refers to. However, with the continuously changing Google algorithms, measures have been taken to thwart these black hat SEO methods, even penalizing practitioners who attempt them. Another important chapter in algorithm changes that affects healthcare SEO rankings is the “MEDIC†update in 2018. This update is all about Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Your website should showcase your credentials and provide accurate information about treatments and services to establish trust with Google. An announcement made by Google in January mentioned that it would be releasing another “CORE†update. Core updates are inherently broad changes to the search systems and algorithms. One can also google new SEO guidelines.
In 2020, the best healthcare SEO strategy was a long-term one involving three core SEO specific techniques:
1) On-site Healthcare SEO techniques:
The code, images, and words that make up your website are what on-site or on-page technical Healthcare SEO refers to. There are a variety of factors that impact aspects of SEO, from the type of content that you have on your health service’s website to your site’s mobile responsiveness and the site’s loading speed.
- SEO metadata: Description tags
These are usually a 160 character or less description that summarises the content of the website, and show up just beneath the title tags in the SERPs. - Title Tags
These specify the titles of your webpages and are an HTML element within the backend of your website. It is what is displayed on the Search Engine Results Pages as the clickable headline for a particular search result. - Site speed
It is also a determining factor for where your page will show up on the SERPs because this is essentially a measurement of how fast the web pages load. - Mobile responsiveness
The content of your website should be displayed in a mobile-friendly way. It becomes a vital part of your SEO strategy, with more and more customers going mobile and searching for practices and hospitals ‘near me.’ - Changing content
Your overall search engine traffic will be boosted if you update old healthcare/medical content on your website. It also helps enhance the overall effectiveness of your healthcare SEO efforts. - Sitemaps
An extensible markup language for search engines: Your XML sitemap, which is similar in context to HTML, is an invitation for search engines to crawl the URLs that are listed within the sitemap. - Visible for user experience:
For strong SEO practices, it is essential to have a visible sitemap that your users can see. Other vital features that should be included in on-site SEO for healthcare industry techniques include keyword meta tags, alt tags, footers, anchor text links, and so on.
2) Off-site healthcare SEO techniques:
Google sees websites linked to other relevant healthcare-related websites as ‘more important’ than websites without any of these backlinks. Because it gives your web page credibility and authority when it comes to search engine results, you want these backlinks to be relevant. You should focus on getting backlinks pointing to your website from the following offline sources-
- Healthcare Directories
Healthcare directories play a role in Search Engine Optimisation because they are how new and existing patients find your practice. The ranking factors include consistency across the directories, as well as how often and where practices have been listed in these directories. - Press releases
These serve as a way for your practice to let major healthcare publications and journalists know about significant events like launching a new service or product or winning an award. - Articles and blogs
Online articles and blog content are good for SEO because they position your website as a relevant answer to customer questions. - Reputation Management
Before deciding to trust a business, an average customer reads about seven reviews. Try responding to both negative and positive reviews, and avoid HIPAA compliance violations. - Healthcare Social Media
Most healthcare SEO experts agree that a higher number of likes and followers on social media pages, especially on Facebook, increases the relevance of your site and features on the #1 page of Google. These are the best SEO guidelines for the healthcare industry.- Directories:
As mentioned above, consistency within the directories is important.
- Directories:
