Google and other search engines take a careful eye to medical business websites. Creating SEO-friendly healthcare content while also selling your product or services can be difficult. Keep in mind expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness (E-A-T) and your money your life (YMYL) principles when creating content for your website. Include well-research information and statics that could directly impact potential new clients, especially in areas of health, finances, or safety. If the science and data is new, be honest. Remember false or fraudulent claims could tank your website ranking and business. Here are 6 more strategies that can help your website rank better on SERPs and get it in front of clients that truly need your services:

1. Use Appropriate Medical Keywords 

Make sure you target the correct keywords for your industry. Start with the medical product or services you offer, then use Google’s Keyword Planner to help find the best keywords to incorporate into your content. Compare your results to what is and isn’t being search by users. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs! This is a spammy tactic that will penalize your website. Instead, be specific. Use short-tail keyword in titles and long-form keywords into your body copy. Make sure your body copy is relevant, readable, and simple enough to understand. A lot of medical medicines or ingredients like to use long Latin words, don’t be afraid to mention their common names in your content as reference. 

2. Add A Lot of Content Pages

Other industries usually have to cut back on the amount of content they include, but for medical websites it is the opposite. Include high-quality information that goes into detail on how your product or service will help make your target audiences lives’ better or easier. The more long-form content you include, the more likely Google will recognize you as an authority and thus increase your ranking. Ideas on how to increase your content length are:

• Add a blog page
• Side effects section
• How-to-use section 
• When-to-use section
• Symptoms section
• Ingredient section
• When-not-to-use section
• How it will improve your life description 
• Meet the doctors page 
• About the manufactures page 
• FAQ section or page 
• What to ask your doctor section 

3. Optimize Visual Elements 

Include photos and graphic elements to make your pages more interesting to look at. If you can include a video, even better! Infographics are also an underrated visual medium that could display useful information for your users. This will increase organic traffic and encourage visitors to stay longer on your website. Increased view time tells search engines that your web pages have valuable content that is useful to users. For images, make sure you don’t forget to include accurate alt text and meta descriptions for Google crawlers and e-readers.

4. Optimize Website Speed, Security & Mobile Friendliness 

Website speed, security, and mobile friendliness are all ranking factors. First, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your current site speed. Since you have a lot of content, your page might load slower than others, however, you still want in to be quick enough for users to know that your website is active. A few ways to increase speed is to:

• Have a performance-optimized hosting provider
• Compress images
• Reduce URL redirects 
• Cache your web pages
• Enable browser caching 
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Eliminate unnecessary plugins
• Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files

Second, check the security of your website. Use an SSL certificate to encrypt your website and ensure visitor data is protected from hackers. Also check for spam links in existing or old content. Always keep your website software, apps, and plugins updated (read more on keeping your website secure here). Lastly, ensure your website is mobile friendly and responsive. Check on phones, iPads, and desktops to see if your website is functional. Most CMS, like WordPress, have templates already optimize for responsive design, but if your site is still running on PHP you may want to hire a digital marketing firm to update the your web design. 

5. Offsite Factors 

Check your social media accounts, especially if you have a plugin linked to your website. Make sure the passwords are strong. Clean up comments that contain spammy links. Block suspicious accounts that want to follow you. Use social media platforms as a link-building tool that leads to longer form content on a landing page. You can also use social media to interact with clients by asking important questions. Then, you can incorporate their questions into your content. Not only does this make it so your audience feels heard, but Google will also see you as a direct authority.  

6. Local SEO

Have a Google My Business profile. This can by created through Google Maps. It is important to build local traffic, especially if your business relies on in-person experiences. You want your website to pop up in the top 10 results when they ask “(medical practice, drug store, med supplies, etc.)  near me”. Fill out the following information: 

• The business categories
• Your primary phone number
• The business description
• Your hours of operation (and any seasonal hours)
• Your address or service area.
• Google reviews of your business
• Photos of your business and products or services

Let us help with your medical business’ SEO. Call 248.528.3600.