A lot of patients are searching the web for good hospitals and medical services but with increasing competition for visibility, a potential client can only land on your website, if you’re showing up on the first page and you cannot get here without understanding how to set up SEO for hospitals websites strategically.
Understandably, most digitally aware C-Level executives in hospitals do understand the need to set up visibility targeted SEO strategies to get their facilities right in front of their target clients but sometimes the certainty in generating expected outcomes can be a drawback.
But, what would you do if there are some result tested, data backed and locally evolved strategies that could actually work for your medical facility, regardless of its location?
As one of the leading SEO experts in Nigeria, in this guide, I’ll be sharing with you some of these strategies that we’ve evolved over the years, and the steps you can take to use them to double up your hospital website visibility right from scratch.
Why you Need Hospital SEO in Nigeria
You may feel like you do not need SEO for hospital strategies because you already have a brand but with the way Cleveland, Mayo Clinic and a host of the leading hospitals in the world are optimizing their website for optimum visibility, you need to keep in mind that visibility is no longer about branding.
With your hospital SEO all set up, you’ll not only gain improved website visits, you’ll show up in front of your target audience, gain more patients, earn more income and of course, grow in terms of popularity in your industry.
In this guide, you will also learn:
- How to attract new patients to hospitals using strategic Search Engine Optimization
- How to boost hospital brand visibility locally and internationally
- How to position as a thought leader in your area of medical specialization, using strategic content optimization
With that said, the following are the best hospital SEO strategies you need to drive a better visibility for your facility:
Find your Audience & Patients
Table of Contents
If you’re planning to successfully set up SEO for hospitals, you need to know who you’re targeting so you can optimize your search strategies to specifically target this people. This is a very crucial first step for starters.
So at this point you want to figure out your area of specialization as a hospital. Outline the medical services you’re providing. This could be anything from emergency care, cardiology services, maternal services, optical services etc. you need to outline everything.
Doing this gives you an idea about the target audience potentially in need of these services. And with your better knowledge of who they are and how they would like the services to be delivered, you can then use this information to optimize for them.
If you’re running multiple medical services as most hospitals, one of the ways you can optimize each services clearly is to create a single page for each services while using relevant keywords in the content for the page as well as the headings, page descriptions and meta tags.
Additionally, you can create audience focused content built around the specific services, post it on your general blog and link back to that page. This in addition to the other steps you’ll learn from here can be very effective in pushing the boundaries for your hospital in terms of online publicity.
Set up a Search Compliant Hospital Website
A search complaint website is a website that complies with the requirements of search engine providers like Google, Bing and the likes. This requirement can include mobile responsiveness, improved speed and device compatibility for users.
Having built websites for a number of health and none health related brands, over the years I have learned that if it takes too long for users to access your website, you may have more bounce rates, fewer visits and eventually, your ranking on the search engine results page might get decreased over time.
That’s why for anyone planning to set up SEO for hospitals, you must keep in mind to create a search compliant website from the scratch.
Outside taking steps to use the right frameworks for building the website, if you’re using any plugins or extensions, you want to use those extensions that will not impact negatively on your website performance.
At the end of the day, the right hospital search engine optimization demands that you do not only have an active and accessible website but one that can easily be accessed without delay and in the shortest possible time.
Additionally, ensure that you have a secured socket layer certificate on your website, to encrypt and protect user privacy, XML sitemaps, to get your URLS indexed in search engine servers and of course, a Robot.txt file to ensure nothing is being blocked.
Overall, do not just set up a medical website, get a website that will improve your visibility. This is very important.
Optimize your Medical Website for Search Visibility
Optimizing a medical website for search visibility is nearly as seamless as every other search optimization but one thing that makes hospital optimization stand out is that medical platforms are subject to high level scrutiny to ensure accuracy and ethical compliance.
What this means is that you do not expect to post any content and have it rank automatically, outside making effort to create highly valuable content, you need to have the level of competence to create that content. And in some cases it might need to be reviewed by an expert higher up than the content creator.
That said, to set up SEO for hospital websites, you must start with the website’s name, description and home page.
Yes. Optimize the website description on your home page to meet with user search queries. And going further, optimize each and every one of the headings on each page to meet with the user query for that website.
Going further, pay attention to fulfilling your on page optimization, including linking from one relevant page to the other on your medical website. This can improve your chances at a higher visibility.
Additionally, use descriptive and captivating phrases on your headers and titles as this can draw in more clicks. Also, pay attention to your meta description including HI1, H2, H3 headers and so on.
Finally, set up your author profile with the right description of each author, including their qualification and experience. This will be very crucial in terms of ranking as the search engines gets to pick this up.
Create Valuable & Medically Inclined Content
Content is king but you do not need just any kind of content. To setup SEO for hospitals, you need a well written content that is valuable to the reader, compliant with ethical standards for medical practitioners and well put up better than other existing content.
This means that outside taking the time to research your content thoroughly before publishing them, you have to focus on creating medically inclined content around your area of practice so that you can attract targeted clients.
Furthermore, you have to be competent enough to create that piece of content. For example, an ordinary content creator without a relevant degree, certification or expertise cannot be used as the author for your content without review.
Even where you obtain the services of a content creator to benefit from their expertise, you’ll still have to set up experts with relevant expertise to review that content. And this must be visibly indicated that the content was medically reviewed by experts.
Additionally, to get the most of content marketing for hospitals, you’ll need a well created content with relevant search keywords. This is very crucial. Even where you have one of the best written and research packed medical content, to get a wider reach, you have to get the content optimized with relevant search phrases used by your target audience.
In a nutshell, content marketing for doctors are high value, widely searched and can deliver a huge returns on terms of investment but to get the most out of it, you have to be very strategic and hyper focused on delivering real value for your users.
Plug into Social Media Marketing for Hospitals
With more than 4 billion users globally, the social media presents a huge platform for marketing, brand outreach and visibility. You can plug into this platform to further position your medical website for higher reach.
To evolve website SEO for hospitals using the social media, you need to identify the top social media platforms with your target audience and create a social media handle on that platform.
Update your social media page with your bio as used on your website and other platforms, photographs and brand image and also, add your website links directly to the social media platforms.
After this is all set up, you can then embark on creating and sharing content with your audience to build and grow the social media platforms. Just like you did with your blog content, your social media content should mirror medically inclined content aimed at creating value for your target audience.
From time to time, share links from blog posts on your website to your social media. This will increase the reach of your website post while also giving your social media users, the option to enjoy long form content from your brand.
As part of your strategies to get more views for your social media content, you can consider getting using hashtags, trends, and social media tags and paid promotion to ramp up your reach.
Build Backlinks from Competent Platforms
Backlinks are important part of top tier search engine optimization strategies used in boosting a website’s credibility. It is one of the growth hacks you can use to set up SEO for hospitals and get your results without fail.
One of the top benefits of backlinks is that it is one of the credibility indicators from the search engine algorithms like Google’s. A lot of websites rely on this as a key search optimization strategy.
One thing you have to keep in mind while building backlinks for a hospital website is that you need backlinks only from a competent website. Because getting links from spammy and low content websites can harm your website. It’s one of the reasons you have to consider working with SEO experts that knows all of these things like our in house experts before getting started.
That said, as soon as you’re ready to get a backlink for your hospital website, you have to target the websites that are relevant to your industry. This kind of links ends up adding more value to your brand.
If you’re looking at getting links outside your industry, consider top performing websites with a well-recognized brand power and an audience that will be interested in your services.
Set Up Google My Business
Recently, creating a Google Business Page has become an important SEO strategy, used by businesses, regardless of their industry.
You can incorporate this into your plans as you set up SEO for hospitals. Doing this improves your credibility while positioning your hospital on Google Maps and directly at its locations where patients can easily locate it.
While setting up your Google Business Page, consider filling up the page completely with the right keywords. List out the medical services offered in your establishment and availability for potential patients.
Furthermore, create links to your website from your Google Business Page, encourage clients to drop review for your services (This can be very helpful). And then make some updates to your page at intervals.
Prioritize Building up Local SEO
Local search engine optimization is a great way to position your hospital website geographically for an audience from a specific region.
Even though international reach is oftentimes the goal for most brands, for hospitals specifically, in most cases you might want to target a particular geographic region either based on your services or strategic target options.
Even where this is not the goal, you want to still enhance your website for local search engine optimization, as you setup SEO for hospitals. This is very important as it gives you a foundation to build your online growth locally.
To get started, consider using locally relevant keywords that aligns with your goals. Additionally, create pages and list your websites in yellow pages in your target geographical region. This is very important in creating digital footprints in that area.
Furthermore, you can create geographically targeted content, aimed at meeting the medical needs of potential patients in that region. And this should align with your area of practice.
Final Words
So you just learned about the proven strategies to set up SEO for hospitals and medical institutions. Using these strategies can get you to revamp your website traffic, attract more patients and even earn more for your hospitals.
But, one thing you must keep in mind is that there’s an increasing competition for visibility in the digital space. And to get your search visibility goals achieved, you do not only want to work with the best, you want to use the best strategies to outrank your competition. And you can always work with our experts to achieve your SEO goals for your website by reaching out here.
Now it’s your turn. What are your challenges when it comes to creating visibility for hospitals online? Drop your comments below.
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