SEO For Doctors

Professional SEO for doctors.

Unlock Your Medical Practice’s Potential with SEO for Doctors!

Ready to stand out as a doctor on Google? Our expert SEO for doctors’ service can put you at the top, no matter if you’re a small practice or just starting out. Local SEO for doctors has evolved, making it easier than ever. In the past, it took immense influence, backlinks, and traffic to outshine your peers. But times have changed. Now, armed with the right know-how, timing, and consistency, you can swiftly dominate Google’s local ‘3-pack’ and secure the top spot. Imagine the impact of ruling local medical searches in your specialty: 🏥 More new patients. 💰 High-turnover procedures. 📅 Increased appointments. 📈 Practice growth. All you need to do? Dive into local medical SEO, or SEO for doctors. Knowledge is power for ranking medical professionals, and our guide sets you up for calls, visits, and inquiries. Follow theseproven SEO for doctors tips and reap enhanced search results. Now, tracking the results is all that’s left. Benefits of SEO for Medical Practices: ✅ Boost practice website traffic. ✅ Surge up rankings for treatments and conditions. ✅ Steal traffic from competitors. ✅ Attract patients without ads. ✅ Enjoy more leads and appointments. ✅ Elevate physician reputation. ✅ Harvest new patient reviews. Get in Touch Now Top 10 SEO for Medical Practices Tips:

• Website Design: Start here. Update your site, ensuring a dedicated contact page with consistent NAP details.

• Reviews Matter: Feature a mix of first-party and third-party reviews/testimonials.

• Google My Business: Claim, verify, and update your profile.

• Facebook Presence: Craft a practice Facebook page – essential for first-page results.

• Directory Domination: Claim listings across more than 50 directories, maintaining NAP uniformity.

• Leverage Video Content: Engage patients with informative videos, boosting page dwell time.

• Keyword Research: Use tools like Ubersuggest and LSIGraph for powerful keyword insights.

• Review Renewal: Collect fresh, quality patient reviews – a powerful Google ranking signal.

• Content Strategy: Mix up content types, focus on what resonates most with your audience.

• Build Backlinks: High-quality, credible backlinks are vital. Quantity isn’t the answer; it’s quality.

Ready to Elevate Your Practice’s Online Presence? Our expert team specializes in SEO for physicians, propelling your practice to the forefront. It’s not an overnight transformation, but with consistent effort, you’ll witness increased site visitors, calls, and new patients. Investing in local SEO for medical practices is a smart move, with rewarding returns. If this feels overwhelming, we’re here to guide you. Book an initial consultation and let’s optimize your medical website’s performance. SEO for doctors is more feasible today than ever before, even if you’re a small or brand new practice because SEO for doctors has changed so much on a local level. In years past, you needed a lot of influence, backlinks, and a lot of website traffic to have a chance of outranking your colleagues and their established medical practices. Now, with the right knowledge, timing, and consistency, you can not only quickly show up in Google’s local “3-pack,” but also be at the top. What would it mean for your practice as a physician to dominate the local medical search results for your type of practice?

• More new patients?

• More high-turnover procedures?

• More consultations or appointments?

• Overall growth of the practice?

All you need to do is get into local medical search engine optimization, also known as SEO for doctors, and know what you’re doing. Knowledge is power when it comes to ranking doctors in search results, and with this guide, you’ll be well on your way to new calls, website visits, and inquiries. Follow these SEO for doctors’ tips and benefits and bask in the increased search results. All you have to do now is track the results, right? The benefits of SEO for medical practices:

• Improve practice website traffic

• Rank higher for treatment and disease-related search terms

• Capture website traffic from competitors

• Attract new patients without paid advertising

• More monthly leads and appointments for new patients

• Physicians gain a reputation as industry leaders

• Generate new patient reviews

10 Tips for SEO for Medical Practices

It starts with the design of your medical website. It sounds like a given, but before we can look at the other points of solid local SEO for doctors, it starts right here. Correct and update your medical website design and the information it contains. Make sure you have a dedicated contact page that includes your NAP contact information (name, address, phone) that will be used consistently across all other listing and review websites going forward. Consistency is critical to the whole scenario, so start off on the right foot here. Include the contact information in the universal website footer and nest it on the contact page of your website, as this is one of the first places Google will find it. Online reviews play a big role in search engine optimization for doctors. This is a carryover from the first point, but it’s so important that it deserves its place on this list. If you are concerned with SEO for medical practices and ranking first on Google, make sure you have a reviews/testimonials page on your website. Make it a proper mix of what are called “first-party” reviews, which are reviews directed to the practice, and third-party reviews sourced from sites like Facebook, Google, and Yelp. Reviews are a strong indicator of page rankings in Google’s eyes, so make sure you have some on your site. We’ll revisit off-site reviews in a few minutes. Claim the provider’s Google My Business listings. To appear in the top spots on Google as a physician, you need to make sure you are listed on Google My Business. To do this, you will need to claim, verify and update your listing or create a listing if Google has not already done so for each provider. You may be surprised to find that you are already listed on Google Maps, even though you have never done so yourself. For this reason, it’s important to be proactive about search engine optimization for medical practices because Google will do this for you whether you ignore it or not. You don’t want people to get the wrong information, so take it into your own hands. Healthcare providers tend to change residences several times, from residency to fellowship to practice, which can lead to a lot of errors in your Google My Business profile. Once you’ve claimed the listing, take the time to complete the verification process, as this will make your updates live on Google and unlock important analytics. Once verified, fully complete the profile using the same information for the NAP that you used in tip #1 on your medical website for the appropriate provider page. Create a practice Facebook business page. If you don’t have a Facebook business page for your practice, you’re way too late for many reasons, but you may not have considered that one of those reasons is medical search engine optimization. That’s right. Facebook is critical for first-page search results. And why? Because 9/10 of the time, when you do a quick search for a competitor’s dermatology practice (for example), their Facebook page is at the top of the first page. The same is true for any other specialty or family practice out there. Facebook has ultimate influence on search rankings, and you lose landscape and visibility if you don’t have a practice Facebook page, so do it now. Claim third-party review profiles and listings. Submitting your doctor to Google My Business and creating your practice Facebook page is a great step in the right direction for successful search engine optimization for doctors and a spot on the first page of Google for your practice. However, that’s not the end of the story. There are more than 50 other directories for listings and reviews that should be claimed, reviewed and completed with the same NAP information you used above. To further emphasize, UNIFORMITY is critical in all things related to SEO for medical websites. The reason for this is that Google will return your practice with much greater confidence in search queries if it has a set of information confirming that the information is accurate. Start with the major directories like Healthgrades, Vitals, CareDash, etc. and move down the list to the lesser known, but still important, provider directory platforms. Learn more about our provider directory management service. Start with video content Videos are an effective way to increase engagement and build a relationship with your potential patients that they know, like, and trust. In the most successful medical content marketing programs (which we’ll discuss in more detail later), providers are directly involved in the content development process. Patients have taken ownership of the research process and want to hear directly from the providers they may seek out. Adding videos to your blog posts also increases dwell time on the page, which is an important ranking factor. When posting your new videos on Youtube, be sure to follow the tips in the video below to optimize the video for maximum reach. Remember that Youtube is owned by Google, and SEO is very important as it is the second-largest search engine. Having a hard time coming up with initial video content ideas? Start writing down common FAQs and questions you get asked by patients throughout the week. I bet if you pay attention, you can create 4-6 months of video content in an hour or less. And the best part? You can be sure that patients are looking for answers to those questions. Perform comprehensive keyword research for local SEO for medical websites. Keywords are the backbone of good local SEO for medical websites. Many people fail from the start because they never take advantage of the resources available to them for free on the internet to conduct keyword research. Ubersuggest has come a long way since Neil Patel bought and revamped it. All you have to do is enter your keyword and the tool will give you insights into search volume, backlinks, top pages and more. Another easy way to find related keywords is to do a Google search and scroll to the bottom of the page to “searches related to”. These keywords should be considered as section headings for your content. Another great tool you should use is LSIGraph. Simply enter your focus keyword and look at the LSI keywords you need to include in your content. It will output a list of long-tail keywords that people are searching for around the topic, in this case “butt lift”. Here is a video with more information about LSI keywords and how they help with search engine optimization for medical websites. Take these keywords and make them section headings on the page you create about butt lifting. For example, make sure you have a section in an H tag for Brazilian butt lift cost because that’s what people are searching for. The more of these related long-tail keywords you can include in your page, the better Google will rank your content and feature it not only in searches for “butt lift” but also for other related topics. This will greatly increase your reach. New patient reviews play a big role in search engine optimization for doctors. After following the instructions above and adding a reviews section to your website and making more than 100 listings in third-party directories and review portals, it is now time to put an emphasis on collecting new patient reviews from your satisfied patients. Reviews are one of the most important ranking signals for Google, and often those near the top of the Google “3-pack” have several solid 5-star patient reviews. This is one of the most important areas to focus on if you are a physician looking to improve your local SEO. As you can see, Google My Business and reviews make up 40% of the ranking signals for local search, so they are very important. Google sees this as a kind of social proof, saying that other consumers in a certain area have enjoyed the services they received at your practice, so they should send other people the search result of the same medical practice. Physicians are often reluctant to engage in generating new patient reviews because they fear bad reviews from disgruntled patients. While this fear is valid, it often cannot be avoided. Therefore, you need to continually work to counteract this by always generating new, high-quality reviews. This is one of the most important things you can do to appear on the first page of Google for medical practices or providers. One has 228 reviews, making it among the first search results for primary care provider searches in the West Orlando area. We recommend focusing on Google My Business first when creating reviews, but always provide a second option. Whether that’s Facebook, Vitals or Healthgrades, not everyone has a Gmail address, and you should give them the option to leave a review elsewhere. Read this to learn more about how we can help physicians with reputation management. An active content marketing strategy is an important part of SEO for physicians. Content is still the name of the game when it comes to search engine optimization. Most providers think of blog posts when they think of content marketing in healthcare. Although this is one of the most common types of content marketing, there are more than 50 types of content marketing, including medical podcasts, videos, graphics and more. A mix of media works best, as different patients prefer to consume their content in different ways. However, for you as a physician, it’s important to find a type of content that you believe will bring you the most and focus your time and energy on that avenue. Investing in a well-thought-out, strategic content marketing strategy backed by keyword and competitor analysis can be the most important ranking factor in the long run. Note: Be sure to use Google Analytics to track which content is most successful and the best ways to distribute it, so you don’t waste your time and effort and optimize your resources. Here are some fantastic tips for optimizing new blog posts you publish on your website. Check out this snapshot from Google Search Console from one of our clients. It shows the power of content marketing. We started a monthly content and medical SEO strategy for his website in November. This shows their search impressions (purple) and organic search clicks (blue) from October 2019 to April 2020. Impressions have increased almost 2.5 times and organic clicks have increased almost 3 times. This is despite being in the middle of COVID at the time of this screenshot.

SEO for medical websites: Backlinks are crucial

Backlinks are another important part of a solid SEO strategy for local doctors to get a medical practice to rank first on Google. What exactly is a backlink? Moz defines a backlink as a return link, also known as an “inbound link” or “incoming link,” that occurs when one website links to another. The connection between the two websites is the backlink – so-called because it points back to the linked page. Each high-quality backlink serves as an additional confirmation point (much like a review) that another credible website is giving your practice a “thumbs up,” so to speak. The two key terms here are quality and credibility when it comes to getting backlinks. The better known the website or the more relevant it is to your business, the better local SEO for doctors you will receive. SEO for doctors example A reference in a WebMD article to a doctor in practice is a significant backlink compared to a website with local listings linking to your medical website. Note: Be wary of agencies and individuals who claim to be able to acquire hundreds of backlinks a month for your medical website to improve your SEO ranking. This is usually a scam that is considered a “black” SEO approach for healthcare organizations. Google not only frowns upon this practice, but it can demote you or even ban you from Google in the worst-case scenario, so be very careful. Bottom Line: SEO for Physicians Strategies – Hire VikingLinks as your SEO agency and get your business growing: Following these steps will put a doctor and his medical practice SEO on the path to search success. Start by applying for listings, structuring your website properly, and then move on to a solid, ongoing SEO strategy for your doctors. It doesn’t happen overnight to appear at the top of organic search results, but it can happen quickly if you follow the right process and ensure consistency on a monthly basis. If you invest time and energy in local search engine optimization for medical practices, you will gain more website visitors, more phone calls, and more new patients overall for your practice. Trust me, the investment will be worth it. If all of this seems a bit overwhelming, or you’d like us to perform a medical website SEO audit to find out exactly where the practice stands and how you can improve your ranking and website traffic, book an initial consultation with me. VikingLinks provides industry-leading expert SEO advice for physicians to generate new website traffic and patient leads for your practice. We use a variety of techniques and strategies to achieve impressive, measurable results. We’re here for you! Give us a call or fill out our contact form.