Almost every modern clinic or dental office has its medical website. It is convenient and practical: it is much easier for potential patients to get acquainted with the list of procedures and make an appointment. Therefore, the promotion of a medical clinic in search engines using SEO tools is in great demand, but it has many features.
Today we’ll talk about all the intricacies of medical marketing: what nuances should be taken into account and what common mistakes business owners make when promoting themselves.
Content
- Features of promotion of medical websites
- Stages of promoting websites of medical services
- Work on reputation
- Alternative promotion channels
- The result of promoting a website for medical clinic services?
- Errors during promotion if you do it yourself
Features of promotion of medical website
For the promotion of medical services to be as effective as possible, it is necessary to determine the exact direction of the resource.
It could be:
- a private hospital or office, including a dental one;
- laboratory for testing;
- online store of medical equipment and tools;
- online pharmacy;
- health resort or health resort.
They all have different audiences with different needs, which should be considered when drawing up an action plan.
What’s the Difference?
Technically, the promotion mechanism is no different from other types of businesses. However, a feature that should be focused on is this content.
Google is wary of publications on medicine and treatment because it considers this information to be such that it could potentially affect the health or safety of the user. Therefore, they put forward much more requirements.
A well-chosen content strategy will increase visitors’ trust in your medical center. But, at the same time, low-quality texts can cause irreparable damage to your reputation on the Web and beyond.
Our team is well acquainted with the peculiarities of SEO optimization of portals of such a complex topic.
Follow the link and check out the case study promoting a private medical center in Dnipro. In just six months, we increased organic traffic by more than five, thanks to a well-developed semantic core and regular publication of high-quality, optimized articles.
Let’s take a closer look at what SEO promotion of medical websites consists of.
Drawing up a strategy
First of all, it is necessary to clearly understand the ultimate goal: the sale or supply of medicines, and equipment for hospitals, attracting patients to provide them with medical care, etc. Based on this, an action plan should be formed. Medical promotion on the Internet, like any other, includes technical audits, competitor analysis, a compilation of CL, etc.
Let us dwell on the features of collecting semantics and working out the structure.
Semantic core and well-designed structure
Promoting a medical website design on Google always starts with carefully selecting relevant keywords. However, the competition in this niche is very high, so it is better to give preference to mid-frequency queries and detail them:
- in most cases, people are looking for a medical facility or procedures in a particular city near their home, so be sure to add the name of the town, district, and, if possible, the metro station to the keywords;
- use requests for specific procedures;
- if eminent doctors work in your hospital, use their names along with the keywords;
- Also, add specializations or the profile of a medical institution to the keywords.
Keywords for a medical website should attract a “hot,” ready-to-action audience so that you don’t get an unpleasant situation: the number of web page views seems to be growing, but there are no more calls and appointments.
The structure should be clear to visitors
A confusing and illogical structure is a problem for many large venues. If your center offers a lot of procedures of different directions or appointments with doctors of other profiles, take care of a logical hierarchy and arrangement of sections. So the potential patient will quickly orient himself and find the information of interest. Otherwise, a person will go to competitors with a more elaborate page structure.
Divide the menu into administrative and informational. Move the pages “About Us,” “Specialists,” “Reviews,” “Licenses,” “News,” and similar to the first one, and the pages describing the medical services that are provided in your hospital to the second. Observe the hierarchy: first, select departments or directions, and link sections to them with a description of specific procedures, operations, etc.
Useful and quality content
Competent promotion of the website of medical services is impossible without high-quality content.
Taking into account the collected semantic core, it is necessary to write texts for all pages with a description of services, and their task is to provide the main commercial traffic. After that, you should start a blog – it will be a source of a constant influx of visitors.
Difficulties in implementing a content strategy
The difficulty lies in the specifics of the niche. Articles on a medical topic should be expert: only, in this case, users, and therefore your potential patients, will trust you. Remember how often they joke on the Internet: if you get sick, you can’t google your symptoms. Otherwise, you will get a mountain of “useful” advice and simply “killer” diagnoses. This joke has a great deal of trust, as in any other. Often, medical business owners are too careless about content and confidence in writing articles to people who understand copywriting but do not understand anything about medicine. Therefore, low-quality articles with recommendations for treating diseases with dubious and sometimes dangerous methods multiply on the Web.
There is also the other side of the coin. Doctors, who are well versed in all the intricacies of treatment, do not always know how to convey thoughts to ordinary users correctly. Optimized posts with tons of terminology and confusing explanations can turn users off.
A good solution, in this case, is to use copywriters to write texts taking into account the collected SA and give the finished material for proofreading to a medical specialist who will correct all inaccuracies and fill in the missing gaps.
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What to write?
Practice shows that the most popular are:
- drug reviews;
- reviews of medical equipment for home use;
- articles like “how to”.
A competent approach to content creation guarantees a stable positive result and a significant increase in organic traffic.
Information about the company
Promotion of a medical website on the Internet necessarily includes updating the basic information:
- indicate the route map;
- add some photos of cabinets and interiors;
- provide information about the equipment you are using;
- if this is a clinic, add to each service a card of a doctor who performs the corresponding service;
- in the section with doctors, describe their work experience and field of activity, and add a photo of a specialist;
- In the blog section, add an author to each article, preferably a doctor, who shares his expert opinion (the article can be written by a copywriter – but proofread by a doctor for reliability, we wrote about this above).
The more potential clients learn about you, the more likely they will turn to you for help.
Stages of promoting websites of medical services
The promotion of medical centers is always carried out in stages:
- Marketing analysis. It is important to study the main competitors and your target audience initially.
- Full technical audit to identify errors that must be corrected.
- Collecting a semantic core or expanding an existing one. At this stage, the specialist selects the maximum number of relevant keywords so that, in the future, you can receive an influx of users from more landing pages.
- Optimization and improvements. The problems identified during the audit must be eliminated – this will increase the ranking of the resource.
- Content creation. This is a very responsible and important stage, which should be taken seriously. We have already given recommendations regarding the texts above. We emphasize that they must be unique, useful, and reliable from a medical point of view.
- External optimization. Includes the publication of articles on third-party resources with the obligatory indication of a link to your help. This contributes to an increase in positions in the issue and an increase in organic traffic.
The main scope of work is carried out in the first month, and then it is important to publish new articles on the blog and external resources regularly – thanks to this, positions in the issue will only grow.
Work on reputation on medical website
One of the goals pursued by the promotion of the website of medical clinics is to increase the number of positive mentions of the business on the Web. To do this, it is necessary to work on SERM (Search engine reputation management) – reputation management on the Web.
They include publishing posts on thematic forums and articles on various portals and blogs. Let’s consider these points in detail.
CROWD: Thematic and city forums/threads
A kind of “word of mouth,” which is successfully used by modern marketers to promote Internet resources and specific procedures. Post comments with links to your hospital or clinic on popular forums in your city in relevant threads and resources dedicated to the health topic.
Articles on medical portals/sites, thematic blogs, media sites
Submit articles to health portals or local media with attribution and a link to your facility’s website. Expert articles, reviews, and interviews with famous doctors. Thematic placement will positively affect not only the site’s position. Still, it will also provide an opportunity to increase the company’s rating and get real customers by switching to a specific service through an article.
The content must be of exceptional quality. Otherwise, you risk serious damage to your reputation by posting questionable recommendations.
Make regular posts. Thus, you will not only increase people’s awareness of your treatment center but also increase their position in the search results for popular queries.
Alternative promotion channels
Often clients are interested in alternative channels for promoting medical services to replace classic search engine optimization. We confidently declare: that without SEO, you are unlikely to get a stable influx of visitors. However, by using additional channels, you get extra bonuses.
Social network
Not all business owners understand the benefits of promoting medical services on social networks. Many say that Instagram or Facebook accounts are optional, but this is a full-fledged, separate source of targeted traffic that you need to use! In addition, well-designed accounts in social networks work to form your image. Hire an SMM specialist who will regularly update your statements with interesting posts.
contextual advertising
Another great channel for quickly attracting new visitors is setting up contextual advertising. It works well in tandem with optimization, the results of which, albeit stable, can be seen only after a few months. Contextual advertising will provide you with a good influx of interested users for this time.
The result of promoting a website for medical clinic services?
Medical SEO Services allows you to significantly expand your audience through the use of relevant search queries. But to get a good stable result, it is necessary to develop the right strategy. For an experienced team of specialists, this is a simple task. But independent attempts to promote a resource of similar subjects can lead to problems, which we will discuss later.
With the right, and most importantly, professional approach to the promotion of the medical portal, you will receive:
- the stable influx of “hot” audience;
- retaining new customers who will eventually become permanent;
- enhancing the image and recognition.
Given the fact that the niche is considered highly competitive, in the first 3-4 months, you will be able to see a surge in activity in lower competitive categories and services; in the future, with busy work, movement will appear in highly competitive areas. Suppose your resource has a convenient and logical structure, and the blog is regularly updated with high-quality content written with SL in mind. In that case, you have every chance of getting to the TOP of Google or Yandex search results.
Errors during promotion if you do it yourself
Often, clients themselves try to figure out how to promote a clinic in an attempt to save money. Unfortunately, in most cases, this fails. Why? Basically, due to the lack of experience and understanding of the specifics of the work of search engines.
The most common mistakes business owners make when doing SEO on their own are:
- poorly developed semantic core;
- confusing section structure, broken hierarchy;
- low-quality texts with low uniqueness;
- publications oversaturated with keywords;
- a large number of low-quality external links due to chaotic registration in various directories.
Instead of conclusions
The promotion of clinics is significantly different from the promotion of other web resources. Don’t test the fate of your business with experiments. The above mistakes can harm the reputation of your medical institution. Correcting this will be very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. It’s better to contact Idea Digital Agency immediately — our specialists know exactly how to bring you to the TOP of search results and attract new customers.
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