Best Practices Doctors Should Consider to Retain Patients and Attract New Ones

1. Best Practices Doctors Should Consider to Best Practices Doctors Should Consider to Retain Patients and Attract New Ones Retain Patients and Attract New Ones Begin your SEO journey with a professional Medical SEO service that will help you implement a strong SEO strategy and drive a consistent stream of patients. Healthcare information has been among the most searched topics on Google. People search for various information such as medicines or particular doctors or a hospital, various medical treatments etc. An estimated 7 percent of Google’s daily searches are health related, according to Google Health Vice President David Feinberg (as reported in The Telegraph). Google's total daily health-related searches amount to 70,000 each minute. Out of all search results, the chances are most of the traffic goes to the first three search results. Therefore, it is important for medical practices to have a good healthcare SEO strategy for physicians. Here are some of the statistics that show why having a strong online presence is important for physicians, medical practices and hospitals. According to an article published in “DialogTech”, •Search drives three time more visitors to hospital sites as compared to non-search and search is by far the most preferred way for patients to find healthcare providers online.

2. •Patients who have booked their healthcare appointments conducted three times more searches than those who didn’t. This shows that potential healthcare consumers often do extensive research before taking an action. •Consumers researching physical therapists, nursing homes, and optometrists are the most likely to use search engines. In most major healthcare verticals, over 60% of consumers run a search before scheduling an appointment. Another report by KPMG “Healthcare 2030: The consumer at the center” stated that 58% of millennials and 64% of GenXers value online booking of appointments to the extent that they would switch healthcare providers in order to gain that convenience. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website which allows search engine robots to crawl and properly index your site. Every day, potential patients search for doctors and medical information and services on the Internet and effective SEO measures will make sure that your medical practice or business can be found at the top of search engine results and ensure that healthcare consumers or potential patients have an informative and seamless experience when they click your website. Now, let us consider some tips for physicians to improve their ranking and retain their patients. Have a well-designed medical website: Having a well-structured website with updated information about the products and services offered is vital. It should also have other important information such as the name, address and phone number of the medical practice or hospital. Make sure that all contact details are the same across all other listings and review sites. Other factors such as call to actions, easy navigation etc are also essential to ensure good user experience. Link building with the right links: Link-building with the right links is one of the most effective ways for Google to identify your website as a trustworthy one. Quality links from one or two trusted and popular websites should be given more importance than getting several links from multiple directories. Link building is a long process and sometimes quality links may come from not-so popular websites. It is important to link to relevant websites and referral traffic can contribute a lot to your website’s organic search rankings. Extensive keyword research is essential: Keyword research is an important medical SEO factor. It is a process of evaluating and identifying relevant keywords that can be used in the content, meta description, anchor text etc. There are short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Healthcare webmasters can find relevant keywords using tools like Google AdWords, Keyword Planner, Ahref, SEMrush etc. Mobile optimization: With every year mobile searches are increasing rapidly. According to Statista, in May 2019, 62 percent of U.S. health and medical-related searches originated from a mobile device and this is expected to increase in the coming years. There is a significant difference between website optimization and mobile optimization like, website layout, navigation button, reformatted content, images etc. With most searches performed on mobile devices, the demand for accelerated mobile pages (AMP) is increasing and practices that keep up with the fluctuations in mobile search should decide whether they want AMP or any other fixes to improve their website speed. Voice search is a must: With mobile search, voices search has also increased. This is because it much easier, faster and convenient than typing. Industry experts say that if voice search sustains its current growth rate, then in the next three years, nearly 50 percent of total searches will be via speech. Smartphones and virtual assistants are on the rise and they are the most preferred choice for those

3. who do not want to type on a small screen. To adapt to voice search, the website should adopt the following changes: ✓Include long-tail keywords ✓Use natural language and conversational tone ✓Incorporate FAQ page, phrase questions in such as way that real patients would ask them and provide comprehensive answers to it. ✓As most voice searches are local based, keep your local SEO updated ✓The most common intents behind voice searches are “to know,” “to go,” “to buy” and “to do.” So, find out the needs of your audience and provide solutions accordingly. Tailor your content as quick answers: Quick Answers is a new feature in Google where it scans the web for snippet of content that answers all the queries of users. The snippets are usually in small short sentences or as bullet points and these snippets will be ranked higher if your content is optimized. Online reviews matter: Online reviews play a significant role for doctors. According to an article published by DialogTech, 94% of healthcare patients use online reviews to evaluate providers and 84% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendation. Providing a top-notch experience for this demographic is important not just for your review strategy, but also for patient retention because 43 percent of millennials are likely to switch practices in the coming years. All these figures show that online reviews are vital for doctors, and reviews are a strong indicator of page rank in Google. Google considers reviews as a social proof which shows that consumers in a given area have enjoyed the services that they received at your practice. You can also add a review page to your website to post new patient reviews from your satisfied patients. Include video content: Video is a powerful content medium that helps increase patient engagement. Adding videos into your blog posts also increases on-page time, which is a critical ranking factor. Video content helps to educate and engage with users and gain a competitive advantage. Videos can be of several types -- educational, how to, testimonial etc. Video content will attract attention, engage interest and help generate more appointments. Content still rules: Informative and relevant content always drives potential patients to the website. Post new content every week to ensure your site is always updated. This adds more pages to the site and attracts new visitors who may not have heard of your practice otherwise. Make sure that the content is focused on the topics that get the most attention of the users and include relevant keywords that people use to find advice and information. Ensure that the content is unique and genuinely interesting to potential patients. With digital evolution, it is important for medical practices and physicians to have a strong online presence in order to grab the attention of healthcare consumers. So, begin your SEO journey with a professional Medical SEO service that will help you implement a strong SEO strategy and drive a consistent stream of new patients. (800) 941-5527