Key SEO Elements that Healthcare Businesses Should Never Miss Out on

1. Key SEO Elements that Healthcare Businesses Should Never Miss Out on It is important for healthcare businesses to invest in medical search engine optimization that allows search engines to properly index their websites. Information about healthcare is one of the topmost researched topics that enjoy the most traffic and therefore it is important for physicians and other healthcare providers to invest in medical search engine optimization. It is the process of optimizing websites which enable search engine robots to crawl and properly index your site. Every day, potential patients look for doctors and medical information and services on the Internet and effective SEO measures will enable your medical practice or business to be found at the top of the search engine results page and ensure that healthcare consumers or potential patients have a seamless experience when they click on your website. 80% of Internet users have searched for a health-related topic online, and “near me” searches for doctors have steadily increased since 2016, which means that it’s also increasingly important to invest resources in being found online. Ignoring good SEO will amount to jeopardizing your business. So here are the key elements of SEO that medical businesses should necessarily include in their digital marketing strategy. Long-tail keyword search:Most of the searches on search engines are made using long, descriptive phrases and products- or services- based. Ranking for such queries require valuable content and search engine tagging. Earlier Froogle, Google Shopping was free but it led many marketers to do the bare minimum. But now it is not free and marketers now spend much time on that channel to maximize

2. return on investment. Some people consider SEO as free but that’s not true. There is a fixed monthly fee paid to Google irrespective of whether it is paid or organic traffic. SEO tagging: Google can pull different SEO title tags to display in their search results based on search query and what they feel is the intent of the searcher. These are often used on search engine results pages to display preview snippets for a given web page and are important both for SEO and social media sharing. Websites having rich content with reviews, customization, and FAQ typically do better than websites with very little content and ignore critical elements such as Meta description, H1header and so on. Key items that are important for SEO that healthcare businesses often ignore include the following. •Meta descriptions:Many search engine optimizers say that Meta description doesn’t really affect ranking. They are right to some extent but ignoring Meta description could lead to low priority. This is because Meta descriptions are significant with regard to results displayed by search engines. Google often uses Meta descriptions in the search snippets and if you don’t provide them, Google could attach less relevance or importance to your website. •Product Image Alt text:Alt text helps search engines understand an image. And it’s more important than many merchants realize. Potential buyers can take the pictures of the products; compare the prices and reviews using the barcode reader. Images have better chance of capturing long-tail traffic that could improve your sales and revenue. •PDF viewers: Google indexes and ranks web pages along with 26 other document types, including PDFs that are often used for product information sheets, manuals, diagrams, and similar content. A user clicking on a PDF in Google search results will not be tracked in analytics. In addition, users will not see the navigation options for other parts of your website, which could have a negative effect. Embedding PDFs in a viewer and adding a canonical tag in the HTTP header allows the page to be trackable in analytics and it also tells Google to index the viewer. •SSL certificate: For healthcare businesses as well as other businesses, SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate is something very important. It is especially important for any business that collects sensitive data online including passwords and credit information. An SSL certificate is the best

3. way to show that your website is secure against cyber threats. It adds to the trustworthiness of your site, and signifies to customers as well as search engines that your website is legitimate. •Schema mark-ups: This is a code installed on your website that enables search engines to find and deliver the most relevant information to customers through search results. It is an SEO element that websites cannot miss. •SEO-friendly URL: Your URL should be short, easy to read and give the reader an idea of the content provided on the page. It is best to leave out strange characters and long strings of numbers that could confuse the reader. Incorporate your target keywords into the URL wherever it makes sense. Ideally, 50 – 60 characters would be the ideal length for your URL. To ensure readability, hyphens are better than underscores for separating words. Some aspects of SEO like quality content etc remains the same but other aspects like security enhancement, mobile advancements etc seem to be changing frequently. Experienced medical SEO companies can analyze your current SEO performance, find missing SEO elements, identify opportunities for growth, and set up and manage webmaster tools for better optimization and conversions. 1-800-670-2809 | (631) 494-3324