Drive a Rush of New Patients With SEO for Doctors

According to Physician’s Practice Magazine, “SEO nets practices $4-$10 for every dollar spent.” We diagnose and reconstruct your search engine optimization (SEO) so you get found by local patients seeking your services. With deep medical practice SEO experience, we know the questions people ask when considering Doctors and how to convert them from prospects to patients—ethically and effectively.

  • 82.8% of patients find healthcare providers through online searches. 
  • 71% of patients seek another provider when a website fails to answer their questions.
  • With Google’s recent Y-M-Y-L update, medical sites now rank differently 

Are local prospects currently finding you when they search related services? If so, how well are you converting them to paying customers? Is your website more of an online brochure? We’re a five-time award-winning healthcare marketing agency.

Our clients include: Blue Cross / Blue Shield, Athena Health, and Omron. And we have multiple case studies showing results we deliver medical practices daily.

Want to discover why your current SEO isn’t working and how to fix it? Contact us now for a free 15 minute, no-obligation consultation. It may surprise you what one discovery call reveals. Schedule your consultation now and you’ll also receive the complimentary eBook, “A Guide to Online Reputation Management for Doctors.”

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How Doctors
Get Found Online

Get found online in two ways— Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and/or Pay-Per-Click advertisement (PPC). Both have advantages and should be part of your marketing mix.

PPC produces quick results. SEO takes longer but produces higher quality traffic and better overall ROI. Physician’s Practice Magazine writes, “SEO nets practices $4-$10 for every dollar spent.” Comparatively, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) generates an average of $2 for every dollar spent.

Medical practice related PPC keywords range from $5-$20+. Meaning, you’ll pay $5-$20+ every time someone clicks your ads. Even when they have little or no buyer intent. For instance, students searching healthcare related information for school reports.

SEO is sustainable. SEO content works for you 24/7; answering prospects’ questions, establishing your expertise and authority, and inspiring confidence in your services. Best of all, regardless of buyer intent, you aren’t spending every time someone clicks your SEO content.

$20,000/month spent on PPC drives new patient acquisition, but not without maintaining ad-spend—forever. Conversely, $20,000 spent on SEO produces a body of content with lasting compounding value. SEO gets better over time.

As SEO builds momentum and your pages win top search positions, maintaining them requires fewer resources because SEO content and high-quality backlinks establish expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T) factors. E-A-T sites rank higher and show up more in search. Spend more on SEO rankings now and you’ll spend less later—considerably less than PPC over the long term.

SEO and PPC are best together. If you have to choose, SEO is the best bang for your buck. We also manage PPC for healthcare organizations and medical practices. Contact us. 

Discover how to use content to drive more new patient sign-ups. Download the free whitepaper, “Content Marketing Strategies to Grow Organic Traffic by 300%”

SEO Doctors
Frequently Asked Questions

Doctors benefit from more website visitors by ranking higher in search results for various keywords. More visitors equal more opportunities to engage and convert prospects into patients. Done right, your website content will answer many of the questions patients have prior to them contacting you. Do this better than your competitors and you win customers. Everything works together. More visitors = more conversions = more customers = more word-of-mouth referrals = more revenue.

82.8% of patients search for providers online prior contact. 71% of patients seek other providers when they don’t find what they’re looking for on a provider’s site. Getting found by local patients searching for your services is vital. But it’s only half the battle. Anticipating and answering prospect’s questions better than your competitors is the path to patient acquisition online. Good SEO strategy and content does that. If your website isn’t ranking for the terms your prospects are searching for and you aren’t positioned as the solution to their problems, you’re leaving money on the table.

While it is true, no provider seeking SEO services wants to hear, “it depends.” Time-to-results is always tricky but—A recent survey of 75 SEO experts reports notable traffic increases in 6 months while 1st page rankings average 12-24 months. Again, this can vary by keyword competitiveness and other factors. Keep in mind, SEO compounds over time. As your site ages and you continue publishing content and getting backlinks, search engines collect more data establishing what Google calls E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust) factors, ranking higher for various keywords becomes faster and easier. Contact us for a more accurate appraisal of your time-to-results.

Another trick question. Of course you want a hard answer. Broadly, SEO services range from $5k-$15k/month, with initiation costs between $5k-$10k. Costs depend on several factors. Question any agency providing one-size-fits-all pricing. SEO is time-consuming and labor intensive. Strategy is probably the most important factor in winning SEO, followed by high-quality content and backlinks. Beyond those, Google considers over 200 ranking factors. Optimizing for ‌these factors requires careful thought, planning, processes, and execution. If you want to know what SEO will cost your practice, contact us for a no-obligation consultation.

Fortunately, calculating ROI for SEO services is fairly simple for medical practices. First, find your average patient lifetime value (LTV). Get this by averaging the number of times patients visit your office annually. Next, multiply that by the average value of an office visit, multiplied by the average number of years patients remain with your practice. Example: An average patient visits 3 times/year spending an average $2500/visit and stays with you for an average of 5 years. Their LTV is $37,500. Or $7500/year.

Next factor in the cost of SEO services. Working with an agency is good because you’ll have fixed costs. Let’s say your cost is $15,000/month or $180,000/year.

Now look at your organic traffic increases and conversion. Let’s say SEO efforts brought 100k new visitors to your site in a year. You convert .025% for 250 new patients. The total value of those conversions based on average LTV is $93,750,000 or $1,875,000/year.

Calculate annual ROI:

(Return – Cost) / Cost 

$1,875,000 – $180,000 = $1,695,000

$1,695,000 / $180,000 = $9.41 ROI for every dollar spent.