Avoiding Medical SEO Mistakes: A Short Guide

Your medical website is a powerful tool to gather your audience, promote your expertise, and establish your brand. With a stellar website, you're sure to direct more traffic to your site and your local medical clinic as well. There are many ways to promote your website, including the most effective strategy: medical SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term for a collection of optimization strategies to help websites rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Medical SEO is about boosting your medical website's reputation and trustworthiness so that it can rank higher.

Medical SEO can provide solid and lasting results to preserve your SERP rankings and reach more patients. Despite the popularity and the many incredible benefits of SEO, some marketers are still making costly mistakes. These mistakes often waste time, effort, and money, which can be too much for a thriving medical practice.

Common Medical SEO Mistakes

Some marketers spend so much time over-optimizing their websites to trigger red flags on search engines. They fail to realize that SEO is about creating sites that users will find helpful and efficient, and not just about boosting ranks.

Remember the following medical SEO mistakes when formulating SEO campaigns for your business:

     1. Overlooking Website Content Quality

One of the most important aspects of SEO is creating great content. Your audience will likely visit, stay, and return if you have high-quality, engaging, and relevant content.

Some marketers make the mistake of posting content that their users don't need or find interesting. Sometimes, they post irrelevant content that confuses their audience.

Other marketers use black-hat tactics such as keyword stuffing or putting too many keywords into your content. Keyword stuffing will never rank your site higher and might disqualify you from SERPs.

Digital medical marketers must remember these strategies to improve content quality:

• Conduct thorough keyword research to identify the best ones to use for your campaigns.
• Never use keyword stuffing! Use your keywords strategically: in your page title, heading, introduction, and conclusion. Use secondary keywords in your content and descriptions.
• Research the topics your audience is looking for. Use online quizzes, social media, and the latest trends to find these out.
• Use calls-to-action (CTAs) at the end of your content to lead your audience to book your service.
• Use different forms of content: text, video, images, infographics, and tables and graphs.
• Make your content readable by using simple words, headings and subheadings, and bullet points.
• Use a sitemap to lead your audience to the content they are looking for.
• Use health tools such as calculators, quizzes, forms, and guides.
• Optimize your content for mobile use. Make sure that all your site elements work well, even on a small screen.

     2. Not Focusing On Local SEO

Who's your target market? Do you plan to go beyond your community, city, or county? Or do you want to concentrate your practice locally?

For a local medical clinic, you need to stand out locally to get more attention online and offline. It would help if you grew your business inside out to embrace your local customers.

Local SEO strategies can help you dominate your industry and drive more people to your local clinic. Neglecting local SEO is like letting your competitors win and allowing them to take your clients away.

Thus, local SEO should be part of your SEO strategy. Consider the following to boost your local SEO rankings:

• Claim and manage your Google My Business (GMB) listing. This is your free unique listing on Google featuring your name, address, phone number, and other business info. Manage this listing and make sure all information is correct and updated.
• Manage local reviews on GMB. Answer questions or comments, resolve complaints, and thank customers for their positive reviews.
• Promote your local business with photos, 360-degree views, videos, and maps.
• Create GMB profiles for all your local branches; GMB connects with Maps. Your clients can find you quickly and get directions to visit your local clinics.
• Use local terms in creating keywords. Add the city or county name, city alias, or state to zero in on your location.
• Add local content such as local weather and temperature, local news, and Covid-19 cases.

     3. Setting and Forgetting SEO

SEO is not a plug-play-and-forget strategy. The most common mistake that marketers make is failing to follow up on their efforts. SEO can take time to take effect. Once it does, you get lasting results. But it does not mean that you have to leave SEO on autopilot.

• Study analytics to find areas of improvement.
• Perform a website audit to ensure site efficiency.
• For content SEO, list your keywords according to topics and create pages for each topic.
• Always stay updated on the latest news, research, press releases, and best practices in your medical field.

     4. Considering SEO Apart From Other Marketing Strategies

SEO will always be part and parcel of digital marketing. Many marketers manage their SEO campaigns separately from other tactics, but actually, SEO can enhance these methods in the long run.

For instance, SEO can boost PPC ads by optimizing landing pages. SEO can improve social media marketing because optimized content can reach more clients and patients. Mobile marketing will be more successful if you optimize your on-site tactics.

SEO can also help enhance other digital marketing tools such as email marketing, affiliate marketing, and content marketing.  Consult an expert SEO company if you want to know how SEO can boost your digital marketing strategies.

Final Words

Avoiding these medical SEO mistakes can optimize your website and save you time, effort, and money. Your well-optimized medical website can improve site traffic, attract more visitors, and promote your brand. Let your medical brand move to the top of SERPs and remain there using medical SEO strategies.