Using a Site Checkup To Increase Medical SEO Effectiveness

A fundamental part of any search engine optimization activity is the checkup – after all, you cannot know where you need to focus your attention and what changes need to be implemented if you do not know what your current strengths and weaknesses are.

Here is a brief overview of how using a site checkup can increase the effectiveness of your medical SEO, and help you grow your business by attracting new patients.

What Is an SEO Site Checkup?

A site checkup is much like a health checkup – you are looking at the entirety of your site and assessing where there are problems, and what changes can be made to improve. While you may take cardio-vascular readings, or check the integrity of a patient’s teeth and gums – a site check is looking for an equally varied range of factors that indicate the search engine ‘health’ of your site.

This is usually achieved by using a site checker tool, which is plugged into your website and runs the full analysis for you.

What Does a Site Checkup Include?

This will depend on which tool you use. There are a number of free options available (a quick Google search for ‘free site checkup’ yields a massive number of results), and each will vary in what is checked. The core insights that you should be looking for are:

• Speed – this is an important factor in search engine ranking, as it is a key part of the user experience. Studies have shown that the bounce rate (the number of visitors who abandon the page) is significantly higher when a page takes three seconds to load instead of one.
• URL – your URL is what appears in the address bar when someone visits your site. Users (and therefore search engines) like shorter URLs that accurately state what the main function of the page is – so for a blog you might have a contracted version of the blog title, for example.
• Mobile optimization – Google now crawls mobile versions of websites before desktop versions, which is an indicator of how important it is to have a mobile-optimized site. This part of the checkup will make sure that your entire site is easy to navigate and interact with on any type of device.
• Images – it has probably been many years since you were on a site that was text only, and for good reason: users love images. They can have a big effect on site speeds (and mobile-friendliness) however, so your images need to be carefully managed – this will include making sure that they are correctly compressed and that alt tags are in place.
• Tags – alt tags are used to describe your images in words so that a search engine crawler can correctly identify what the image is. Similarly, meta tags are used to build an accurate impression of the core nature of your site. Your site checkup will tell you if your tags are in place and if they are working as intended.
• Content – your content should be keyword-rich, and make use of tags, links, and headings to rank highly on search engines. Of course, that is the technical side of things; the content also needs to be user-friendly (engaging, informative, useful, and accurate).

There are many other areas that can be assessed by site checkup plugins (some check for upwards of 100 different factors), but as long as it includes those six core checks, you should be on the right track.

What Are the Alternatives to a Site Checkup Tool?

You can conduct the some of these checks yourself – for something like mobile optimization, you can simply visit your website from a range of different devices and see how the pages perform. Of course, if there are issues then you will need to then conduct a more advanced analysis to find out where the problems lie and how to address them, but for a first step, nothing really beats seeing the pages for yourself.

To test the speed of your pages, you can use the free Google tool ‘PageSpeed Insights’. Go to the Insights page, enter your URL and run the page speed test. After a minute or so you will be presented with your results, which will not only highlight any areas that need attention, but also suggest what you can do to improve those areas.

Your content is a relatively easy factor to check manually – simply read the site through as if you were a new visitor (an even better idea is to get someone unrelated to your medical practice to read it through). Does the content flow naturally? Does it make sense? Can someone who has never heard of your practice easily understand what you specialize in and how they can contact you? If the answers are all yes, then you likely have good content.

It is also relatively easy to manually check that your site has a logical linking structure – note down all of the pages that you have published to your site, and then make your way around the site using links. You need to be able to easily get to each page with one or two clicks (maximum) and it should be super-easy to find the pages you are looking for. As a good first step, ensure that your home page has links at the top and/or bottom to your other pages – particularly highlight the services and appointment booking pages.

For other more technical factors, you may need help, which is where a digital marketing agency comes in.

Digital Authority Partners

Digital Authority Partners is an established, respected, and expert agency dealing with everything to do with digital marketing. We can help you to conduct a site checkup with our own tools and processes, and provide you with a detailed, full-coverage report that shows the current state of your site and recommends the most effective ways to improve your medical marketing.

This is the beginning stage of your medical SEO activity – when you have your report in hand, we can work with you to make sure that your site is user-friendly, and that the search engine algorithms are ranking you highly.