One of the key traits of a successful hospital, medical authority, or organization is effectively disseminating information. Providing information to the public is a major factor in reducing the number of illnesses or injuries to be dealt with in the first place.
But to effectively communicate with a large audience, organizations, and people who run healthcare websites will need to be visible on search engine results. You will only be able to reach more patients if they can actually find you.
Search engines rank and increase visibility for websites based on certain ranking factors. If you’re looking to improve the reach and audience of your healthcare SEO website, here are some ranking factors to consider to make it easier for patients to find you on Google.
Table of Contents
1. Check Your Website Load Speed
Site loading speed is one of the biggest ranking factors for websites. If you run an online healthcare service or run a website, verify if your website loads fast. Google recommends websites load in under 2 seconds. If you need to improve load speed, as a healthcare marketing agency we use a variety of ways to accomplish this, such as using asynchronous loading of CSS and JavaScript files, reaching out to your hosting provider to reduce server response time, reducing file size for elements on your site, and even changing to a faster host.
2. Is Your Site Designed for Mobile?
Today, most people access the internet through their smartphones. That’s also a major reason why websites are becoming increasingly mobile-focused. In fact, even Google has “mobile-first indexing”, where it will only display a website in search results if the site is responsive.
Today, websites are often built with “responsive” design; designs that can scale and adjust the elements of the website depending on which screen they’re being displayed on, such as a computer, laptop, iPad, or smartphone.
3. Is There Enough Content with Keywords On Your Site?
In the eyes of Google, content is king. Content is the searchable content on your website. But patients and users need to have a way to find that content. That’s where keywords come in.
Keywords are search terms used by patients to find resources they need. When you incorporate keywords into your content, to make it easier for Google to find your articles and whitepapers, the search engine will be more willing to display your website results to the first page of search results.
Finally, when patients come onto your website, read through your material for a long time, search engines notice that, and rank up your website even more, since they understand that the patient was able to find out what they were looking for through digital marketing for healthcare.
To make it easier for Google to find your content, your keywords need to be everywhere, in the content, headings, in the anchor tags that are used to link the webpage on other sites, in the URL itself, and more.
One thing to note is to avoid stuffing your website with keywords. Google will actually de-rank your website if it learns you’re stuffing your website with keywords. According to most SEO experts, having one keyword for every 200 words of text is best. Google prioritizes readability over keyword usage anyday.
4. Check Your Website’s Bounce Rate
When a user comes to a website and leaves within a very short period of time, it’s safe to say that the patient did not find what they were looking for. This activity of visiting a website and hopping off shortly after is called a bounce rate. To improve website visibility, you generally want your website to have a low bounce rate.
But bounce rate varies depending on which industry you’re operating in since some websites will naturally attract consistent visitors over a period of time. In healthcare, the acceptable bounce rate is around 55%. If your website’s bounce rate is higher than 56%, then you’ll need to find out why users are leaving without finding what they need.
The factors for users bouncing could be a number of things; the site being slow to load, not enough relevant content, the website not being mobile-friendly, and more. Our digital marketing agency can help you But fixing these issues is a vital part of staying visible on Google.
5. Collaborate and Get Backlinks
The healthcare community is built upon the collaboration of the global community. In the online space, that becomes almost literal. Backlinks or links that redirect back to your website, which are placed in other websites are another major ranking factor of Google.
Backlinks occur when people share your content, promoting it, and thereby increasing the trustworthy nature of the content, or when website owners support your content to backlink to it.
Depending on what type of backlink is being used, Google will also rank these. “Do Follow” backlinks are backlinks that Google knows have value to be followed. But with no-follow links, Google understands that you’re claiming there’s no search value in a certain backlink, and will not count it as a part of the ranking.
This is where collaboration comes in. When a website with larger traffic volume backlinks to a smaller website’s article, the larger reach of the first website will gain visibility of the smaller website too, thus increasing the reach of the smaller website too. Improving visibility like this helps improve the ranking factor for the smaller website, ultimately giving it a more natural reach. This is because the larger website has more domain authority, and when it backlinks a smaller website, the website is telling Google’s search algorithm that it believes the smaller website is a legitimate source of information, thus improving visibility.
If you are giving valuable information to the public, then collaborating with other websites on projects and content can give both websites a boost in viewership.
6. Optimize Your Footer
The bottom-most part of a website, the footer is where you can gain a lot of optimizing to gain ranking points. Google recognizes a good footer, optimized with a good sitemap and easily accessible contact and social media information. This makes it easy for search engines and patients to understand how best to get in contact with you and understand how your website is structured. A good footer will be helpful for patients looking for crucial information instead of searching with random terms that may or may not get them the results they want.
Conclusion
Improving visibility on Google for your website is one of the easiest ways to make your medical authority known to the masses. The factors mentioned above are just a few of the many ranking factors that Google uses to rank and increase website visibility for all of the websites in the world. Focusing on these six factors alone will not be enough, however, since there are many more ranking factors to optimize as well.
And once you do improve your visibility to gain first-page visibility, you’ll be tasked with keeping yourself there. Every other website on the internet also wants to be a part of the first page results. If you are invested in making your website great, then our digital marketing agency can provide the know-how and talent necessary to not just boost your website’s visibility, but keep it at first-page results.
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