A Modern Approach to Advertising For Medical Practitioners.
In today’s day and age, it isn’t feasible for medical practices to solely rely on word-of-mouth advertising to attract new patients. These businesses find themselves competing more and more with the digital marketplace, and many are catching onto the fact that a digital marketing strategy is necessary to reach people as effectively as they had in a pre-internet era.
As a healthcare practitioner, you may be wondering what the best way to continue driving traffic to your website is, in a way that also makes sense for your long-term goals as a business. Knowing where to invest your money is not always intuitive or straightforward, especially when your specific and direct aim is to increase patient intake. With virtual patient appointments set to continue increasing in popularity, we’ve had many of our healthcare clients ask the following question: Should I be investing in search engine optimization (SEO) services?
What Is Medical SEO?
In order to answer the previous question, you must understand what search engine optimization actually is. SEO refers to a series of methods used to improve the visibility of your website in search engine rankings. One of the core challenges is remembering that most consumers will not comb through numerous pages of results when looking for a product or a service. Research actually shows that the top 3 search results for a query receive over 50% of user-generated clicks, demonstrating that visibility and relevance are everything!
By utilizing the proper SEO techniques, you can give your page or site a fighting chance at getting displayed further up near the top as opposed to getting lost in the millions of results that a given google search tends to yield. In medical SEO particularly, the implementation of your marketing and data strategies will make a significant difference in terms of your rankings, website traffic, and client growth compared to marketing the old fashioned way via newspapers and local listings.
Data shows that the younger generation isn’t an outlier in turning to the internet for healthcare services. 76% of respondents over the age of 60 have made a healthcare-related search online in the past year. For this reason, especially as digital technology becomes more accessible to aging demographics, SEO should be a critical piece of your marketing strategy. Forgoing this means you will end up missing a huge opportunity to grow your business.
At 360 Marketing, we are specialists in both medical and healthcare SEO services along with a focus on businesses both large and small.
Get Your Pages to the Top of Google
A major reason a practice or hospital would utilize targeted healthcare SEO is to reach the top of a search engine’s database. Having a solid SEO strategy means that people will be more likely to find you based on your target keywords in an organic search.
We accomplish this by targeting certain keywords and formatting client websites to make the most use of its metadata. This is, of course, a simplification of the process; it is also important to make sure your business profile is accurately formatted for searches that are local to your area, as well as optimizing descriptions, tags, and regular invitations for visitor engagement.
Growth Is Not Instantaneous
You’ve likely heard the phrase that something is ‘a marathon, not a sprint’ before. Many of the clients that we have served within the healthcare industry have been surprised to learn that it can take a few months before they carve out their own space in Google Search. Once they break through that barrier, their investments more than pay dividends.
Consistency is the key rule when it comes to building brand credibility on organic searches. Writing generic content for your website once is not enough: consistent content creation and monitoring are necessary to feed into the algorithm, which in turn keeps your site relevant to search engines. Regularly updating your medical practice’s blog section with what’s changing or upcoming at the clinic, and sharing news on topics that are of interest to your patients are also contributing factors to a successful SEO campaign.
Once you have designed and implemented your perfect SEO strategy, you can expect to see impactful and long-lasting results. You will find that promoting and marketing your services becomes much easier, acquiring new patients no longer feels like an uphill battle against the impossible, and that it is easier to generate interest in whatever you choose to advertise for your practice. More than that, once you have an SEO strategy in place, your website will do the heavy lifting for you as your elevated position in Search passively generates increased web traffic.
Now with all that said, only one question remains: what are you waiting for? Let’s help you get started on implementing search optimization strategies for your practice today! Our professional team at 360 Marketing cannot wait to hear from you–call today!