The healthcare industry is increasingly competitive, with myriad clinics vying for visibility in a crowded landscape. As today’s patients tend to turn to search engines to find healthcare providers, having a strong online presence is no longer optional—it’s essential. This post outlines the 10 basic steps you can take to implement search engine optimisation (SEO) to enhance your medical or healthcare clinic’s online visibility– helping you to reach more patients and grow your practice in this competitive space.
What is Healthcare/Medical SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for healthcare and medical clinics refers to the practice of optimising a clinic’s online presence to rank higher in search engine results for relevant keywords and phrases. This includes refining the clinic’s website, online listings, and other digital assets to improve visibility and attract more potential patients searching for healthcare services in their area.
Why is SEO Important for Healthcare Providers?
Increased Online Visibility & Patient Volume
In today’s digital age, a vast majority of potential patients turn to search engines like Google to find healthcare providers, research medical conditions, and seek relevant information. Healthcare providers’ online presence and search engine rankings thus can significantly impact their ability to acquire new patients. By ranking higher in search results, clinics can increase their online visibility, drive more qualified traffic to their website, and ultimately attract more patients.
Cost-Effective Patient Acquisition Channel
For healthcare clinics, SEO can be one of the most cost-effective marketing approaches in the long run, especially as organic traffic is ‘free’ compared to pay-per-click advertising. Picture a constant stream of new patients daily without ongoing costs or effort on your part.
Establishes Trust & Authority
Effective SEO strategies resulting in a strong online presence can establish a clinic’s credibility and authority in the industry. When a clinic ranks highly for relevant keywords, it signals to users that the website is a trusted and authoritative source of information, leading to increased patient trust and confidence. This can impact their decision in choosing one healthcare provider over another.
10 Steps to Healthcare & Medical SEO
If you’re seeking to improve your website’s ranking in search engines, here are 10 key steps to implementing SEO for healthcare and medical clinics that will help you establish a strong online presence, build trust and credibility with your target audience, and ultimately drive more qualified traffic to your website and clinic.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of any successful healthcare and medical SEO strategy. It involves identifying the words and phrases that potential patients use when searching information online about medical conditions, treatments, or healthcare providers.
Some keyword examples include:
- “GP near me”
- “psychologist singapore”
- “dentist bedok”
- “physical therapy for back pain”
- “[condition] treatment”
Identifying the keywords used by your target market is the basis for implementing ‘on-page SEO’. This involves optimising your website’s content, meta tags, and other on-page elements to improve the chance of your website appearing in front of potential patients.
It is also essential to consider keyword intent. Keywords with commercial or transactional intent, such as “tcm clinic singapore”, are more likely to result in a patient lead than keywords with informational intent, such as “what is acupuncture”. Nevertheless, targeting informational keywords through blog content remains valuable. As today’s consumers tend to interact with a brand multiple times before making a decision, informational content can effectively build brand awareness and serve as crucial touchpoints in the customer journey.
To conduct effective keyword research for your healthcare business, start by brainstorming a list of relevant terms related to your practice, services, and specialties. Consider the language your patients use, common medical conditions or procedures you treat, and your location. Keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest (which has a free version available), SEMrush, or Ahrefs can help you identify popular search terms, their search volumes, and competition levels.
2. Create Conditions & Treatments Pages
Content is king when it comes to healthcare and medical SEO. Search engines prioritise websites that provide valuable, informative, and engaging content relevant to users’ search queries. By creating high-quality content, you can enhance brand awareness among patients searching for relevant information and establish your practice as a trusted authority in the medical field.
Aim to create a “content ecosystem” surrounding the most common “pain points” of your patients. Start by creating individual service pages for common conditions or treatments in your field of practice. Then, use keyword research to identify the exact keywords and phrases your target audience use when searching for the specific treatments or conditions. Weave them into your page titles, headings and metadata (more on step #4). Commonly-visited pages should also be prominently displayed in the navigation menu for easy access.
Note on the medical & healthcare industry advertising restrictions: In the healthcare and medical industry, adhering to regulatory advertising restrictions when promoting services is crucial for maintaining ethical standards, protecting patient interests, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. These restrictions are designed to prevent misleading claims, safeguard public health, and maintain the integrity of medical professions. Failing to comply can result in severe consequences, including legal penalties, damage to reputation, and loss of professional licences. Medical and healthcare clinics in Singapore need to be aware of the following guidelines:
Healthcare Services Act (Advertisement) Regulations
Private Hospitals & Medical Clinics (PHMC) Advertisement Regulations
3. Create Quality Blogs
While service pages should cater to the most commonly sought treatments or conditions in your practice, create blog posts to capture informational searches for other related health topics, conditions, treatments, and general wellness advice tailored to your target market. Unlike your service or ‘money’ pages, your blog posts should be more informational. That being said, you should still briefly introduce your practice at the end of the blog and include links into your service pages to encourage patient visits.
Content Strategy Tips
Conduct Keyword Research: Search queries with high search volumes and lower competitive difficulty levels often make the best candidates for blog topics. If blog ideas are derived through other sources, ensure that the topic has sufficient search volume before starting.
Collaborate with Medical Professionals: Work closely with doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals to ensure the accuracy and credibility of your content. Invite qualified medical professionals to become authors or reviewers.
Understand Google’s E-E-A-T criteria: Google’s E-E-A-T is a set of quality standards used to evaluate web content, focusing on the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness of the content creator and the website to determine search result rankings and overall content quality. Ensuring that your content ticks off the E-E-A-T criteria checklist is especially important for healthcare SEO. High-quality, accurate and reliable health information from credible sources would usually rank higher in search results.
Learn more on OOm’s Guide to Google’s E-E-A_T
Promote and Repurpose Content: Share your content across multiple channels, such as social media, email newsletters, and online directories. Repurpose successful content into different formats (e.g., turning a blog post into a video or podcast) to maximise its reach and impact.
4. Optimise Meta Data
Metadata refers to the snippets of text that describe a web page’s content. This includes the meta title and meta description which show up in search engine results pages (SERPs). Optimising meta data to include target keywords is key, as it helps search engines understand what a page is about is a major factor in SERP rankings.
The meta title, or title tag, is the blue link you see in Google and should accurately describe the page’s main topic using important keywords. Keep it under 60 characters. The meta description is the short paragraph below the title, elaborating on the page content. A compelling meta description, around 155 to 160 characters, can improve click-through rates.
To optimise your metadata:
- Include your target keyword in the meta title
- Write unique meta titles and descriptions for every page
- Accurately summarise the page content in an appealing way
- Incorporate related keywords and variations naturally
- Include your location name for local SEO
Optimising the metadata for all the key pages in your website, such as the homepage, service pages, and blog pages, is crucial for enhancing search visibility. You can adjust the metadata through your website’s content management system (CMS). For WordPress sites, installing an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO or RankMath is necessary. For Wix and Squarespace sites, the SEO information can be edited directly from the CMS settings.
5. Optimise Google My Business Page
For healthcare and medical services, patients tend to search for clinics nearest to them. Thus, optimising your Google My Business (GMB) listing is essential for local SEO and attracting potential patients in your area.
GMB listings appear prominently in Google Search and Maps results, displaying essential business information such as address, phone number, website, hours of operation, and customer reviews. When someone searches for healthcare services near their location, well-optimised GMB listings have a higher chance of appearing at the top of the search results.
To optimise your GMB listing for healthcare and medical SEO, follow these steps:
- Claim and Verify Your Listing: If you have yet to do so, claim and verify your GMB listing to manage and update your business information.
- Complete Your Business Information: Fill out all relevant sections of your GMB listing, including your clinic’s name, address, phone number, website URL, business hours, and categories. Make sure to use consistent and accurate information in your website and across all platforms.
- Add Healthcare-Specific Attributes: For healthcare providers, GMB enables the listing of specific medical services, treatments and specialised medical staff (e.g. psychotherapy, dietitian, psychologist). Wherever possible, be sure to include the relevant categories of your listing so your GMB profile can appear for searches for those terms.
- Add High-Quality Photos and Videos: Visual content can significantly enhance your GMB listing’s appeal. Upload professional photos of your clinic’s exterior, interior, staff, and facilities.
- Encourage Patient Reviews: Positive reviews from satisfied patients can significantly boost your GMB listing’s visibility and credibility. In Singapore, medical practitioners are prohibited from requesting patient reviews directly. However, clinic assistants can still encourage patients to leave reviews at the end of their visit. It is also helpful to have a standee at the reception counter that encourages patients to leave reviews with a QR code link to do so.
6. Create a Strong, User-Friendly Website
A user-friendly website is crucial for healthcare and medical clinics to make a positive impression on patients. Best practices in web design include a clean, modern layout with easy navigation, clear calls-to-action, and accessible information about services, doctors, and locations.
User experience (UX) should be a primary focus, ensuring that the website is intuitive and easy to use. Key features include large, legible text, contrasting colours for better readability, and a logical site structure that allows users to find the information they need.
Mobile-friendliness is also essential, as most potential patients will likely access the website from smartphones or tablets. Responsive design, which adapts the layout and content for optimal viewing on various screen sizes, ensures a seamless experience across devices.
In addition to this, SEO considerations are important. Target keywords should be strategically incorporated into your page headings and content. However, it’s crucial to maintain a natural flow, as excessive use of keywords can be perceived as keyword stuffing, which may result in search engine penalties.
If you are just starting your practice and need to create a website, or need help in improving your current site, OOm can help. Our team of website design experts and developers can help you to create aesthetically pleasing websites optimised for performance and user experience. Learn more or view our portfolio through our Website Design & Development page.
7. Improve Technical SEO
Have you ever been frustrated by a slow-loading site or a poor site layout on your mobile device? As search engines consider user experience in determining site rankings, issues like slow site speed and major technical problems can prevent a site from ranking highly, even with other SEO strategies in place. Ensure that your website loads fast and meets all the criteria for a positive user experience.
Technical SEO is the practice of optimising a website’s backend elements to improve crawlability for search engines and enhance the overall user experience, including:
- Conducting a technical SEO site audit to identify and fix any technical issues, such as broken links, crawl errors, or duplicate content.
- Improving website speed by compressing images & media files’ sizes, minifying code, and leveraging browser caching.
- Implementing responsive design or creating a mobile-friendly version of the website to ensure a seamless experience across devices.
- Ensuring proper URL structure by using descriptive, keyword-rich URLs that are easy to read and understand.
- Implementing structured data markup (e.g., Schema.org) to help search engines better understand and display your website’s content.
- For HTTP websites, migrating to HTTPS to enhance website security and establish trust with users and search engines.
- For any broken links or “Not Found” pages, implementing proper redirects (301 redirects)
- Monitoring and addressing any crawl errors or indexing issues reported in Google Search Console.
As the above aspects are important factors influencing SERP rankings, improving a website’s technical health can significantly enhance its visibility in search engine results.
Due to the complexity of Technical SEO, its implementation would usually require the expertise of SEO specialists and developers. For a start, you can usin Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to assess your website’s basic performance. If you identify significant issues that need attention, it is advisable to reach out to SEO agency with technical SEO expertise, such as OOm.
8. Build Backlinks
Backlinks are incoming links from other websites to your site, acting as “votes of confidence” that can boost your search engine rankings. High-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites signal to search engines that your site is a trusted and valuable resource, leading to improved search rankings and visibility. They can also generate referral traffic to your website from other websites, further increasing visibility and potential patient acquisition.
Link Building Strategies for Healthcare Sites
Create Valuable Content: Creating blog articles and other contents as previously discussed can also help to attract natural links from other websites and healthcare professionals.
Guest Posting: Identify reputable health blogs, medical publications, and industry websites that accept guest contributions. Provide well-researched and informative articles with relevant backlinks to your site.
Leverage Existing Relationships: Reach out to healthcare providers, medical associations, and industry partners you already collaborate with and request backlinks or content contributions on their websites.
Local Directories and Citations: List your practice in local business directories, healthcare-specific directories, and citation sources.
Link building can be time consuming and require significant efforts. If you are unable to invest the time or resources for it, consider partnering with an SEO agency offering link building services.
9. Leverage Social Media
While social media metrics aren’t direct ranking factors, a strong social presence can indirectly support SEO efforts by:
- Increasing brand visibility
- Driving traffic to your website
- Improving content distribution
- Creating social signals that search engines may consider
- Generating potential backlinks
- Enhancing local SEO through reviews and check-ins
In general, social media has become an integral part of healthcare branding and marketing strategies. It allows clinics to connect with their patients, share valuable information, and establish themselves as trusted authorities in their field.
10. Track Your Results
Tracking your SEO progress is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your efforts , identifying areas for improvement or capitalising on successful tactics.
There are several key metrics you should regularly measure to gauge the success of your healthcare and medical SEO campaign:
Website Traffic: Monitor the number of visitors to your website, their sources (organic search, referrals, direct, etc.), and the pages they visit most frequently. Tools like Google Analytics can provide detailed insights into your website’s traffic patterns.
Engagement Metrics: Analyse user behaviour on your website, including time on page, scroll rates, bounce rates, and pages per session. These metrics can reveal whether your content resonates with your audience and provides a positive user experience.
Keyword Rankings: Track your site pages’ positions in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your targeted keywords. Improvements in rankings can indicate the effectiveness of your on-page optimisation and link-building efforts.
Conversion Rates: Measure the percentage of website visitors who complete desired actions, such as scheduling an appointment, filling out a contact form, or making a purchase. High conversion rates signify an effective user experience and a well-targeted audience.
To track these metrics effectively, you’ll need to leverage various SEO tools and analytics platforms:
Google Analytics: A free, comprehensive web analytics service that provides detailed insights into your website’s traffic, user behaviour, and conversion rates.
Google Search Console: Another free tool from Google that helps you monitor your website’s performance in Google Search, identify issues, and submit sitemaps.
SEO Platforms: Paid SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz can track your keyword rankings, backlink profile, and competitor analysis.
Takeaways
Although a strong online presence is vital for healthcare providers in today’s digital landscape, effective SEO implementation requires considerable investment in time and resources.
If you lack the resources or expertise for SEO, let us help. OOm is a leading SEO agency in Singapore with a comprehensive team of SEO and digital marketing experts. Also learn more about our healthcare and medical digital marketing solutions. With our expertise in healthcare and digital marketing, we have helped many clinics to grow their patient pool and expand their practice.
Schedule your free digital strategy consultation with us today.
About OOm
OOm has been a leading digital marketing agency in Singapore since 2006, with expertise in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing to website design and development. Our clientele comprises small and medium businesses (SMEs) to enterprises.
OOm has won over 30+ marketing awards for the results we have delivered to clients over the years, including ‘Agency of the Year’, ‘Lead Generation Agency of the Year’, ‘Independent Agency of the Year’, ‘E-Commerce Marketing Agency of the Year’, ‘Excellence in Search Marketing, ‘Excellence in Performance Marketing’ to ‘Excellence in Data-driven Marketing’ among others. OOm is also a Google Premier Partner (reserved for the top 3% agency partners in Singapore), as well as an official Meta Business Partner.
