Why SEO is Vital for Hospitals and the Healthcare Industry

Hospital SEO – Why it’s Important to You!

With more and more people on the internet every day, it is vital for any business to stay ahead of the curve with an online presence, especially in industries such as healthcare.

Recent studies show that one in three American adults have gone online in an attempt to solve a medical condition (http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/01/15/health-online-2013/).

With proper healthcare and hospital SEO techniques applied to your website, you will see measurable improvement in traffic, rankings, and brand exposure.

So what exactly is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears as high as possible on the list of results given by a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. The internet is driven by SEO and by using best practices for healthcare SEO, your site can meet or exceed your online goals.

Benefits of SEO for Hospitals

• Just as in anything, there are countless goals one may have when showing an interest in SEO.

• Expanding your brand image, bringing in more patients, or ranking above you competition are just a few of the many ways that search engine optimization can benefit your business.

• Building a strong SEO backbone for your site is the base and most cost effective path to any successful online campaign.

Using Healthcare SEO to Rank Above the Competition

• In any segment of business, ranking above your competition is a vital step to success. With a healthy SEO campaign, that’s exactly what you will get.

• With healthcare being such a large field, there are numerous businesses and practices that each and every healthcare facility is competing with on a daily basis.

• This space is extremely competitive, so companies need to take advantage of every opportunity to stay ahead of the pack.

• Page 1 of organic search results earn 92% of all traffic, so it is crucial/critical to leverage search engine optimization for any website. (http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2276184/no-1-position-in-google-gets-33-of-search-traffic-study#)

Without a strong sense of SEO on your page, you will find yourself lost behind page 1, fighting for only 8% of the traffic.

How to Use Healthcare SEO to Emphasize Your Specialties

• Every hospital, doctor’s office, and healthcare facility has many core competencies that set them apart from their competitors.

• Some of these being specialized doctors, unique procedures, or strong departments. These are all focus areas to take pride in and give you a uniqueness that others don’t have.

• By leveraging SEO best practices, these are all topics that you can rank for.

• For example, if your hospital is known for its neurology department, you can optimize around this competency and rank for terms such as, “best neurology department”.

• These are the focuses that set you apart and following SEO healthcare best practices will make these known to the consumer.

Learn more about how we have helped hospitals and healthcare providers improve their search engine presence and ranking here.