Being an amazingly effective marketing channel, SEO faces distrust, misunderstanding, and irrational fears from business owners, especially when it comes to the healthcare sector.
All of it didn’t just appear out of thin air. There is room for manipulation here, based on postponed results and unreasonable activities.
In this article, I’ll show you there are no SEO monsters under the bed if you are working with the right agencies. Also, you’ll see a lot of reasons why SEO is still one of the most important digital channels in 2020 for the growth of your healthcare business!
More searches of clinics and doctors
I’m sure you know that people are searching out different symptoms of diseases using Google and engaging in self-diagnostics.
Fairly often, patients will come into the office stating: “I tried googling it, but what I read just scared me.”
For specific, diagnosed medical cases, searching for some info about the disease is totally acceptable. Yet, in some cases, it’s bad and even dangerous. Nonetheless, we should consider all of this traffic as potential leads.
Along with symptoms, users are searching for clinics and doctors. That’s a tastier piece of the search traffic pie for us. According to Google Trends data, we can see significant growth for queries like “dental clinic near me” or “rheumatologist in California,” especially in the past five years. The same is true for non-local medical queries.
We can see a big opportunity for explosive growth in the medical area because the current trend is pretty fresh.
Important tip:
Always require your agency provide an extended semantic core including search queries and volume of traffic. The semantic core is the heart of your SEO. It will be very useful for general marketing purposes to have it.
SEO as the most effective long-term investment
First of all, we need to clarify that SEO is the worst short-term marketing investment available. If you try to calculate ROI after the first two to three months of working on your SEO, you’ll get something very close to 0%. On the other hand, SEO begins to yield results exponentially starting from the third month (for an average project).
Mostly, during the first six months, we might see a 200-300% ROI. And after a year, this could rise to 700-800% ROI per month. The most interesting thing is that the results are rising, but the SEO consumption budget stays quite stable as originally projected. The whole system creates a so-called snowball effect.
While working in the medical domain, it is important to understand that this market is controlled very strictly from Google’s side. So, in some cases, it might take a little while to see some results. You should be patient.
Important tip:
Postponed results did not obviate the need to control from your side. During the first two to three months require from your SEO agency detailed monthly reports. You can just compare the report with the internal and technical SEO checklists and asks questions as necessary.
Digital competitiveness still acceptable
“It’s too late now… we’ve lost the element of surprise.” SEO’s element of surprise was lost in 2005. We are in 2020 now, and we have to deal with it.
Despite the fact that the medical search market is really competitive, you can start today and still be successful in SEO. It comes from our SERP results researches.
Three points why:
- We noticed that around 6 of 10 medical websites from the top search results aren’t optimized. All things being equal, you’ll be able to see results within the first few phases using only technical and internal SEO. And by adding external SEO, you’ll skyrocket higher than ever. Of course, it’s an average medical case. There are very hot competitive topics in the healthcare sector like “rehabilitation” where it would be really hard to compete.
- Coming back to the trends in the digital healthcare field, we can clearly see that the previous year was the year of digital health and digitalizing the whole medical sphere. Medical business owners started to consider digital marketing as the main channel for attracting patients. By 2023, we expect four to five times higher competitiveness in Healthcare SEO than now.
- After the medical algorithm update, we see that Google is cleansing medical SERP results and downgrading a lot of websites from time to time. So, if you create high-quality content mixed with White Hat SEO, you’ll be able to replace your old but low-quality competitor in the search engine results very fast.
Important tip:
Make decisions faster. Choose a fast and flexible SEO agency. The trend is already here!
Medical dilettantes are collecting your visitors
These guys have been around medical search results for a long time. It’s not that they are bad guys, but I can’t admit that they are good. They create informational medical websites, place google ads banners, and sell the potential patients to you through the Google AdWords when you launch your PPC advertising campaign.
I mean, I have nothing against high-quality medical blogs. They are cool and helpful. But mostly, we see websites with rubbish-quality content written by non-medical copywriters. And some of the info might even be dangerous for visitors. So, you can accomplish two goals at once by building out your own medical site ― remove intermediaries from your patient flow and help people by providing professional medical content.
As I wrote, Google is checking the professionalism of the content very strictly and it will be easy for you to pick up some of the traffic from these guys.
Important tip:
Analyzing these websites along with low-quality medical content, you can find a lot of ideas for the articles. These guys are usually very good at collecting correct semantic core and keywords that work.
Social Media can’t handle the job solo
Social Media is a cool and useful channel for your healthcare business. But it’s important to understand that healthcare is about privacy. It means that in other spheres, Social Media can play a major role, but in healthcare, it could be considered only as an additional channel.
That’s why SEO is crucial for digital healthcare promotion. Also, it means that medical traffic didn’t transfer fully from search engines to social media and you can expect quite a high volume of potential patients from the Healthcare SEO channel.
Important tip:
The traffic from social media will be very helpful for SEO growth because Google likes to see traffic from different sources.
If your SEO specialists don’t say anything about Social Media, you need to run.
Conclusion
I just want to summarize everything and highlight that search engines are waiting for your healthcare websites and would be happy to give you a noticeable amount of visitors if you act correctly.
Good luck with your Healthcare SEO and remember that search engines today are smarter than yesterday and there is no time for Black SEO and bad stuff like that!
