See what we’ve learned from our experience with health clients, for whom we’ve helped boost organic blog traffic by as much as 21,383%.
We’ve all asked Dr. Google important health questions, wondering if that pain in our neck is just what waking up at 35 feels like. It turns out most people don’t just use Google to analyze symptoms, but 75% of patients report researching providers online to find new doctors, dentists, and other care professionals like you.
That means your online presence can significantly benefit your business if you understand the basics of healthcare SEO.
We get it — you’re a doctor, not a marketer. We’re here to help by sharing our technical SEO best practices for healthcare businesses. See what we’ve learned from our experience with health clients, for whom we’ve helped boost organic blog traffic by as much as 21,383%.
Check out our health SEO strategy tips to try below.
- Understand How SEO Benefits Healthcare Providers
- Identify Your Audience Needs To Map Your Site
- Prioritize Foundational Site Optimization
- Optimize SEO Content To Rank for Key Terms
- Localize Your Strategy
- Monitor Competitors and Their Strategies
- Assess and Improve Your Strategy
1. Understand How SEO Benefits Healthcare Providers
Search engine optimization involves improving your website and content to increase its visibility and understanding for web crawlers. There’s a lot to cover, but we break it into two key processes:
- Technical SEO: Looks at the actual website’s health, structure, and code to identify optimization opportunities.
- Content strategy: Looks at content optimization and the actual information on a page to improve visibility and rankings.
Your website’s technical health and your SEO content strategy work together to facilitate indexing and ranking performance. A technically optimized website is visible to web crawlers and easy to navigate, while content optimization helps the crawler understand the actual content and its value.
Learning how to build an effective healthcare SEO strategy and improving technical and page optimization will likely make your website appear in more searches within a few months. This increased organic traffic can support your brand’s recognition and convert new clients.
SEO BasicsWhat’s the difference between these SEO aspects? |
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| Technical SEO keeps your site healthy |
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| Content strategy keeps individual pages in shape |
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| Local SEO keeps you engaged in the community |
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SEO Benefits for Healthcare Businesses
The universal benefits of SEO apply to healthcare businesses, too. The ultimate goal is to increase your online presence and visibility to support business growth objectives.
Healthcare SEO specifically benefits your practice by:
- Building trust with current and prospective clients. Provider profiles, blog articles on common procedures, and service details all help users understand your practice and what to expect as a patient.
- Reaching new audiences that use the internet to find local services and currently see competitor profiles instead.
- Improving your site authority with links, press mentions, and quality content. Stronger site authority is a key quality signal that will help support other page rankings and objectives.
- Driving conversions to get new patients to sign up for an appointment, attract partnerships with new clinics, or reach your annual flu shot quota.
This is especially valuable if you’re a local practice competing with established clinics associated with larger hospital networks. These systems have more resources and visibility to own the search engine results page (SERP), so it can be easy to get lost in the digital noise.
SEO Challenges for Healthcare Strategies
Healthcare SEO is a competitive vertical with several challenges on the road to success. Because of its integral role in everybody’s daily lives, Google keeps an extremely close eye on “your money your life” (YMYL) topics. These are anything that directly impacts your life, like financial advice and public health information.
So your site’s reputation, content quality, and authority are key to earning Google’s favor — these best practices are covered in a key strategy called E-E-A-T. But SEO limitations aren’t the only hurdle for health companies.
When creating an SEO strategy, you also have to work around:
- HIPAA compliance: It might seem obvious, but you can never share Protected Health Information (PHI). These regulations protect patient data, so effective market segmentation and targeting are difficult.
- Marketing budgets: The industry’s marketing investment is low compared to others. Healthcare marketing accounts for just 9.31% of companies’ total budget, compared to the average allocation of 10.24%.
- Content accessibility: Patient education materials can be difficult to digest — only 8.2% of content meets the National Institutes of Health’s eighth-grade reading level recommendation. Creating accessible, easy-to-read content is important for inclusion and patient-provider relationships.
It’s a tight race to the top of a health SERP, but it’s not impossible. Just be sure you consider these potential complications as you strategize SEO for healthcare.
2. Identify Your Audience Needs To Map Your Site
If someone can’t open your site and easily navigate to find your contact information or service offerings, it’s not very helpful to anyone — human or robot web crawler.
To keep clients happy, you have to build a site that meets their needs.
A local clinic would have contact information and patient portal links on the homepage, with provider profiles and other information a click away in the main navigation.
Hospital SEO might call for symptoms of high-risk emergencies, parking details, and a visitor policy to be readily available. Then, the main navigation details emergency services, outpatient support, and facility highlights.
Both of these patient-facing healthcare websites have very different designs to address the various needs of separate patient audiences, plus the fundamental differences in operations and service scope.
Design Your Site With Business Objectives Top of Mind
Consider and rank your products, services, and target audiences to identify the highest-priority needs your site addresses. This will inform your site structure and design, from homepage content to your main navigation links.
Next, think about what the average user wants when they open your site. This can vary from practice to practice, as pediatricians regularly welcome new clients, but oncologists likely build business through referrals.
Patients might want to:
- Schedule an appointment
- Pay a bill
- Confirm insurance acceptance
- Update insurance information
- Enter a patient portal
- Call to talk to a nurse practitioner
- Browse facility amenities
- Compare clinic service offerings
Your site design should prioritize whatever best aligns with your offerings and target audience expectations. That might mean creating a high-contrast “Appointment Request” button at the top of your navigation or building a carousel of your clinic doctors’ credentials on the homepage.
Some organizations have split audiences to consider, too. For example, a third-party DNA lab might process doctor-provided specimens and independent tests. In this case, you might build subdomains or separate navigation menus to cater content to a specific audience.
Prioritize Intuitive Navigation
Excellent site navigation allows users to find what they need. At this point, most websites follow a similar setup, including:
- Top bar navigation for high-priority links and page categories.
- Search bar for users to search a specific query (usually included near the main navigation).
- Footer links that group key website sections and high-priority internal links. This is particularly helpful for important links excluded from the top bar nav.
Again, we want to prioritize our navigation links based on what users need from the site. Beyond links, you need to think about branding and accessibility when you label navigation links.
Should you call your blog “Blog” or “News Center”? Or maybe something creative and unique like “The Checkup.”
For most businesses, we’d recommend sticking with the straight-shooter and using “Blog” or “Learn.” “News” can certainly work, but it doesn’t quite clarify whether readers are getting information as patients, medical industry news, or business updates.
We won’t try to box your creativity — “The Checkup” is a great blog heading but not the best navigation label. Users could read this as an appointment request instead.
There’s a fine balance between user experience (UX), SEO, and creative branding. To make sure your site is intuitive, follow UX best practices and have people test drive the site in front of you a few times so you can catch any confusion.
Create and Maintain a Sitemap
Site navigation is just as important for the robots crawling your site, but instead of a search bar, they look at your sitemap. This file shows all of the content on your site and organizes it by relevance, relationship, and importance.
While you don’t explicitly need a sitemap (if you have strong navigation and internal linking strategies), we highly recommend one. It helps web crawlers understand and index your site more efficiently and allows you to identify your most important pages.
When a web crawler indexes your site, it uses something called crawl depth to limit the number of pages it indexes at a time. If you don’t have a sitemap, it has to figure out where to go on its own, which can waste valuable discovery time on less important pages.
This isn’t as essential for smaller sites, either. But investing time now in creating and maintaining a sitemap will benefit your health SEO strategy and support continued growth at scale.
3. Prioritize Foundational Site Optimization
Intuitive navigation is key for UX, but it’s just a part of the larger technical SEO picture. A well-optimized site is user-friendly with healthy core web vitals, responsive design, and mobile optimization.
These signals make it easier for Google to interpret your site and content, but they also speak to your overall site quality. Usability is important to Google — it’s not going to promote broken sites with slow-loading images or difficult-to-read copy.
Users also want a great site experience. Most of us have opened a page and been bounced around as pop-up ads load and videos buffer, and I’m willing to bet you were as quick to exit as I am.
Not only does this turn the customer off, but Google sees your bounce rate and interprets high rates negatively. Even if the robots don’t understand how annoying auto-play videos are, they understand your reaction and use that to gauge content value.
So, if you want Google to see, understand, and promote your content, you need to address the foundation of your website’s optimization.
Ensure Site Accessibility
Site accessibility features are important for any business, but it’s not just about inclusivity or SEO perks (though those certainly exist). Creating accessible websites can literally change people’s lives, and that’s especially true as a healthcare provider.
Most accessibility features are relatively easy to implement, including:
- High-contrast designs and color-safe palettes for people with low vision and blindness
- ALT descriptions so text-to-speech software can describe images
- Accurate closed captioning on videos for people with hearing disabilities
- Screenreader-friendly forms with input labels, clear instructions, and error indicators
- User-friendly fonts and text sizes that make reading easier
There are plenty of programs and plugins that support your site’s accessibility. There are also courses and resources available to learn more about web accessibility needs, solutions, and impacts.
Build Site Authority
Website authority refers to the overall health of your site. Strong authority is essential to great SEO and earning rankings, but it’s an even higher priority for health sites competing for YMYL queries.
We touched on this earlier and mentioned E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) as a key framework for improving your site authority.
You can create positive E-E-A-T signals with features like:
- Author bios that introduce recognized writers and their credentials. If you use fact-checkers, give them a bio to further support your topical authority and build trust.
- Original research and data that shows you’re an expert in the industry and have unique insights to share.
- Relevant content topics that align with your expertise and experiences and relate to your audience’s needs and business services.
- Well-cited resources validate your content and improve trust.
- Content freshness date so users can easily determine how old information is, and you can show when you’ve refreshed pieces with new findings.
E-E-A-T goes beyond your blog post credentials, and true site authority is built over time. The more high-quality content you produce, relevant links you build, and recognition you earn, the higher robots and readers will regard your website.
Think Mobile First
Mobile-friendly care is nothing new to most providers as nearly a quarter of Americans regularly self-diagnose with health apps. From wearable fitness trackers to mobile apps to monitor blood sugar, mobile medicine is a booming business.
Most of us have mini-computers in our pockets, so there’s little reason for most people to search for a doctor using a desktop. This isn’t unique to healthcare, as a larger share of searches are made from mobile devices.
Your website has to work on mobile devices if you want patients to access your site.
The first part of this solution is building a mobile-friendly site from the get-go. You can use services that make your site responsive to accommodate different devices, but nothing will be as effective as a site built for mobile viewing.
Second, you have to continue optimizing your site for mobile use. That means uploading image assets in desktop and mobile sizes, considering scroll depth on mobile screens to adjust your formatting accordingly, and customizing key features like your navigation menu to work intuitively on desktop and mobile devices.
4. Optimize SEO Content To Rank for Key Terms
Once your site is technically optimized, it’s time to dig into your content. No matter how well-designed your site is, nothing will rank if you don’t also have high-quality, keyword-driven content for users to find on the SERP.
So you need a content strategy that addresses user needs and targets valuable keywords for your business. Additionally, you need to know how to write and format great content. Let’s get to it.
Discover Your Target Audience
You can publish great SEO content all day and never see positive results for your business if the content isn’t relevant to your customers. So before you ideate topics, you need to identify your target audience for healthcare SEO content.
You probably already know who you’re trying to reach, but we want to understand what they’re searching for and why. Come up with a few example customer personas and think through these questions to learn more.
| Audience Question | Healthcare Example |
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| What challenges are they looking to solve? |
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| How does your service or product solve user needs? |
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| What tangential needs might readers search for? |
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| What information do your users need to make a decision? |
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| Is your ideal customer ready to buy or learn more? |
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This understanding will help you build a strategy that balances your business goals with real customer support to expand your audience reach and convert more business.
Now that you know more about the topics your readers want to see, you can explore specific keyword opportunities.
Research Keywords
Keywords are the specific search queries people type into search engines to find the results they’re looking for. In SEO, we use these to gauge the popularity and potential value of specific topics. We can also research keyword results to understand search intent and build effective content accordingly.
There are two types of keywords to know:
- Parent keywords are at the top of the pyramid with the highest search volume and potential value, but they tend to be much more competitive.
- Long-tail keywords are more specific and focus on a core need, so there’s less competition to rank but fewer searches.
If you’re Healthline, you can probably rank for any parent healthcare keyword you want. Most healthcare SEO strategies will benefit from long-tail keywords early on since these are less competitive, and you don’t need as much site authority to rank.
They’re also usually tied to a specific phase of the buyer’s funnel. For example, searching “nutritionists” will pull some local results and a lot of national blogs. Searching “vegan nutritionists in Las Vegas” shows clear intent to find a quality provider and make an appointment. Targeting the long-tail query from the beginning is a better value for smaller, local healthcare sites.
Beyond that, you need to consider:
- Brand relevance: Does it make sense for your site to cover this topic?
- Topical authority: Do you have experience and expertise in this subject?
- Audience need: Does this address your target audience’s needs and search intent?
- Strategy objectives: Does this topic support your goals (increase organic traffic, links, etc.), or is there a better opportunity?
We designed our own system, the Keyword Opposition Benefit Analysis (KOB), which we use to organize potential keywords from most to least valuable opportunities. You can learn more below:
Explore Content Types and Objectives
Keywords help you know what topics to cover and understand what users expect to see from specific terms. This also helps inform the type of content you create for each query.
There are several types of content that serve a variety of purposes. Most topics just need an SEO article, but we also commonly cover these formats:
| Content Type | Description | Best For |
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| SEO articles | Keyword-driven informational content | Increased organic traffic |
| Statistics and trends | Article sharing industry trends, data, and statistics | Increased organic links and promotions |
| Data studies | Deep dive into existing data to identify new insights | High-end news coverage and promotions |
| White paper | Long-form on a specific industry topic | Building authority and industry news coverage |
Ideally, any content you create is also keyword-driven to help support organic traffic. Otherwise, you’ll want to manually promote it to the press or through other marketing channels to drive interest.
Prioritize Proper Headings and Keyword Application
So, you’ve chosen a keyword and content format, but how do you actually optimize your article? This is all about keyword inclusion, and there are four places you need to include your target keyword to succeed:
- The title tag/H1
- Meta description
- Introduction copy
- Conclusion copy
These target keyword placements make it perfectly clear to web crawlers and users what your content is about. If you can sprinkle a few other exact-match keyword mentions throughout the copy, that’s great!
You can also support optimization by including additional long-tail keywords that relate to your topic and are covered in specific sections. This helps build out your article and extend its reach online.
Just make sure topics flow naturally from the target keyword. You should always immediately prioritize a quick answer that addresses the key query. So, if your post is “Best healthcare accounting software,” your first H2 should be the #1 healthcare accounting software.
5. Localize Your Strategy
Many healthcare clinics and services operate within a specific region, so ranking nationally isn’t going to help attract new clients. Instead, you need to localize your SEO strategy to appear in “provider near me” searches.
This isn’t entirely different from the larger health SEO strategy, but you do need to find local keywords and address community needs to gain traction.
Target Local Keywords in Your Strategy
Local keywords will have significantly less search volume than national parent keywords, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable! So don’t shy away from a strong query because it doesn’t look like a lot of people are searching the term.
The easiest way to start with local keywords is to add your area to key phrases, like:
- “Doctors that accept Aetna in New York”
- “Best optometrists in Atlanta”
- “Birth centers in Chicagoland”
Most of these won’t need a page on their own, but you can work the keywords into your homepage, website description, and “about us” page to signal your relevance to Google.
You will still want some localized pages, like your contact or about us page. This clarifies your location and helps naturally include some of those keywords.
Use Review Sites To Build Links and Mentions
Links are an important way to build authority across your site, and so you need local links to build regional recognition. Good news — you can build a lot of these on your own with third-party sites.
If you don’t already have a Google Business Account, start there. This is one of the first features that pop up on common searches like “doctors near me,” so it’s a great place to start.
It also allows you to link to your website and build out key customer information. You can drop some of those local keywords in your business descriptions to help boost visibility. Business reviews will also build trust and authority over time.
Beyond Google Business profiles, you can include your business on provider marketplaces like Psychology Today and review sites like Yelp.
Build Your Local Reputation
Once you take advantage of third-party review sites, you can further build your reputation with local press mentions. You can offer your services as a subject matter expert to newspapers and stations when flu season comes around. If they use your interview or comment, you can earn a link back to your site.
You can also write guest posts to share on other publications. If you share an article on healthy nutrition for fertility with a parenting blog, they’ll also link back to your site. Plus, Google will pick up that your name’s referenced across the web and better understand your expertise, which supports site authority.
6. Monitor Competitors and Their Strategies
The healthcare SEO competition is fierce, but that can be good. It means several companies are already investing in top-tier strategies, and you can learn a thing or two from your competitors.
Step one is understanding where you fit in the market. Identify a few search competitors that are ranking for queries you want to target and are of a similar size to you. Then use a tool like Ahrefs to see their site authority, top pages, and ranking keywords.
A few key comparisons to note are:
- Link profile: Links indicate authority, and you might have a hard time competing against sites with significantly more links than you.
- Organic keywords: Explore how many keywords the site is ranking for to judge how much you need to invest in content to stay competitive.
- Top pages: See the highest-value keywords a competitor is ranking for to understand realistic ranking expectations and top opportunities.
Once you know where you stand, you can better understand your key content goals.
Ahrefs also lets you compare your content catalog with competing domains to identify a content gap. This shows all the keywords a competitor ranks for that you don’t, so you can zero in on opportunities to help bridge the gap.
7. Assess and Improve Your Strategy
At this phase you have pretty much everything you need to design an effective healthcare SEO strategy and design great supporting content. Now, you can launch your strategy, publish content, and keep an eye on results.
SEO strategies take a while to fruit, so don’t be too quick to uproot your carefully laid strategy when you don’t see immediate results. We usually give a strategy three months to start rolling before we even begin monthly reporting. After that, we like to check results monthly to monitor performance.
Track These Reporting Metrics
To evaluate your content and site performance, you’ll want to track these metrics:
- Domain Rating: refers to your overall site authority
- Core web vitals: tracks the overall health, speed, and responsiveness of your site
- Organic traffic: monthly total for organic clicks to your site
- Organic traffic value: estimated value of organic clicks in a month based on keyword PPC
- Link profile: the number of unique LRDs inbound to your site
- Keyword rankings: the SERP position a specific keyword holds
- Conversions: the number of events a user triggers, like clicking a “free quote” CTA
You can look at many of these metrics sitewide and apply them to specific sections, like a blog or individual post.
Google provides the best performance tools, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You can also access third-party tools like Ahrefs to see performance metrics, but they’re estimates rather than exact data from Google.
Refresh Content Annually (or More)
After several months of publishing content, you can accurately see how it’s performing and what topics aren’t quite hitting the mark. Now, you can start evaluating what needs to be updated.
If you find some content just wasn’t the right fit for the site, it’s best to remove it. But most content just needs a few tweaks to boost performance. When you’re identifying content to refresh, consider:
- Search intent: Does the current post solve for what the users need?
- Time to value: Is the answer immediately available, or is it hidden below the fold?
- Freshness: Are there new data findings or insights you need to add so the content is up to date?
- Optimization: Are there opportunities to reoptimize the post with additional long-tail keywords, new meta data, or authoritative references?
- Content quality: Does your piece add anything new to the conversation that competitors don’t address?
Most content needs to be refreshed annually, but it depends on the topic. Your post about seasonal fly precautions is probably good with an annual update, but flu transmission data would call for quarterly or even monthly updates.
Schedule a Check-Up for Your Healthcare SEO Strategy
Healthcare SEO can be tricky, but it’s possible to succeed with the right tools and support for a qualified healthcare SEO agency. And the benefits for your business could be huge, with an improved local reputation and a steady stream of new patient inquiries.
Ready to build a health SEO strategy that sickens the competition? Siege Media has over a decade of experience optimizing healthcare blogs and maintaining healthy content strategies, and we can help your organic growth, too. Get started with a content audit today.
