Rank Higher and Appear in More Searches With Our
SEO for Hospitals

With effective SEO, you show up when local patients search for hospitals and healthcare services in your area. SEO is vital to hospitals. Here’s why:

  • 82.8% of patients find healthcare providers through online searches. 88% of local searches on mobile devices result in a call or visit the business within 24 hours
  • 71% of patients seek other providers when a provider website fails to answer their questions. Hospitals often fall short on Service Page content.
  • Yesterday’s SEO isn’t working. Google’s recent Y-M-Y-L update, now ranks medical sites differently—it matters, especially for hospitals.
  • Done right, SEO nets medical practices $4-$10 for every dollar spent (according to Physician’s Practice Magazine reports)

We’re a five-time award-winning healthcare marketing agency. We know the questions people ask when considering healthcare services, how to get found and how to convert prospects to patients—ethically and effectively.

Our clients include: Blue Cross / Blue Shield, Athena Health, and Omron.

Schedule your consultation now and you’ll also receive the complimentary eBook, “A Guide to Online Reputation Management for Doctors.

Schedule Your Free SEO Diagnostic Consultation
Uncover site issues and fixes. Review current links and how to get more high-quality links. Audit keywords issues and suggestions. Analyze local competitors. Optimize Google My Business and Bing Places. Get reliable advice from an SEO expert.

How Hospitals
Get Found Online

Get found online in two ways — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and/or pay-per-click advertisment (PPC). Both have advantages and should be part of your marketing mix. PPC produces quick results. SEO takes longer but produces higher quality traffic and better overall ROI.

Healthcare related PPC keywords range from $5-$20+. Meaning, you’ll pay $5-$20+ every time someone clicks your ads. Even when they have little or no buyer intent. For instance, students searching healthcare related information for school reports.

SEO is sustainable. SEO content works for you 24/7; answering prospects’ questions, establishing your expertise and authority, and inspiring confidence in your services. Best of all, regardless of buyer intent, you aren’t spending every time someone clicks your SEO content.

$20,000/month spent on PPC drives new patient acquisition, but not without maintaining ad-spend—forever. Conversely, $20,000 spent on SEO produces a body of content with lasting compounding value. SEO gets better over time.

As SEO builds momentum and your pages win top search positions, maintaining them requires fewer resources because SEO content and high-quality backlinks establish expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T) factors. E-A-T sites rank higher and show up more in search. Spend more on SEO rankings now and you’ll spend less later—considerably less than PPC over the long term.

SEO and PPC are best together. If you have to choose, SEO is the best bang for your buck. We also manage PPC for hospitals and healthcare organizations. Contact us

Discover how to use content to drive more new patient sign-ups. Download the free whitepaper, “Content Marketing Strategies to Grow Organic Traffic by 300%”

Hospital SEO
Frequently Asked Questions

Healthcare organizations benefit from more website visitors by ranking higher in search results for various keywords. More visitors equal more opportunities to engage and convert prospects into patients. Done right, your website content will answer many of the questions patients have prior to them contacting you. Do this better than your competitors and you win customers. Everything works together. More visitors = more conversions = more customers = more word-of-mouth referrals = more revenue.

 

82.8% of patients search for providers online prior contact. 71% of patients seek other providers when they don’t find what they’re looking for on a provider’s site. Getting found by local patients searching for your services is vital. But it’s only half the battle. Anticipating and answering prospect’s questions better than your competitors is the path to patient acquisition online. Good SEO strategy and content does that. If your website isn’t ranking for the terms your prospects are searching for and you aren’t positioned as the solution to their problems, you’re leaving money on the table.

Time-to-results is always tricky but—A recent survey of 75 SEO experts reports notable traffic increases in 6 months while 1st page rankings average 12-24 months. Again, this can vary by keyword competitiveness and other factors. Keep in mind, SEO compounds over time. As your site ages and you continue publishing content and getting backlinks, search engines collect more data establishing what Google calls E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust) factors, ranking higher for various keywords becomes faster and easier. Contact us for a more accurate appraisal of your time-to-results.

Broadly, SEO services range from $5k-$15k/month, with initiation costs between $5k-$10k. Costs depend on several factors. Question any agency providing one-size-fits-all pricing. SEO is time-consuming and labor intensive. Strategy is probably the most important factor in winning SEO, followed by high-quality content and backlinks. Beyond those, Google considers over 200 ranking factors. Optimizing for ‌these factors requires careful thought, planning, processes, and execution. If you want to know what SEO will cost your practice, contact us for a no-obligation consultation.

Fortunately, calculating ROI for SEO services is fairly simple for medical practices. First, find your average patient lifetime value (LTV). Get this by averaging the number of times patients visit your office annually. Next, multiply that by the average value of an office visit, multiplied by the average number of years patients remain with your practice. Example: An average patient visits 3 times/year spending an average $2500/visit and stays with you for an average of 5 years. Their LTV is $37,500. Or $7500/year.

Next factor in the cost of SEO services. Working with an agency is good because you’ll have fixed costs. Let’s say your cost is $15,000/month or $180,000/year.

Now look at your organic traffic increases and conversion. Let’s say SEO efforts brought 100k new visitors to your site in a year. You convert .025% for 250 new patients. The total value of those conversions based on average LTV is $93,750,000 or $1,875,000/year.

Calculate annual ROI:

(Return – Cost) / Cost 

$1,875,000 – $180,000 = $1,695,000

$1,695,000 / $180,000 = $9.41 ROI for every dollar spent.