Can Effective Medical SEO Also Be Affordable?

The smartest way for healthcare professionals to spend their marketing money these days is with medical SEO. However, you need to be careful when spending money with a medical SEO agency. This is because it needs to be done right; unlike traditional advertising, you can’t simply spend a lot of money to put ads everywhere.

From a marketing perspective, you know that most people search online for most things, including healthcare. Medical SEO is the key to reaching more people through your website.

Medical SEO involves optimizing both on-site and off-site issues to improve search engine ranking. This, in turn, generates high-quality organic traffic. It can also work hand-in-hand with a pay-per-click advertising campaign.

Watch this video to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to Medical SEO!

The Difference Between Medical SEO and PPC

The simple difference is, pay-per-click means just that, you are paying for people to click through to your website. On the other hand, search engine optimization puts your website closer to the top of search engine results pages, where it will attract organic traffic.

Effective medical SEO takes months, but in the end, you'll have free organic traffic. Yes, you'll need to make an investment upfront. But once your website gains traction, it should continue to climb the ranks. On the other hand, you could pay for search engine ads forever. While PPC is generally affordable, month after month, that cost adds up.

It's best to use PPC while your website is being optimized. Once your website appears on the first page of Google, you can back off on spending for PPC.

From the user’s perspective, organic search results have more authority and credibility. People understand that the results at the very top are ads. Medical SEO not only drives organic traffic but also gives you and your practice a stamp of authority.

How well your website ranks in the search engine results depends on how well your content is optimized to rank for your keywords. It also depends on the overall user experience of our website.

Benefits of Medical SEO

The fact is, search engine optimization not only increases the organic growth of your online presence, but also the growth of your practice. By investing in medical SEO, you'll also increase your professional authority and reputation in the community.

The internet has become an integral part of our professional and personal lives. Today, people use it to also guide their healthcare decisions, and research healthcare providers. They also use it to find answers about their symptoms and health issues. By using the internet, they can find local healthcare providers, like you.

By creating valuable, optimized content aligned with what people are searching for, you can present yourself to potential patients in the best light possible.

Healthcare practices that don’t leverage medical SEO are missing out on potential revenue. Whether you are a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, or a dentist, medical SEO can help you meet your goals.

Improve Your Professional Image

Your website is the place where potential patients can see your educational degrees and any awards you've received. But more importantly, it can showcase your expertise by filling your website with quality content covering your services. This allows you to build your professional reputation and display your expertise.

When someone does a search for your profession in their area, you want to be on the first page of the search results. It's a fact, that many people assume that the medical professionals that appear at the top are the most qualified. Quality, SEO-optimized content reinforces that perception.

In addition to enhancing your professional reputation, medical SEO can also increase patient trust. When your blog is filled with useful health information that people are looking for, they naturally associate you with an expert in your field.

By spending the time and money to have great, SEO-optimized content created that answers people's questions, you can build trust. As a result, your website visitors are more likely to make an appointment, since they see you as a trusted authority. Also, they'll be more likely to overlook the occasional negative review, since most of what they see is positive.

Popularity and Trust

An often-overlooked element of medical SEO is that it builds the trustworthiness and popularity of your website. Generally, Google and other search engines rank authoritative and reputable websites higher.

How does a search engine find out if a website is reputable? Two important things include backlinks and mentions from highly ranked websites and the quality of the website's content. Also, a website is ranked according to its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Coincidentally, these are also the qualities that medical professionals are ranked on.

As you can imagine, these ranking guidelines are very important when it comes to medical websites. Google particularly looks for accurate, authoritative medical information, and will downrank medical disinformation.

This is where professional, medical SEO can be worth the money; an SEO professional can get you the quality, authoritative backlinks that you need. Furthermore, they'll know how to structure your internal links to let the search engines know that you are an authority in your field.

Hiring the Right Medical SEO Professional

Medical SEO is labor-intensive and can take months to drive meaningful results. It involves hiring a team well-versed in technical SEO, using SEO tools, content creation, keyword research, link building, on-page optimization, and much more.

By choosing an SEO agency with team members experienced with medical websites, you're most likely to get results. As you know, running a medical practice is highly specialized, and you need an SEO professional aligned with that level of specialization.

How can you tell if it's the wrong SEO agency for you? Either they do everything, or they're willing to work with anyone. You need to find an SEO agency that specializes in search engine optimization for medical and healthcare professionals.

If one thing is clear, the internet is not going anywhere. Thus, medical SEO is only going to become more important to your practice. Healthcare professionals that double down on medical SEO will see a hefty ROI in the future. They’ll be able to connect their expertise with a much wider audience while building their reputation.