Let’s talk SEO keywords for healthcare.
In this video, I’m going to start off by dispelling some common misconceptions that people have about keywords and SEO. I’m going to give you some of the basics so that you can get moving along with keyword research, showcasing some free and some paid methods.
At the end of the video, I’m going to share with you a link to a download. It’s going to be a quick and dirty guide—a checklist that you can follow to implement your keywords on your page once you’ve identified them. I’ve actually shot videos to go along with the entire checklist, so if you are so motivated, you should be able to do it yourself.
Common Misconceptions About SEO
Alright, let’s get into it.
The most common misconception in SEO is that what we do is put the keywords on the page.
That was SEO in 2004, but the truth is it hasn’t been SEO since about 2012. Google does not necessarily rank a page because it includes a specific keyword.
It ranks a page because it’s relevant to a topic, it’s more comprehensive than any of the other search results that it has in the index, and in the case of healthcare, it’s coming from a website that Google trusts more than some of the other websites that it has in the index.
Why Do SEOs Still Do Keyword Research?
So, wait a second, why do SEOs do keyword research if Google doesn’t use keywords?
It’s not that Google doesn’t use keywords, it’s that your goal is not to find a keyword and repeat it on the page 27 times.
When you’re doing keyword research for SEO, the goal is to first figure out how your patients are searching for what it is that you do, and second, what questions your target patients have that they’re turning to Google and YouTube to research.
Because, honestly, you want to get in front of them even before they’ve explicitly looked for the place where they’re going to get treated, and keyword research is how you find all of this stuff out.
How to Find and Choose Keywords for Your Healthcare Practice
So, how do you know what keywords to target for your healthcare practice?
I’m going to break this up into two parts:
Part number one is going to be practices that serve a specific geography where someone is very likely to come from far away to see you.
Part two is going to be those types of specialty practices where someone would fly across the country or possibly even do telemedicine.
Part 1: Local Healthcare Practices
Starting off with those, let’s say local physicians, med spas, home care agencies, and the other types of clients that we work with. You’re going to want to start off by targeting service plus location queries. Let’s take the example of a med spa.
A med spa in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where we’re located, is going to want to target keywords such as “B—x Cherry Hill,” “chemical peels Cherry Hill,” “hydro facials Cherry Hill,” and frankly all of the services they offer along with the name of the city.
They are also going to want to target all of those same keywords for a lot of the surrounding towns. Haddonfield, New Jersey, borders Cherry Hill, New Jersey, it’s very affluent, and any medical spa here would want to attract people looking for B—x, chemical peels, fillers.
The thing is, though, your Cherry Hill page is likely going to be tough to get ranking in every single town in the geography that someone would possibly drive from.
This is where location pages come in. It’s common practice for service area businesses in local SEO to build up different pages that are targeting all of those service plus location queries.
I have a video on location pages, I’m going to link to it in the description, but as far as your keyword strategy, you’re going to want to rank for all those queries.
Part 2: Specialty Healthcare Practices
Now let’s talk about those healthcare practices that aren’t really limited to a geography.
Someone will fly across the country for a hair transplant or a facelift, so what does that keyword strategy look like?
Typically, for our clients, we’ll start off by targeting those service plus location queries within their immediate geography, but we’re not going to build out a page for every single city in the United States—that would be spam.
Once all of those pages are up for the immediate geography, we’ll usually pivot our keyword approach to start targeting the kinds of questions that their target patients are searching on Google and YouTube.
Notice that I’m including YouTube—it’s really important when it comes to healthcare.
Content Strategy for Healthcare SEO
This is where our content strategy is going to come into play.
We’re going to use keyword research tools such as Also Asked, Answer the Public, or Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to find out what the questions are that your target customers are Googling.
So let’s say we were doing this for a medical weight loss clinic. We could go to a tool like this, enter a keyword like Ozempic, perform a search, and this tool is going to give me all kinds of different questions that people have about Ozempic.
You can do the same thing in a tool like Answer the Public with Ozempic. As you can see, there’s no shortage of questions that people have about it.
But the trick is to not just simply grab a keyword or question that you like and start rambling on about it in a blog post. You want to qualify each article by four criteria:
- It’s on your buyer journey. We had a client that was serving women’s health and one of their articles that they had planned was “What is menopause?” as if there’s a single 48-year-old woman in North America that has to Google that—that’s not on your buyer’s journey.
- Are people going to be satisfied with an AI answer? “Is Ozempic over the counter?” Lots of people are going to be satisfied with an AI answer to that question. How much weight can I expect to lose on Ozempic? People are going to want to hear from people that have actually been on it or possibly doctors.
- Can you rank for it? Looking at a keyword like “How many Americans are diabetic?” you’re going to have to outrank the CDC, the American Diabetes Association, and the NIH in order to rank for this keyword. Your 2-month-old diabetes startup is not going to outrank the CDC for practically anything.
- Is there enough search volume? That’s where the paid tools come into play. So you may identify a keyword like “Can you drink alcohol on Ozempic?” What kind of traffic can you expect to generate from ranking for that? The number one result is getting about 6,200 visitors a month—a quite significant number. The number two result is getting about 3,900 visitors a month. But when you get down to number three, it’s actually showing zero search traffic, which I would consider to be a red flag.
As we go down the page, 29, 34, it seems like overall most of the results are getting some traffic. I would just want to know why this one here seems to not really be generating anything.
This could be that it’s a brand new article and the SEO tools haven’t picked up on it, but I’d want to dive in a little bit more deeply to see what’s going on here. At position three, it should be getting some traffic, and it very well may be that those other two articles are actually getting traffic for other search intents that are not this one and that there isn’t a lot of opportunity here for us to rank.
I’m not going to get into it too much detail, but there’s a thought process behind all of this.
Basically, if you’re going to spend the time writing a blog or shooting a video for your website and for YouTube, you want to make sure that there’s demand out there, that there are people that are actually looking for this information.
