Did you know that 95% of patients do not scroll past the first five results on Google?
That means that if your practice is not there, you are not getting found, and they’re going to someone else.
In this video, I’m going to provide you 15 tips for SEO for doctors that are going to help you get in front of the patients you want to serve.
So, let’s get into it.
My name is Frank, and I’m the founder of Sagapixel. We’ve been recognized by SEMrush as one of the top healthcare digital marketing firms in the country.
In this video, I’m going to give you these 15 tips for SEO for doctors that will set you on the right path to getting discovered on Google.
Also, this video series gives tutorials for each one of the steps in the checklist. That will help you with many of the SEO problems that you have.
Tip Number One: Get Serious About SEO
Over the long term, SEO is going to have the lowest patient acquisition cost of any channel available to you.
It’s pretty much the only channel that you can spend money on today and eventually stop, yet still reap the benefits.
It’s something that you don’t have to spend money and effort on forever, and it’s really just about getting a number of fundamentals right to reap those benefits.
Tip Number Two: Optimize for Local Queries
Odds are you serve a local market.
When someone performs a search like “radiologists near me,” you scroll past the map results, and you’ll see that these blue link results all have pages optimized around radiologists or radiology in Cherry Hill, where I’m located.
Generic pages that do not mention the location are very rarely going to rank in organic search for these kinds of searches.
It’s a very common mistake to put up your interventional radiology page and not even mention the city, state, or area that you serve. Number five in this list will get into how to do this in more detail.
Tip Number Three: Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is going to help you identify how your target patients are searching for what you do.
So, in the case of a radiologist, maybe people are searching for a radiologist near me, interventional radiologists, or fibroid embolization.
You’re not going to be able to get one page on your website ranking for all three of those queries in most cases.
You’re probably going to have to build pages for each one of those and probably everything else that you do. Keyword research will help you uncover all the opportunities that you have.
Tip Number Four: Create Patient-Centric Content
You could say that search engine optimization could also be called “answer engine optimization.”
You should be producing content that answers all the questions your patients have.
This means that before someone is even in the market to actually look for a physician, when they’re just Googling their symptoms or their problems, your website is the one providing that information.
Keyword research can help us identify what those questions are, what content needs to be added to your blog feed, and then we need to do a really good job of producing it.
Now, I’m not a firm believer in blogging; the written word doesn’t communicate the way video does.
It takes a lot longer than sitting down to shoot a video like the one that I’m doing right now. At best, people scan the headlines; you can’t really scan a video, so they’re getting a lot more of the information that you’re giving.
And really, above all, they get an idea of who you are as a healthcare provider. If someone needs a specialist and they come away from your video wanting to go to you, they will travel.
So, as you’re producing this patient-centric content, focus on video first.
You do need the written word to rank better, and I have some videos to talk about that as well. I’m going to link to that in the description.
Tip Number Five: Implement On-Page SEO Best Practices
This is probably the easiest one to do, but the one that I see fall short most frequently.
Now, this is the video series and checklist that I mentioned earlier; it’s linked in the description.
Basically, what this does is make sure that we are maximizing the relevance of the content to the searches that your patients are performing.
You did keyword research, now let’s make that content super relevant to those searches: put your keyword in the title tag, put your keyword in the H1, put your keyword in the first 15% of the page, use the keyword and related keywords wherever you can while still writing naturally, and use the keyword in the URL.
Honestly, just check out the checklist; it’ll do you well.
Tip Number Six: Get Your Google Business Profile Right
The first thing you see when you perform “radiologists near me” is the Google Business Profile of these three radiology groups in my area.
I can hover on them, I can see pictures of the practice.
These are pretty lackluster photos; it would be a lot better if they had actual or better photography. It’d be better if they had pictures of the doctors—like, what the heck guys?
Nobody cares about the building; they care about the doctors. They have reviews.
You want to make sure that this profile is completely filled out, you have better photography than these listings that you just saw, with human beings in them.
I recommend using Google Posts, maybe to call out some of the content that you’re producing, and do everything you can to get reviews.
Getting reviews will result in better rankings in the local map results and increase the likelihood of someone actually contacting you over the person that has four times more reviews.
Tip Number Seven: Build a User-Friendly Website
It should be mobile-friendly; there should be a tap to call, a tap to book an appointment, and maybe even a tap for directions.
Tip Number Eight: Get Reviews Online in Places Other Than Your Google Business Profile
There are directories such as Healthgrades, ZocDoc, RealSelf, and your potential patients see these reviews, and Google also does take note of it.
So physically having a listing on these websites and collecting reviews will help you rank better in organic search and frankly earn some trust from patients that are looking.
Tip Number Nine: Get Your Technical SEO Right
To start, claim your Google Search Console.
There’s a lot of stuff to do in here that will give you insights into any sort of technical SEO issues that you have.
This is not a tutorial on Google Search Console; learn how to use it.
Use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to run an audit each month and see if there are any sort of major issues on your website.
Technical SEO issues can sometimes be catastrophic; they can also be really easy wins.
But just be forewarned that those tools a lot of the time call out a lot of non-issues, so make sure that you confirm that what you’re seeing in the report actually matters before you invest a whole bunch of resources into addressing it.
Tip Number Ten: Develop a Link-Building Strategy
Google uses links from other websites to determine what pages on the internet are important.
I mean, it stands to reason that if you’re the one dermatologist in Boise, Idaho that’s getting links from Men’s Health, that you must be a trusted dermatologist.
There are four ways that you can earn links:
- Do something newsworthy; the journalist will link to you.
- Create some sort of tool that would make people want to link over to your website—a lot of my calculators and stuff works with this.
- Provide data; other websites will Google things. They want to know how many people X, and they will cite you once they find your data. We do this all the time for our clients; it works and it’s passive; it’s great.
- Offer to write articles for other websites and work in your backlink. Don’t do it at scale; it can start getting spammy really quickly.
What you should not do with link building is think that submitting your website to a bunch of directories is link building—it’s not.
And don’t go to those websites that sell guest post links; they’re garbage, they’re coming from content farms, you’re throwing away your money.
Tip Number Eleven: Use Social Media to Boost Your SEO
A lot of the time, SEO is the byproduct of all the rest of your marketing.
Google wants to deliver to people online what they’re looking for in the real world, and developing a strong social media presence could mean that people start looking for you by name, and Google will take notice.
Tip Number Twelve: Repurpose Video Content for Your Blog
Any sort of video content that you are producing, in particular for YouTube, needs to double as an article on your blog.
In the case of this video you’re watching right now, you very well may have discovered it through an article on our website, or you may have just found the YouTube video.
But the truth is, it also lives as an article on our website, and I never sat down to write an article—it’s basically a search-optimized transcript of this video, and it’s ranking on Google. You should be doing the same thing.
Tip Number Thirteen: Learn How to Measure Your SEO Success
Early on, this usually means content’s getting indexed.
Then it means you’re getting impressions, then it means that you are getting clicks, and ultimately, you’re getting conversions. A lot of the time, rankings are a vanity metric.
To be honest, a lot of the time clicks can even be vanity metrics if you’re not really driving the right clicks to the website.
So don’t blindly look at your numbers and think that everything’s great; you really do need to understand behind the numbers what this means, like who is getting to the website.
Tip Number Fourteen: Avoid Common SEO Mistakes
In tip number five, I talked about on-page entity optimization—don’t keyword stuff.
This means writing unnatural language. Don’t hire someone on Fiverr to write really low-quality articles for your blog. If anything, those articles are going to hurt your SEO.
I’ve had so many cases where we ended up deleting a whole bunch of articles from a website, and their search rankings actually went up.
Don’t buy spammy backlinks from Fiverr or marketplaces online; at best, they’re a waste of money, and at worst, they can get you penalized.
Tip Number Fifteen: Stay on Top of SEO
Now, the truth is I don’t believe that SEO is constantly changing.
The stuff that worked 10 years ago still works today if you weren’t just trying to game the system.
But there are best practices that arise—better ways, faster ways of doing things—and websites like Search Engine Land and email lists like ours, these can all give you tips that can, over time, prove beneficial to you learning about new things that are rising in our industry that possibly none of your competitors know about.
I hope that this very long video was helpful. If you’d like to book a time with me, click here. And don’t forget about that on-page checklist that I’ve included as well.
