SEO can be a goldmine for medical weight loss clinics.
To start, there are very few markets in the United States where SEO among medical weight loss clinics is competitive.
How uncompetitive is SEO for medical weight loss?
We started with a med spa in the San Francisco Bay area last month; by the end of the month, new pages we published on their website were already on page 1.
Second, after word of mouth, SEO will have the lowest cost per lead of any marketing channel you will ever invest in for your medical weight loss clinic or med spa.
Unlike other channels where your medical weight loss marketing spend is gone once you spend it, you keep the keyword-optimized “SEO content” you produce long after you invested in its production.
Take BeYouth Medical Spa, for example (this wasn’t for medical weight loss keywords, but it’s still illustrative of the staying power of SEO).
We hit their goal of getting them to #1 for injectables in their market about a year ago and they decided to hold off on spending any more money on SEO.
How are they doing in Google’s search results today?
See for yourself:
They’ve been bringing in leads for 12 months and haven’t had to spend a penny on SEO.
In this article, I’m going to share with you the basics of SEO for medical weight loss clinics, as well as a few tips on targeting branded terms for semaglutide even in scenarios when you are not actually prescribing them by name. Our medical
If you’d like to schedule a time to meet with us to talk about SEO for your medical weight loss clinic, click here.
What is SEO for Medical Weight Loss?
Fundamentally, SEO for medical weight loss isn’t much different than it is for other industries. It is a marketing channel that aims to get a website found on search engines such as Google, Bing, and YouTube. SEO has 4 parts: technical SEO, keyword and entity optimization, authority building, and Google Business Profile Optimization.
- Optimization of a Google Business Profile
- Technical SEO
- Ensuring your website is fully accessible to Google so it can be optimally crawled and indexed.
- Structuring your clinic’s website to optimally pass link equity to its most important pages.
- Maximizing the relevance of the content on your website to the searches, your patients are performing
- Keyword research to find out how patients are searching for medical weight loss providers.
- Building and optimizing pages to target those searches.
- Answering the questions your patients are Googling through video and blogs.
- Demonstrating authority and trustworthiness arning links from other websites
What goes into these three areas of SEO is a lot more involved than I’ve listed here, but ultimately, every activity that goes into medical weight loss SEO falls into one of these three categories.
Local SEO and Your Google Business Profile is Arguably the Most Important Part of SEO for a Medical Weight Loss Clinic
A medical weight loss clinic with physical locations can benefit greatly from local SEO.
This is what most people think of when they think of SEO—ranking highly for searches such as “medical weight loss clinics near me.”
The goal of local SEO is generally to rank well in the local 3-pack Google map results:
Ranking in the local map results on Google is crucial for medical weight loss clinics because it significantly enhances visibility and credibility.
When a clinic appears in the local 3-pack, it’s among the first things potential clients see when they search for related services. This prime real estate not only boosts the clinic’s chances of being noticed but also positions it as a top choice in the area.
The prominence of the map results can drive a substantial amount of traffic to the clinic’s website, leading to more inquiries and appointments.
Moreover, the local map results prominently feature reviews and photos of the clinics, which are vital elements in the decision-making process for potential clients.
Positive reviews and compelling images build trust and provide social proof of the clinic’s effectiveness and quality of care. Prospective clients are more likely to choose a clinic that has numerous positive reviews and professional photos showcasing a clean, welcoming environment.
This immediate access to testimonials and visual evidence directly within the search results can significantly influence a user’s choice, making it a powerful tool for attracting new clients.
Finally, being featured in the local map results also enhances the overall online reputation of a medical weight loss clinic.
Google’s algorithms consider factors such as the number and quality of reviews, the accuracy of business information, and the engagement level of users.
Clinics that consistently rank well are perceived as reliable and trustworthy, which can lead to a cycle of positive feedback and continued high rankings.
In essence, a strong presence in local map results not only drives immediate traffic but also contributes to long-term success by reinforcing the clinic’s reputation and encouraging ongoing positive interactions with clients.
What Goes into Local SEO for a Medical Weight Loss Clinic?
I have a video that goes into local SEO in great detail. You should check it out if you just want to learn about that aspect of SEO:
Here’s the short version of what you need to know though:
Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP) Consistency
You will establish a standard name, address, and phone number for each of your medical weight loss clinic’s locations.
In the case of a clinic on Route 73 near our office, the address could be formatted as:
RT-73
Route 73
RTE-73
NJ 73
New Jersey 73
NJ-73
Pick a format and stick with it. My recommendation is to find out how the United States Post Office formats the address of the clinic and use that.
The same goes for the phone number. Often, a clinic will have multiple phone numbers—make sure you establish one as the main phone number for the clinic’s online presence.
Once you’ve established a consistent NAP, claim your local citations.
Local Citations for Medical Weight Loss Clinics
Local citations are what Google uses to confirm the accuracy of the information it has.
The last thing it wants to do is to send one of your potential clients needing assistance to a clinic location that has closed or moved.
This is why it uses information it collects from other websites to establish a confidence score in the accuracy of the information in your Google Business Profile (GBP. Consistent and accurate NAP information across all platforms ensures that your clinic maintains high visibility and trustworthiness in search results.
Typically, I recommend against citation management services like Yext, but in the case of a medical weight loss clinic with many locations, it might make sense to consider using one. This will ensure the consistency of each of your offices’ information across the web and make it easy to manage as you open and close locations.
I recommend Brightlocal.
The one exception to this rule would be that if you aren’t going to be opening or closing offices anytime soon, you’re probably best off hiring an SEO to manually manage all your citations one time. Services such as Yext are recurring monthly expenses; if your offices are not changing their information anytime soon, it doesn’t make sense to incur the ongoing expense.
Technical SEO: Ensuring Your Website is Fully Accessible
The first step to SEO for a medical weight loss clinic is to ensure that there are no technical issues preventing Google from crawling and indexing the website.
This article isn’t going to delve deeply into the topic of technical SEO, but it is worth understanding it at a high level.
A typical SEO engagement begins with a full site audit, including a site crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog. There are many things that we check through this crawl, including:
- Truncated title tags and meta descriptions
- Proper use of header tags
- Proper use of noindex and canonical tags
- And about 75 other items
We also check the website’s Google Search Console, typically checking for alerts from Google regarding crawl issues, penalties, or duplicate content.
A technical audit typically takes a day or two to complete, after which we will provide a checklist of items to be addressed with the website. Clients usually have us fix all of the issues we uncover, but they often can be addressed by their developers if they have them on staff.
If you’re interested in learning more about what goes into a technical SEO audit, check out this article or give us a call.
Site Structure
Another part of technical SEO is your website architecture.
A key part of SEO for medical weight loss involves the production of lots of service area pages. The internal linking of these pages needs to be well planned out in advance to ensure the optimal passing of PageRank between these pages.
Build Location Pages to Get in Front of Your Local Patients
When someone in San Diego performs a search for a medical weight loss doctor this is what they see:
When someone in Carlsbad performs this search, this is what they see:
Google understands this to be a local intent search, so they give results that are relevant to these “medical weight loss doctor + location” searches.
You can get your medical weight loss clinic ranking for these searches throughout the market you serve by building location-targeted pages.
A medical weight loss doctor in Tampa, for example, should build out search optimized pages targeting St. Petersburg, Florida, Sarasota, Clearwater, and any suburbs they would like to target.
But beware: there is a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this.
Write Completely Unique Content
Do not duplicate the page 17 times and swipe out the name of the city.
Even if you do manage to get the pages indexed by Google, which you often won’t, I have seen in instances where all of these pages get negatively impacted during Google’s core algorithm updates.
You want to make sure that each of these pages provides unique value.
Make Sure Each Location Page Links to One Another
Make sure that each one of these pages has a section calling out the service area you serve. You want to link to each one of these service pages in this section.
Pro tip: do so with icons whose alt text you can set to “medical weight loss doctor + location.” It will help those pages to rank better.
The #1 Factor That Will Get Your “Medical Weight Loss Doctor” Pages Ranking: Entity Optimization
Google wants to provide information, dense, comprehensive, accurate search results that give people the information they want.
Your “medical weight loss doctor” pages need to aim to do this better than anyone else in your market.
This is an involved process that goes way beyond the scope of this article, but the short of it is that we want to maximize the relevance of the content on the page to the target keyword while providing the most information we can about the services you provide as succinctly as possible.
In SEO, we typically refer to this as entity optimization.
If you’d like to see what this process looks like, this video explains it (I’ve set the video to go right to this section; the whole thing is worth watching, however).
Use Your Blog to Get in Front of New Medical Weight Loss Patients
Your prospective patients have lots of questions about the medication you prescribe to aid in weight loss. SEO-driven content marketing can ensure you are the clinic that is answering these questions and earning their trust.
Potential clients are often looking for detailed information on the effectiveness, side effects, and suitability of various medications. By creating high-quality, informative content that answers these questions, you can attract more traffic to your website and establish your clinic as a trusted authority in the field of medical weight loss.
This content needs to meet 4 criteria, which we refer to as BARS.
BARS: The 4 Criteria Every Piece of Blog Content Must Meet
It must be on the Buyer’s Journey.
You should not write content simply because it is relevant to medical weight loss — you should answer the kinds of questions that indicate that someone is interested in the treatment you provide.
People will not be satisfied with an AI answer.
Google is answering many questions with its new AI overviews. If people are satisfied with those answers, you are not going to be able to get much traffic for those searches.
For example, a search such as “is Ozempic over-the-counter?” will often be satisfied by an AI answer.
On the other hand, a search such as “how much weight can I expect to lose on semaglutide?” will likely want to hear from a doctor or people that have taken it.
You can rank for it.
Just because you want to rank for a keyword does not mean that you were going to be able to.
You often won’t be able to outrank super authoritative websites like Healthline and the Cleveland Clinic. Other times you will absolutely be able to outrank them.
A skilled SEO will able to tell the difference and prevent you from wasting time or missing opportunities.
There’s an opportunity to drive “enough” search traffic.
SEO tools allow us to see estimates of how much traffic individual articles are getting. This can help us to avoid spending time writing about topics that will drive a little to no traffic.
Incorporate Video Into Your SEO Content Strategy
Incorporating video content into your blog content is also critical.
Videos can convey a wealth of information in a more engaging and easily digestible format than written content alone. They allow potential clients to see and hear from your medical professionals, view patient testimonials, and get a glimpse of your clinic’s environment.
This visual and auditory engagement can build trust and rapport with your audience, making them more likely to choose your clinic for their weight loss needs. Additionally, videos can be repurposed as content for social media platforms, maximizing their reach and effectiveness.
This dual-purpose content strategy ensures that your SEO efforts and social media presence work together to create a comprehensive and effective marketing campaign, ultimately leading to more informed and trusting patients.
Keyword Research
Keyword research, which I personally prefer to call topic research, involves identifying these topics that you can write and produce video about.
Tools such as Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, AlsoAsked, and even Google’ autocomplete are my favorite tools for uncovering topics related to medical weight loss that could potentially meet the “BARS” criteria and drive qualified traffic to your website.
The Importance of E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust are often referred to in SEO as E-E-A-T. They are a critical part of healthcare SEO.
Banking is what Google calls a “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) area, which it treats with added scrutiny.
Establishing Trustworthiness with SEO-Driven Content Marketing
Since people may make major health decisions based on the content your medical weight loss clinic places on its website, Google wants to know you are a trustworthy resource for medical content before showing your content to its users.
This means that your content can serve to establish trustworthiness for your clinic’s entire website. Through advances in natural language processing—a type of artificial intelligence that interprets the meaning of a document—Google is able to not only understand a document but also to determine the expertise of the person writing it.
By creating a repository of evergreen, expert-written content on your clinic’s blog and by establishing a solid track record of meeting the search intent of Google users, your content may be able to help your clinic’s entire website improve its search engine rankings.
Link Building for Medical Weight Loss Clinics
Links play an integral role in determining the search engine ranking of your clinic’s content.
Building links is also the hardest part of SEO and, if done incorrectly, the part fraught with the most risk.
There are countless ways to get links to a website, ranging from entirely legitimate outreach to illegal practices. Going about acquiring links for your clinic’s website in the wrong way could end with your website being penalized, a media exposé on your SEO misdeeds, or even a fine from regulatory bodies.
There are three techniques for earning links to a medical weight loss clinic’s website that make the most sense to us:
- Digital PR: Creating newsworthy content and press releases to attract media attention and backlinks from authoritative sources.
- The creation of valuable tools: Developing interactive tools, calculators, or resources that provide value to users, encouraging other websites to link to your content.
- Studies, surveys, and statistics: Conducting original research or compiling industry data to create insightful content that others in the industry will reference and link to.
By focusing on these strategies, your clinic can build a strong backlink profile, improving its search engine rankings and enhancing its reputation as a trusted authority in medical weight loss.
Digital PR for Medical Weight Loss
Digital PR for medical weight loss clinics is exactly what it sounds like: getting coverage for the clinic just as you would for traditional media, but maintaining a focus on earning links.
This may mean pitching journalists and bloggers to cover stories that are publicly available on your website and explicitly asking for a link to a press release or specific page on your website. By creating compelling, newsworthy content—such as success stories, innovative treatment methods, or community involvement initiatives—you can attract media attention and gain valuable backlinks.
These backlinks not only drive traffic to your site but also signal to search engines that your clinic is a reputable and authoritative source in the medical weight loss field. Engaging with digital PR can help your clinic build a strong online presence, improve its search engine rankings, and ultimately attract more clients looking for trusted weight loss solutions.
The Creation of Valuable Tools and Resources
We refer to these assets as “link magnets.”
For example, developing a comprehensive weight loss progress tracker, a calorie and nutrition calculator, or an interactive BMI calculator can attract significant attention. These tools provide real value to users and become resources that other websites naturally want to link to. Additionally, creating in-depth guides on popular weight loss medications, success stories, or evidence-based weight loss tips can also serve as valuable link magnets.
Once you have created these valuable resources, do some outreach to promote them. Pitch to relevant health and wellness blogs, medical journals, and online communities. By offering these unique tools and resources, you can earn high-quality backlinks that boost your clinic’s SEO performance and establish your site as a trusted authority in the medical weight loss field.
Data Earns Links Over Time for Medical Weight Loss Clinics
This is the most likely way you’ll be able to passively earn links over time.
As health and wellness-related web content is written, the writers will need reliable data to back up their claims. By providing those numbers, you’ll often see new links come in with no effort on your part.
The key to this is to have a concrete strategy for collecting and interpreting this data. The studies need to relate to topics that other websites will likely write about. For example, you might gather data on the average weight loss achieved with certain medications, success rates of different treatment plans, or the percentage of people experiencing specific side effects. These studies should be formatted in a way that aligns with the types of questions writers will type into Google (i.e. “average weight loss with semaglutide”).
This strategy can be tricky to master and may not be nailed out of the gate. Working with an SEO consultant with experience creating link magnets will save your clinic countless hours. Reach out if you’d like a hand in developing and implementing this strategy to ensure your clinic’s website becomes a go-to resource for authoritative medical weight loss information.