Medical SEO
Every day, patients search for your services. What would it mean to your practice if every one of those patients found you instantly?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in the Medical Field
Why is SEO now the single most important factor in website design? Because SEO presents the opportunity to be more easily and accurately reachable by your potential customer base. SEO is our core focus, and our core competency. In our design cycle we generally spend from between 55 to 60% of our efforts on SEO. A website without competent optimization will not be found by the thousands of potential patients that search for medical services online. If you have no site, or if your current site is not delivering hundreds of visitors a week, then read the sections that follow regarding Search Engine Optimization.
Without SEO, customers will not find your website, and will not find you. With SEO, targeted and eager customers searching for your services find you easily. True SEO requires experience and an SEO focus.
How We Build SEO-Focused Medical Websites:
We call our designs “SEO-focused” designs because we incorporate SEO standards, best practices, and architecture into every design we create, and every aspect of every design. SEO is the key to targeting search traffic, so SEO must be infused into every aspect of the design process. What follows is a brief primer on how we achieve superior SEO results (it gets a bit technical, but stay with it, it’s worth it).
Medical SEO Keyword Research – What Are Medical Patients Searching For?
We begin our SEO projects with keyword research. Keyword analysis tells us what terms are high-volume search terms, and which terms are low-volume.
This screenshot shows a keyword analysis report of search traffic on terms related to plastic surgeons in the Houston area. The numerical figures are daily search estimates. We then use this data to select which keyphrases and keywords upon which to focus our campaigns. Higher-volume optimization yields more hits which brings in more customers.
Why Flash Animation Hurts Medical SEO Efforts:
One of the great ironies of SEO and web design is that the rise of Flash website animations (Flash is the popular brand of software that encodes animations that appear on websites) appearing on websites over the last 10 years or so has contributed greatly to websites performing poorly in search results. Why? Because search engines don’t read Flash.
Flash animations are commonly pitched by higher-priced medical web design firms. While the animations dazzle unsuspecting clients, they can be search engine death (depending, of course, on how they are used). As such, one often sees lower-priced websites ranking higher for key search terms than more expensive sites.
On the other hand, search engines love text, and tend to severely punish the absence of text. As such, we never include principal text, keywords, key phrases, or navigation within a Flash file.
CSS, Standards, and Hyper-Lean Code
We design all of our web projects according to compliant CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standards. CSS is a simple internet language that describes how a webpage should display. As an example, this page is CSS-based. All of the text attributes, colors, sizes, columns, etc., are compiled in a single CSS file.
Why CSS Is a Good Thing:
You’ll Rank Higher. Only one CSS declaration is needed for a text attribute (color, size, font style, etc.) of an entire site-rather than hundreds or thousands of individual declarations. A CSS-based site is smaller and leaner than a non-CSS site (less code). Search engines like lean code and reward standards-compliant sites with superior rankings. Furthermore, CSS pages load faster than traditional sites, which keep customers engaged.
A website change requires only one change to the CSS file, rather than hundreds of individual changes.
Inbound Linking Campaigns
Inbound linking is the process of securing inbound links from third party sites on the internet to increase the Pagerank value of the target website.
Google ranks WebPages in its search results according to a range of criteria, one of which is it’s Pagerank methodology. Pagerank is Google’s trademarked measurement of the value of a website based upon the number of incoming page links that a website receives. Pages with high Pagerank appear higher in search results than pages with low Pagerank.
We conduct responsible (no spam) and effective inbound linking campaigns that increase the Pagerank value of our client’s websites. These inbound linking campaigns help our clients garner top search engine placement.
Want to Learn More About Website Design or SEO? Drop Us a Message:
Our consultations are free, informative, zero-commitment, and with an experienced SEO expert–not a pushy salesman…
