Practice Management Alert

A new website may not be enough: Learn how SEO can promote your visibility.

Once your website is up and running, you can bolster your efforts to reach new patients by getting a handle on search engine optimization (SEO) and other digital marketing efforts.

Why SEO Matters

Today, savvy consumers utilize the internet as a main resource for finding information and making decisions. Though your practice and clinicians may be especially skilled in providing care and running a business, you won't get the exposure you need to bring new clients in without some digital marketing savviness. The word-of-mouth advertising many practices have depended upon for decades is no longer enough. Despite the advent and usage of social media, many people use search engines to find a new medical practitioner, so utilizing SEO really matters.

Think about it: As people are so reliant on the internet as resource, they often use information they acquire through search engines to decide whether they need to see a practitioner for whatever medical or health issue they're experiencing. If you have a specialty practice, you should make sure you include relevant symptoms or signs in your SEO, so your practice comes up first.

SEO Basics

SEO is complex, and usually an ongoing process. Different search engines have different formulas for "ranking" websites, but stuffing your website full of relevant keywords (like doctor, health, sick, doctor visit) won't help your practice come up first. Google's algorithm for ranking websites tries to determine and then rely upon high-quality content: trust, authority, and relevance/quality.

Google wants to make sure its users find legitimate websites, and it ranks them accordingly. Its algorithm evaluates length and uniqueness of articles and content, as well as how frequently the website is updated, says John Johnson, a writer on SearchEngingePeople's blog.

Top tip: Authentic social media interaction can also have a big impact on your website's ranking in search results, so make sure you have accounts on the biggest social media platforms, and try to post content and engage with users.

"Does the site include things like privacy policy, terms, and disclosure? These things don't exactly affect the ranking, but are nevertheless very important. It is a good sign that the site is legitimate," Johnson says.

Authority is a much more nebulous concept. Google in particular keeps its authority evaluation measures pretty quiet, says Danny Sullivan, an analyst writing on Search Engine Land.

"The most it will say is that the bucket of factors it uses to arrive at a proxy for authority are something it hopes really does correspond to making authoritative content more visible," Sullivan says. "One of the ways it hopes to improve that mix is with feedback from the quality raters that it employs, who were recently given updated guidelines on how to flag low-quality web pages."

Originally, linking to third-party sites was a means of evaluating credibility. Though Google uses many other factors now, links are still a major component for determining authority, says Mark Traphagen, senior director of brand evangelism at Stone Temple Consulting, in writing for Search Engine Journal.

For example, if you write a blog post about flu season and what patients can do to protect themselves, linking to a well-established and relevant page, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), can help your ranking.

"The big innovation that made Google the dominant search engine in a short period was that it used an analysis of links on the web as a ranking factor," he says. "Since putting a link on your site to a third-party site might cause a user to leave your site, there was little incentive for a publisher to link to another site, unless it was really good, and of great value to their site's users."

"Linking to a third-party site acts a bit like a 'vote' for it, and each vote could be considered an endorsement, saying the page the link points to is one of the best resources on the web for a given topic. Then, in principle, the more votes you get, the better, and the more authoritative a search engine would consider you to be, and you should therefore rank higher," he says.

Relevance matters, in that you get "votes" for links that Google believes have authority and focus on your subject matter. For example, if the CDC linked to your practice's website, the Google algorithm would probably be very skewed in your favor for other searchrankings.

While it's highly unlikely that the CDC would ever link to a private practice's page, there are still ways to get your practice more visibility on other pages. One of the best ways is guest blogging on relevant entities' website blogs and providing a link to your practice's website in your author bio information.

Consider Hiring an Expert

A basic understanding of SEO is crucial if you're designing or maintaining your practice's website. If you are looking for lots of website traffic or needing to attract many new patients through showing up in search engine results, strongly consider hiring an SEO expert to go over your website and bolster your digital presence.