Why is SEO important for a hospital website?
Your website has two distinct types of readers to serve: search engine bots and real people. Healthcare SEO can help them all.
There are all sorts of elements that go into the development of a successful hospital website. Naming, hosting, branding, coding and maintenance all play a part. Another absolutely vital element is search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO helps ensure that search engines can find your site. Perhaps more importantly, SEO helps you create an online experience your customers enjoy. Put those two factors together, and you have a website that's built to please both search bots and people. That's a recipe for long-lasting success.
Let us explain these concepts in detail.
Why SEO is your healthcare website's BFF
Web searches are a fundamental part of life. On an average second of an average day, Google processes about 40,000 search queries. When we want to know about—or purchase—something, we open up a search engine and start tapping. Showing up high in search results is vital—especially on a mobile device, where only one or two options might fit in the screen. SEO techniques are designed to help your pages move up in rank, so you have a fighting chance of being seen by searchers.
Voice-activated devices are changing the nature of search. Assistants like Cortana and Siri have started a revolution that ends with the words "near me." SEO helps people find you when they're looking for healthcare services they can walk or drive to.
Consumers expect optimized pages that perform—no matter the device. Hospital SEO goes beyond keyword research. SEO techniques also involve quality content generation, page-speed optimization and responsive design. These are the elements that make reading your content a pleasure.
SEO helps amplify your message. Pages crafted with hospital SEO best practices in mind will have title tags and meta descriptions—the brief text that appears in search engine results. That teaser text can create such a sense of curiosity that readers just itch to find out more when they see it pop up in search results. And an added bonus: That same title tag and meta description will appear on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, if readers choose to share your page—or you do.
Your competition is probably using SEO. In a 2016 survey, 66 percent of marketers said improving SEO was a top priority. It's become a recognized, proven tool that people in all sorts of different industries—including healthcare—use to improve performance. Chances are, your competitors are using this technique. And if they are and you're not, you may see a drop in your web traffic.
Hospital SEO expertise you can trust
Clearly, SEO is vital to the success of your healthcare website. And SEO isn't a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. You'll need new content. You'll need to react to search engine algorithm changes. You'll need to monitor your approach and adjust if your market changes.
We can help. At Coffey, our SEO team can audit your current website and suggest changes, and our team can help you set up a new site with a strong backbone in SEO. To find out more, call 888.805.9101 or email us.
