Digital marketing has been hailed as the next big thing in healthcare marketing, and with more and more of our lives happening online, it’s not hard to see why. Just as users go to Google to search for restaurants, hardware stores, gyms, and grocery stores near them, they’ll also use it to find healthcare practitioners. And many of your potential patients are relying on online search results to tell them whether a specific provider is highly rated, trustworthy, affordable, and qualified.
So, if you’re running a healthcare practice of any kind, digital marketing can do a lot to help you bring in new patients. Whether your practice is brand new or established, digital marketing can put you at the top of search results for similar healthcare providers in your area, help you engage your customer base, make your practice more accessible, and, ultimately, keep your patients coming back for years.
Optimize Your Web Page
Optimizing your webpage for search engines is one of the most important things you can do to attract more web traffic from organic search results, which drive 22 percent of online purchases. But it’s not something you can do yourself. You need an SEO professional with experience in healthcare digital marketing to make sure that your web page is properly optimized with the right keywords, used in the right ways. Amateur efforts to optimize your webpage could actually backfire, and cause your page to rank lower in search results, because Google is very particular about what keywords and SEO strategies it likes.
For example, you have to use the right keywords, but you can’t use them too often — that’s keyword stuffing, and you’ll get penalized for that. You need to offer users fresh content regularly, but it has to be original and unique — duplicate content will get you dinged. It also has to be credible content that offers value to your users — if you’re an optometrist, for example, that means posting videos on how to insert contact lenses, not on the best way to mow your lawn.
Much of this might seem self-evident, but it’s complex enough in the execution that it’s worth hiring a professional to handle it. For example, an SEO service can optimize your website’s HTML using schema markup to add location-specific, structured data to your website’s HTML markup. This data can give search engines even more details about your practice, including top reviews, hours of operation, price, practice type, and location. Optimizing your website with schema markup leads to more accurate search results, more website traffic, and more business.
Develop Your Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing seeks to draw in search traffic by offering users credible content that creates value. As a healthcare provider, you have a lot of opportunities to create successful marketing content — you can blog about patients’ common health concerns and questions, conditions you treat most frequently, and general health tips for your patients, for example.
A strong digital marketing strategy will focus, in part, on developing your content marketing strategy to engage users and increase traffic to your website, as well as traffic to your physical location. You’ll need help to create regular, engaging, and credible content for your website and social media pages, but the investment is worth it as content marketing can also help you boost search returns by creating inbound links. With all you have on your plate thanks to running a practice, professional help with content marketing is worth the cost.
Be More Googleable
Good digital marketing will make sure you’re listed on Google Maps, Facebook Business, and healthcare-specific directories, like WebMD. It’s not always easy to make sure that all of your practitioners have profiles posted to common healthcare directories, but you want to be as accessible as possible to patients searching for your services, practice, or practitioners.
If you don’t think your patients are looking for doctors online, think again. A strong digital presence and solid digital marketing strategy means you’ll be at the top of search results when locals search for your services. This will help you get more business, establish your reputation, and grow your practice.
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