Medical Care Search Trends
Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is something that has taken over in digital marketing in the last couple of decades and for good reason. It can make or break your business if you are in an industry that relies on people going to Google to solve their problems.
Medical care is something that people are searching for quite frequently, and that frequency has only increased over the years. We need not look any further than Google Trends to tell us that the searches for “medical care near me” have increased almost 10x over the last 5 years.
This trend is only going to continue as younger generations, who turn to the almighty Google rather than their neighbor for recommendations and referrals, start adulting.
How SEO Works For Medical Doctors
There are numerous ways to gain new patients as a doctor. Some of the tried and true methods are certainly worth sticking with, but I want to simply convince you that SEO needs to be a part of your approach to medical marketing.
The way SEO works for medical practices is that it provides searchers with relevant information for their search term. If someone searches for “doctors near me,” Google would return results for that query. If they were to search for “physical exams for students,” they could also find doctors near them.
That is just the approach you want to be taking and the terms you want to start ranking for. The best way to do this is to create pages and blogs on your medical website that answer these questions and offer great advice.
I can hear several of you say, “But they aren’t searching for doctors, they are searching for treatment options for their health conditions”, and you would be right. However, what if they land on your website after you wrote an amazing blog post about top 5 treatment options for the seasonal flu. Perhaps they poked around your site, visiting your About page, the Homepage, reading some amazing reviews, and then eventually the Contact page because they now realize that seeing a health expert may be a good idea.
Well, that is basically how it all works. You create content that your potential patients would find valuable and then provide the guidance from that blog post to your contact page. Suddenly, your bookings start happening on their own.
More To The Story
There is much more to the story in terms of technical website updates, constant monitoring of your site’s performance to make improvements, tracking your competition to see what keyword ideas you can get from them, and creating links back to your website from other reputable sites in the medical space.
My goal was not to overwhelm you with all of the technical details in how this all works, but rather to simply convince you that medical SEO is here to stay and can help you grow your practice in major ways.
A Medical SEO Case Study
Just to give you some context and help set expectations on just how this process works and how long it may take to get results, we have provided some data from a recent client success story. We managed to launch a brand new medical website, get it to start ranking within just six weeks, and then within 3 months, they were in the top 3 positions for multiple keywords related to their services.
We launched the site during the second week of September in 2019. By the end of October, they were already ranking in Google and by early January, they skyrocketed to several top positions. We have seen a steady climb ever since. The best part is we are just getting started.
If that doesn’t get you excited about SEO for your practice than these numbers may do the trick. Between the months of October and February, we saw an increase in users by 274%, new users by 253%, and an increase in time spent on-site by 121%.
These success stories are what gets us excited about what we do. We absolutely love each and every one of our clients and thoroughly enjoy helping them reach more people with medical marketing. If you’d like to see results like these, feel free to contact us today.
