Healthcare firms investing in their digital presence is a recurring trend we’ve witnessed in 2021. Unsurprisingly, a new or updated website is often a top priority. It serves as your hub, welcome mat, traffic generator, and other functions. We advise our clients that design and fancy functionality are really the only aspects of the puzzle. It is not enough to have a visually appealing website. And keeping search engine optimization (SEO) to the end or as a thought is a basic mistake.
You can count on us now. If your healthcare institution is thinking about launching a new website now or in 2022, make sure to start with basic SEO as soon as feasible. This is the most certain strategy to rank for the keywords that will create the most high-quality leads in the long term.
7 Essential Search Engine Optimization Principles
However, website SEO is a big issue with many complexities. Consider your website to be a plot of land to help you understand what we mean by “setting fundamental SEO in place.” If you’re going to develop that land and build houses and condominiums on it, you’ll need to design plumbing, electricity, HVAC, and other systems in a way that allows for both now-construction and future growth.
It’s a simplistic illustration, but it clearly shows the issue. The SEO of a website is determined by its structure, site design, and URL hierarchy—foundational SEO that assures you can rank for desired keywords and expand your website with future expansion. As a result, your website should conform to the following seven site architecture principles:
Well-Organized
We recently released a new webinar with John McAlpin, our fantastic SEO Director, titled “SEO Audit on the 3 Pillars of Successful SEO Strategies.” Here is what John had to say about how site organization contributes to technical SEO:
“Technical SEO is the foundation of all SEO; content is the meat, and link development is the cherry on the cake.” All three of them work together to assist you to improve your organic performance.”
There are a few elements in the formula for basic technical SEO. Remember that every piece of material has a place on your own website. That material is usually placed under your primary navigation (main menu). That primary menu should convey a story, letting website visitors know exactly what they’ll get at a look.
That menu is an external representation of how you arrange and organize your site’s pages. You should categorize page kinds so that they are easy to find no matter where a user is on the site. Typically, these classifications are hierarchical (for example, your parent “Services” page may include subpages for certain service categories).
Keep page categories and site structure as basic as possible as a general guideline for easy navigation and crawlability. Also, make sure that each of these pages has its own meta description, title, tags, and header tags (another key ingredient of technical SEO(Search engine optimization) and overall site organization).
Responsive
There are a few aspects of availability to think about. First and foremost, what good is a huge, elegant services page or a new blog post if a visitor to your website can’t locate it? “You don’t want your customers to go five clicks deep only to get important information,” writes John McAlpin in 6 SEO Principles That Make It Easy for Healthcare Consumers to Find You.
So, the first issue you need to answer from the viewpoint of discoverability is, can users get to your most essential sites in three clicks or less, regardless of their entrance point?
Another aspect of discoverability is from the perspective of search engines. Can Google and other search engines locate, find, and crawl all of the pages on your website? One important step you may do is to include the Sitemap and Robots.txt files. Robots.txt and sitemap.xml are important files that can assist search engines in better comprehending and indexing your website. As a result, robots.txt and XML sitemaps complement each other.
Interesting
Okay, your website is well-organized and easy to find. It’s now time to think about user experience (UX) and design, which may improve your site in a variety of ways. “This is where UX and design come into play,” John McAlpin explains. “You don’t want to appear like everyone else. You want to have something that will be remembered.”
Unique websites are the result of a strong feeling of self. Concentrate on who you are and who you assist. This should guide your messaging, appearance, voice, tone, and other aspects that will set you apart. There is no duplicate material! Make careful to remove any duplicate material and to provide redirects where necessary. If your website lacks personality, you’re most probably not effectively explaining what you do.
Interlinkable
When directing readers to an authoritative source, people use links to other websites. Similarly, individuals will connect to your website if they believe they’ve discovered trustworthy content that will benefit their own audience. “Make sure you have natural connecting possibilities inside your website and information worth linking to through your link-building initiatives,” John McAlpin advises.
You should approach linkability from a variety of perspectives.
- Create high-quality content that adds value to your audience’s lives. Are your pages authoritative enough for others to link to from their own sites?
- Examine pages that have no internal connections and only a few external links. Internal links should be added to sites that lack them, and external links should be removed from service pages.
- Launch link-building efforts to increase the number of backlinks in your portfolio. The more authoritative websites that link back to yours, the better your site’s Search engine optimization will be.
Reliable
You want consistency in terms of theme, structure, and page kinds across all of a brand’s websites (or brands). Consistency guarantees that your website appears and functions consistently across all of its features, such as headers, footers, sidebars, and navigation bars.
It:
- Provides a more identifiable and memorable experience for your users
- Allows consumers to do activities more swiftly and efficiently.
- Enhances your website’s usability and learnability by removing pain points and tough navigation.
- It saves both money and time on design.
- “Make certain your material is consistent. Branding that is consistent, language that is consistent, and a theme that is constant.”
Beneficial
In the last section on linkability, we discussed the significance of delivering value. Adding value has larger SEO benefits for your site. “The first guideline is to ensure that every page provides some value. “Get rid of any sites that aren’t providing value to you,” suggests John McAlpin.
So, do your site visitors get something from it (rather than simply being sold something)? Value might be:
- Content that gives information and allows them to make an informed decision regarding their healthcare.
- Price and insurance information that aids in cost evaluation
- Case studies and testimonials
- New research and reporting on critical medical issues
Be quick
Google’s Page Experience upgrade has made it mandatory for websites to be optimized for speed and smartphones. There are several methods for making your website speedier. Fundamentally, you’ll want to optimize page performance from the start of your website. Consider the technological and hosting foundations, for example, while defining the structure of your website (these are more difficult to address later on).
What are our suggestions for making web pages load faster? Begin by “weeding out the weeds,” as it were. Examine and purge your Google Tag Manager (GTM) and any third-party scripts. Update any plugins you have, remove any that are no longer needed, and disable any present site speed plugins. Also, optimize your photographs’ format, file size, and load order!
Finally, your website is only as good as its SEO
That is correct. While the seven concepts described here are connected to Search engine optimization, they actually affect all areas of your website. Paying attention to these seven essential principles can assist healthcare customers in their search for an excellent provider. It will assist you in establishing credibility and confidence with healthcare customers, affiliates, partners, and others. It will reassure patients that they can rely on you and your website, while also increasing their entire brand experience.
Indeed, a local SEO agency provides significant advantages for websites, which may lead to long-term exponential growth. This is why we advise all of our healthcare customers to include SEO and web strategy as fundamental components of their digital marketing plans.
