When you make a website for your medical practice, it can certainly be difficult to know what you should do in order to have a high-quality website. Of course, before you think about how you can turn your practice’s website into a good website, you must remember what the purpose of your website was for in the first place.
A high-quality website is among the most important healthcare marketing tools for most practices. As a marketing tool, the main goal for your website should be to make it so that it has the highest chances possible for future patients to find on the internet. So, basically, you want your website to show as having the most relevant content to providing answers and information in accordance with people’s online searches and queries.
In order to do so, you need to optimize your website so that search engines best rank your website as having the most relevant information to the common searches and queries of your potential patients. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the basis by which Google search determines and ranks the quality of your content as being relevant to various searches. So, you want to optimize your content so that your website’s content is considered as being high-quality and highly relevant when it comes to the searches and queries of your potential patients.
While knowing what you should do to optimize your website for this purpose can be challenging and confusing, here’s a list of the different ways you can better optimize your website:
1. Optimize the elements of your website.
Add a title to your website:
The title tag of a website is the description that appears in the tab of your browser when you’re on a web page. Without an effective title tag, you are missing out on a huge SEO benefit. Typically, an effective title tag will include the name of the doctor or office, the location of the office, and the medical specialty. As long as your title tag includes commonly searched items that will increase your page’s relevancy for locally searched medical services that you offer, then you should be set.
Analytics:
Whether it’s simply using Google Analytics, or it’s an analytics software that’s much more comprehensive, registering your website and using analytics is an absolute necessity when it comes to optimizing your website. Any analytics software will help you analyze whether your keywords are effective, and provide you will information showing you which parts of your site are effective and which aren’t.
Webmaster Tools:
By registering your website, or submitting a sitemap, with Webmaster Tools, or a similar site, you can check your website for any dead links or any other factors that negatively impact your SEO. This tool can also help to make sure you have properly managed your 301 redirects and 404 errors.
Robots.txt:
These pages contain the pages on your website that should not be indexed or “crawled” by online bots. Typical robots.txt pages include things like disclaimers, contact information, privacy statements, etc. All of the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, have search algorithms that provide higher scores to any website that includes robot.txt pages, as it is a very good indicator of a site being official and high-quality. So, in regard to your SEO score, this is a must.
Domain registration:
Whenever you register your website’s domain, always register it for as long as you reasonably can. By increasing the length and the renewal time of your domain, you increase your website’s legitimacy and relevancy rankings, which positively impact your website’s SEO.
Mobile friendliness:
If you are creating or redesigning your practice’s website, you should always be certain that your theme or design is mobile friendly. Many people search for information of all kinds on their mobile devices, so having a website that is incompatible for mobile viewers will surely have a negative impact on your website’s optimization.
2. Focus on optimizing the content of your website.
Relevant content:
Using high-quality keywords and well-written pages is an absolute must for any effective website. What this means is that you choose high-quality keywords that optimize your SEO without over-flooding your pages with keywords. The most optimal web pages feature well-chosen and selective keywords within well-written, concise content that provide relevant information in accordance to the search.
Refreshing content:
Continually update your site and post new articles, blog posts, etc. By refreshing your content, you are constantly updating the content on your page, which optimizes the relevancy of your webpage’s SEO. This is very important when optimizing your webpage’s content.
3. Optimize any off-page sources connected to your website.
Links:
By having backlinks from other websites, the links will serve strongly as an endorsement of the legitimacy and relevancy of your webpage, and the content of your page, which factors heavily into your website’s SEO. Furthermore, these links can add even more to your webpage’s SEO quality and ranking if the links appear on another website that is within the same industry as your own.
For instance, if it appears on a healthcare website, that will add to the quality and relevancy of your page more so than a normal website, but if it appears on a website within the exact field, like plastic surgery in healthcare, then that will add even more to your SEO.
Healthgrades and other aggregators:
You should always claim your page on any websites like Yelp and Angie’s List so you can accurately provide information about your practice and office. Not only will that contribute to your SEO and website legitimacy/relevancy, especially locally, but those websites can connect people directly to your website.
Optimize your social media accounts in a way that directs traffic to your website:
You should always have call-to-action options on your social media posts, and when the call-to-action is directing traffic to your website that is even better. Never forget to post clear and obvious links to your website, especially to specific sections of your website, whenever you create your social media account as that is the primary purpose of any social media account.
At the end of the day, it’s definitely not a simple task to ensure that your website is optimized for search engine relevancy. But, regardless of whether it’s simple, it is very important as your website is one of your practice’s strongest marketing tools. So, with a large percent of your potential patients and clientele searching the internet for answers and information, you should take the time and effort to optimize your website so that it contains high-quality and high-ranking content so search engines can bring people with relevant queries to your website.