A Doctors Guide to SEO

In this presentation we’re gonna explain to you everything that a doctor needs to know about SEO and how to find an SEO company for your local doctor services. So if you’re a doctor and you want to learn more about search engine optimization read this all the way through! If you have any questions feel free to comment them below.

So let’s get into it.

Keyphrases

So imagine a patient is looking for a new doctor, what are some of the variations of keywords that they’re going to search for? The job of an SEO is to figure out what keywords people are actively searching for when they’re looking for a doctor and to make sure that those keyprases are implemented those into your search engine optimization strategy which is ultimately going to affect your marketing and affect your sales.

Ideally you will build your SEO strategy and content around those specific keywords. So for example if somebody’s looking for a ‘family doctor near me’ this keyphrase gets about 10,900 searches per month and the average cost per click for that keyword is $4.86. The competition for that keyword is about a 0.26 which means this keyword is fairly competitive. But since that phrase is somewhat broad, it’s best to drill down further and focus on the specific city that you work in. For example the phrase ‘family doctor in Cambridge’ or ‘pediatrician in Cambridge’ is more specific to your ideal patient.

Next you’ll want to optimize your website for your newly found key phrases. This includes making sure the titles tags for the various pages have these phrases in them and that the keyphrases are sprinkled across the various content on your site. It also includes building new pages with the purpose of ranking well for these phrases. Blogs are an important part of this.

Local Search

Google values transparency, so it’s important to let them know your location. This is where the local map pack comes in. The local map pack takes up the most valuable positions on Google so it’s important to have it optimized correctly. See a nice step by step guide here, here and here.

Competition

At this point the SEO company that you work with will probably want to identify your competition to figure out where you are compared to them, and how to rank well for what they are ranking for. They’ll use some “SEO spy tools” to figure all this out and then start defining link building opportunities.

Link Building

Once all of the above is in place it’s now time to engage the owners of blogs, podcasts and industry related sites to begin the process of getting links to your site. This is one of most time consuming of the SEO process but it’s well worth the effort. Every SEO has his or her different way of link building, but some of the most effective ways to link build as of this writing are:

• Appearing on a Podcast (enter your site link in your bio)

• Content on industry related websites (create articles and offer to post on websites with your link in them)

• Link round ups (reach out to sites that do link round ups and offer your site as a reference)

• “Broken link strategy” (reach out to websites with links that are pointing to pages that are no longer available and offer a page from your site instead)

The possibilities are really endless, and it’s a part of the job that requires some creativity and persistence. The most important thing is that the links are comes from sites that are considered a quality to Google. It’s a game of quality over quantity.

This video has a ton more tips and I highly recommend watching it for more information on the topic!

I hope this little presentation helped. If you have any questions do not hesitate to reach out or comment below!