As a person that provides search engine optimization for medical industries, the numbers I have looked at can be shocking.
The search volume for a “Dentist Near Me” numbers to at least 501,000 per month in the United States alone, while the search volume of the term “Eye Doctor Near Me” alone is 127,000 per month. These two keywords do not form the whole market, as there are a whole lot of variants of this keyword with the same meaning.
However, given a significant amount of search volume for just two of these keywords alone can give you an idea of just how important Search Engine Optimization can be. Having a click-through rate of just 2% can increase your monthly traffic by at least 1,000 and with that a stronger stream of clients.
Hence, the current state of digital marketing in the healthcare industry is interesting, so we ran a small experiment while working on our client’s site.
We listed the top 50 ranking sites of dental clinics in New York and ran a check on their metrics. These points below are what we found out in the SEO metrics of Orthodontics in New York while working on our clients’ sites.
We think that SEO for dentists could be done a lot better in our opinion.
A bounce is a user that lands on your site and exits without any interaction. In other words, to the Search Engines, if a user bounces, your healthcare site did not meet the searchers’ intent. Hence, it makes sense for the algorithm to rank a site with high bounce rates for a particular term lower in the search engines. Digital marketing logic.
It took 10 seconds on average for a dental site to load and site ratings are usually below 50. As a rule of thumb, any site that takes more than 3-5s to load urges the user to look elsewhere for better information or user experience. 10 seconds or anything above, is nigh unacceptable. One of the key metrics for good SEO results is a low bounce rate – anywhere around 30% and below is a goal to keep in mind.
As a user, whether to trust a site or not depends on the site’s aesthetics and its loading speed. Currently, patience is a rare quality – users rarely wait for more than 5 seconds for a site to load before deciding to go somewhere else. People hate waiting, so anyone who makes them do so will usually end up the loser 90% of the time. SEO for the medical industry does not stress site speed optimization enough, especially when conversion rates must be optimized.
58% of all searches today are done via Mobile Phone. If your desktop loads fast, and your mobile phone loads in 10 seconds, you are still bound to lose 50% of all inbound leads despite doing good work on one side of your website.
Hence, for SEO purposes, you need to make sure that your site elements can resize and present themselves in an aesthetic way and displayed properly for mobile devices. We group these together and have a solution, implemented for our client.
Baseline: More than half of the top 50 dental sites are noted by Google to be non-mobile responsive. Those are points docked off for SEO, doctor.
Technical mobile optimizations take a lot of time and are usually done by those who have experience in the arena. It is no wonder that medical clinics do not have the time nor the capacity to focus on fixing such technical issues.
This is what we did for our client’s mobile optimization:
· Compressed All Images
· Technical plugin addition (for Wordpress sites) and removing all unused plugins to minify JavaScript bloat
· Used Cloudflare CDN
· Put the website on an Amazon S3 server
· Other technical removals & addons
With this addition, our clients’ site loading speed went from its original 10.3 seconds to 4.2 seconds, a massive improvement for not just Google, but for user experience.
However, the technical challenges were not the only issue plaguing our client and the healthcare industry.
Just like esoteric terms about the human body, terminologies such as “backlinks” are also used to discuss the “health” of your website.
We had to prepare sites like these…
To try and go up against sites with statistics like these…
There are glaring reasons why some medical sites are not ranking, and the lack of a strong backlink profile is one. The whole outreach process takes a lot of time, and the clinics themselves surely do not have enough time to oversee such as process.
When digital marketers mention that they require a lot of time to see results, this is what they mean. If you, like most members of the healthcare industry, have not been investing in content (what you can call “getting your name out there”), you are not yet an authority site. In other words, without backlinks, you do not rank, especially so for the knowledge-intensive medical & healthcare industry sites.
Hence, for our clients, we prepped well-researched articles about dentistry and orthodontics almost every week. Using these articles, we built a strong backlink profile as these are content that other medical experts can surely trust. This is the best way for any medical expert to build authority and trustworthiness into a site.
Within about 7 months, a lot of our pages were close to first, or on the first page, but were not yet able to break into the Top 3. This is when a digital marketing firm makes a difference. We managed to reach out to renowned authorities in the healthcare industry and managed to submit a few guest postings on these authority sites.
The final push made a huge difference, but the results of the final outreach push can never be realized unless we already had strong fundamentals as a website.
Hence, within about 9 months, we experienced this surge in traffic gradually.
A near double in organic traffic. A huge win.
We remain experts in ranking websites in the medical industry, and we cannot wait to assist more clinics in more of their business dreams.
We would love to make more successful case studies as healthcare professionals grow together with us.
If you would like to grow your clinic as well, feel free to contact us!
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