2 Telemedicine SEO Tips

With the advent of hundreds of tools and apps like Uber, Washe & BetterHelp, as a society, we have become accustomed to make our lives easier through technology. 

It’s no surprise that many physicians are turning to telemedicine to also bridge the gap between patient and the sometimes “difficult” task of actually coming into an office. 

OK….so you’ve started your telemedicine business, got your appropriate licensure, partnered with a company like Snap.md for the infrastructure & received general marketing advice. In order to create a large, sustainable business model, you’ll obviously need a promotional strategy utilizing channels like Google Advertising & Facebook.

Consecutively, you’ll need to invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO aka the “free” traffic) so you don’t have to always rely on paid media to promote your telemedicine practice. 

Tip 1: Content Strategy & Site Structure

When creating your website, you’ll want to take into consideration the content your end patient will want to see when they’re doing a search for you. For example, if you’re a dermatologist, your patients are doing a lot of searches for things like, “how to heal eczema” or “best lotions for xxxxx” etc etc. 

I suggest using free tools like Google Trends and answerthepublic.com to get ideas on what people are searching for. 

Google also just released some new structured data (Schema) coding that you can add to your FAQ page to help give you a chance to rank in the instant answer sections too. 

The way your website is structured is also very important as UX or User Experience is definitely a Google Ranking signal nowadays. 

Keeping people on your site longer and giving them the info they need in less clicks will help Google understand that your site is the best choice for their search query. 

Location pages: Are you targeting a specific state or country? There’s a lot of technical SEO that may be involved if you have specific multi-country / multi-language targeting and we can discuss that in a different post. 

The gist on location page setup is simple. Create long form (2000+ words) location pages for the targeted area. Want to focus on Florida but your’e in Canada? You’ll need to create a structure like site.com/florida and then subfolders like site.com/florida/orlando etc etc for each city. 

Tip 2: Authority is VERY Important

You can’t just create a website, add content and hope that it ranks well on Google. Well, I guess you “can” but your biggest competition isn’t just doing that. They are doing PR and outreach to generate backlinks (people pointing their website to yours). Why would they do that? 1: Because you have awesome content that is link worthy. 2: Because you’ve done some sort of strategic outreach or co-marketing like a blog post (guest post) on their website. 

Google uses the quality of links as well as a ton of other factors to give websites the ability to rank high on Google’s limited spot page 1. 

This piece of online telemedicine SEO has higher importance since you probably don’t have a physical location in the market(s) where you’re wanting patients from. 

You’re ultimately going head to head with other practitioners that have a brick and mortar office in that area. 

How do I check my website’s authority? There are several free and paid tools we recommend. I like Moz, SEMrush & Ahrefs. They all have their own version of authority measuring but you’ll get the gist after checking your site and your comps. 

Whether you’ve just started contemplating adding a telemedicine piece to your practice or you’ve been trying to take yours to the next level, we can help. Get into touch with us today.