How to Recover from Google’s Medic Update #2

In part 2 of 4, we are going to go through another series of steps to recover from Google’s “Medic” algorithm update (Read Part #1 here, Part 3 here or Part 4 here) . The main point of this post is to….

Focus on Your Website’s Consumer Pages

In short, Google is able to distinguish which pages on your site are considered YMYL pages. These pages are the focal point of the core algorithm update and may have been your main culprit for the decrease in web traffic & keywords ranking. According to Google’s Guidelines, YMYL pages “….could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability or safety of users…..”. These pages on your medical website should be held under the highest standards as Google wants to make sure that there’s a continued trust between the searcher and Google.

How to I Improve My Website’s Consumer Facing Pages? 

1: Have professionals in your specific niche create the page content. Of course, if you’re the medical professional writing the content for your own site, that’s awesome. If you’ve relied on a marketing agency or someone else internally that can’t write at the level the physician can, then re-do the page by an actual professional in that medical specialty.

2: Find your pages that talk about diseases, mental health or other conditions and make them the 1st priority to update. In order for them to pass the sniff test of Google’s E.A.T guidelines, you’ll want to make sure that they are linked to a bio about you or someone at your practice that’s reputable online. There should be at least 1-2 links TO published research backing up what’s mentioned on that particular page. Most importantly, you’ll want to update those pages regularly. Make note each month to scan those pages and find ways to add more content, remove old content, add a video or link to a source to backup the content.

3: Generate backlinks to these sub pages FROM other reputable websites. If you work with a Medical focused SEO agency like us, they will know what to do. For example, if you’re an Oculoplastic Surgeon that talks about Almond Eye Surgery. You’ll want to have numerous links from blogs, news sites and social media pointing to that sub-page on your medical site. You’ll want to create an amazing piece of content that is worth linking to, place it on that URL and do some manual link building outreach or use a tool like Quuu.com to get a groundswell going.

Just like we mentioned in part 1, you’ll want to make sure that you were actually affected by the Medic update by using a tool like SEMrush. Your sub-pages, services pages, explanatory pages are all very important and should be taken seriously. Stay tuned for part 3 of the Medic update series!

Bonus Tip! If you send out a lot of direct mail pieces, we have actually seen a good tactic to aid in Medic Recovery. Ask people to “Google Our Practice” instead of sending them directly to your URL. I elaborate on this offline to online strategy in a post here.