Medical SEO vs General SEO

What are the differences between optimizing your website with typical SEO best practices versus optimizing with a background in Medical Online Marketing? In this post we are going to break it down for you.

Medical Content

This is obviously a big one as most agencies aren’t able to write at the level needed to satisfy the “sniff test” of medical practitioners or people who know what they are looking for when researching a potential practice. Also, Google is continuously updating their algorithm. Recently, the “Medic” update affected many medical websites that had badly written and inaccurate sub-pages. One thing that should be asked when working with a medical focused digital agency is, “Do you have people writing for me that have actual medical / healthcare background in my field?”

Awareness of Competition

When you’re optimizing your website both onsite and offsite, being aware of the intricacies of the space you’re in helps tremendously. Knowing who the major and minor players are, what keywords to focus on and what backlinks to obtain are very important.

Deep Understanding of Symptom Searches

Whether you’re a Gastroenterology practice or a Dentist, people are Googling very specific things. Knowing about your specialty and optimizing your website for both broad terms like “dentist near me” and specific terms like “what is a capsule endoscopy” are important. See the example of Google’s Featured Snippets below.

Schema Markup

Schema is basically the language that Google speaks. When adding schema markup code to your medical website, you’re basically communicating directly with Google telling them what sections of your website are all about. You can tell Google that you’re a hospital, what specialty you are, patient reviews, etc. This will both improve the way Google crawls your medical focused website and ultimately improve the UX (user experience) when seeing search results and ultimately landing on your site.

Watching Trends

The medical experienced SEO practitioner you work with will be focused on the healthcare space so closely tat they are aware of trends in medical specialists. It’s impossible for your generalist agency to be that granular day in and day out. Utilizing tools like Google Trends (below), Google Alerts, subscribing to medical news organizations, they will be able to catch things that you as a busy professional wouldn’t normally catch. Then, they will be able to react on your behalf from an online marketing perspective.

(Updated 2018)

 Google Algorithm Updates

Any good SEO company will know about the Google algorithm updates. However, in 2018, there was a series of updates commonly referred to the Medic Update. This core algorithm update seemed to affect a majority healthcare and medical type websites that offered advice to patients or prospects. An SEO company that has hands on experience dealing with the recovery of these updates is essential as there are a lot of tests & variables at play that will be different for each and every medical brand / location. Staying on the “heartbeat” of updates and how to recover specific to the medical space is important so you can not only recover faster but stay ahead of other competitors that were also affected.

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