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SEO best practices for healthcare websites

Patients search a condition, a treatment or a specialist, from a few kilometres away, on a phone, often anxious. SEO for a healthcare website is being the result for those searches: a page for each department and condition, a site that loads fast and reads on a phone, a local presence for each location, and content written by a named doctor. Here is the work, in the order it pays.

Written by
The GullySales team, Bengaluru
Updated
Reading time
2 min read
In this article
  1. 1. Pages that match what patients search
  2. 2. The technical basics, which are not optional
  3. 3. Local search, per location and per department
  4. 4. Content with a doctor’s name on it
  5. What to measure, and the mistakes to avoid

2. The technical basics, which are not optional

Under three seconds on a phone on 4G, because that is how patients arrive. HTTPS, because a health site without it is flagged by the browser and distrusted by the patient. Readable on every screen. And structured data — the schema that tells Google the hospital’s hours, departments, doctors and reviews — so the listing in the results carries them. A crawl finds the faults in an hour; most healthcare sites have never had one.

3. Local search, per location and per department

A Google Business Profile for each location and, for a hospital, for the major departments — complete, with real photographs, correct hours and the services listed. Name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear. Reviews asked for at discharge and answered. And a page on the site for each location, naming the area and the doctors there. For most clinics this is the work that moves patients first, because the competition for a catchment is thin.

4. Content with a doctor’s name on it

Health pages are judged on accuracy and authorship. A page that answers one patient question — what a procedure involves, what it costs, when to worry — reviewed by a doctor whose name and qualification are on it, ranks and is trusted. A page by “Admin” does neither. Two such pages a month, from the questions the OPD hears, and a reviewed-on date kept current, is a content programme; a blog of “10 tips for a healthy heart” is not.

What to measure, and the mistakes to avoid

Appointment enquiries from organic search, by department, and how many booked — not rankings. Look at Search Console monthly for the queries the site is found for and the pages that are slipping.

The mistakes: stuffing keywords into pages a patient cannot read; leaving the site slow on a phone; letting medical content go stale; and building one page for the whole hospital when patients search for a department. Fix the department pages and the local profiles first; the rest compounds from there.

Where to go from here

If this is the problem you have, these are the pages to read next.

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