Healthcare SEO: Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly Content for Medical Websites in 2022

If you’ve ever been dealing with content marketing and you practiced SEO tricks either for your personal blog, business website, or any other online project, you know for sure that the current approach to SEO is quite different than it was a year or two ago.

Marketers across the globe, including healthcare SEO experts and marketers, in particular, should now change their strategies and techniques of website content optimization to meet the current trends, especially the updates by Google. So what are the challenges and tasks? Why SEO is important and which trendy SEO strategies currently suggested by experts should be used these days. Let’s see!

Medical Industry Obstacles During The Pandemic

2020 was complicated for everyone in healthcare since the pandemic brought unpleasant changes to the work of organizations like hospitals and clinics all over the world. Their all focus was on finding the beds for patients, providing the right therapy to save lives, and applying efforts for finding enough medication and supplies for every patient.

The overall confusion and fear that made people stay at home and refuse from attending clinics badly influenced the patient volume and the demand for some medical services.

In June 2020, a survey conducted by the Medical Group Management Association showed that physicians experienced an average of 60% drop in patient volume. This drop caused the loss of revenue among healthcare providers.

However, by May 2021, the patient volume was increased and this boost started to be considered the top priority by responders of the poll conducted by Epion Health.

The larger amount of doctor appointments was characterized by the surveyed doctors as ‘critical’ or ‘most critical’ priority in comparison to any other priorities for 2021.

It’s December 2021, and the priorities of healthcare customers change as quickly as the approach to the Web marketing of medical services. Today, SEO experts should shift their approach to search engine optimization to stay the much-fancied of Google and remain ‘fixed’ at the top of its SERPs.

The State of SEO 2021 – Key Statistics

Multiple researchers collect the stats on SEO and marketing to show that SEO is still a top-of-the-line focus to consider when launching an online marketing campaign.

Most companies that start optimizing their websites for search engines need to learn the true statistics to get an insight into the top-priority aspects they should stick by to beat the competition.

So, what are the main SEO stats for 2021? Let’s see:

1. Google is still the major influencer in the SEO world. According to Statista, Google (+ Google images) holds 92.27% of the total market share among the search engines. It is followed by YouTube (also owned by Google), while Yahoo!, Bing and Amazon follow them in that list.
2. A team of strategists at Intergrowth states that 61% of B2B marketers consider SEO and organic traffic to generate more leads than any other marketing concept.
3. According to HubSpot, SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
4. HubSpot also reports that 49% of users use Google to find a new product or item.
5. By 2021 Google has received 360 billion searches and this amount is growing day by day.

SEO is essential to increase the visibility of your business and introduce your product to the target customers, and the healthcare business is no exception. Now it’s time to discover the major search engine optimization tips for 2022.

Healthcare SEO Strategies for 2022

The current year has shown the approach to SEO should now be based on the mix of proper keyword research, quality of content, and enhanced user experience. Of course, every new Google update brings pivotal changes to SEO standards, but most of them are often temporary and quite possible to uphold.

Page Experience Update by Google

Page experience update was one of the latest and most influential updates of Google released in 2021. This algorithm is focused on estimating the signals that define how a user perceives a website and which experience a user obtains when interacting with a web page.

This means that a website should be simple-to-navigate, fast-to-load and all its content should be intuitively easy-to-find.

If your website is already indexed by Google, you can use Google Search Console to find and test the Core Web Vitals report tool to fetch out the issues with user experience on your web page and fix them.

Quality Content is Still a King

Even if your website’s user experience is not perfect, your page is going to be ranked higher if you’re publishing high-quality content. In 2019, Google released the update codenamed Bert and this affected almost 10% of all the search queries.

The algorithm is focused on NLP (natural language processing) which is a concept that discovers the methods to tune up the bots for better analyzing human languages. An updated search spider tries to get a better insight into the search queries of users.

Today a website content should be user-friendly and easy-to-perceive for a human, not just for a spider. NLP techniques mean the search results should be more quality and understandable to properly answer the question of a user, so the quality content is what SEO should be currently focused on.

Good Content for Medical SEO: How to Create

Modern SEO is more than just using the right keywords and featuring them in your meta description and title, the NLP approach requires the understanding provided to a user. Content should be as clear for a target reader as possible, so before you start creating the next post, think about the way of releasing the information.

Now that your post is ready, make sure that your freshly-crafted publication is laconic and informative enough for a reader to receive a reply to their questions and that your language of speaking is understandable for a wide audience.

So, let’s strip down several tips on creating SEO-friendly content for the healthcare industry.

1. Avoid using professional slang

Representatives of every profession have their particular jargon that is clear only within their own community, and in medicine, this is especially common. However, when it comes to medical SEO some specific jargon or terms are not understandable for regular users or potential customers.

For instance, instead of using the word combination “corpus cavernosum” it would be better to use the ’erectile tissue’ one or use “a material for multiple purposes” instead of “pluripotent material”, etc.

A great number of medical terms transform a blog post or an informational article into medication instruction. However, if there is a certain name of an illness, you can call it as it is but add a little bit of explanation. For instance, if you use the word “hypogonadism” it would be great to explain this means ‘low testosterone’.

Try using a tool like Readable to create more easy-to-perceive and SEO-friendly content.

2. Focus on the structure

Good readability consists of short and coherent sentences and a good hierarchy of titles with tags H1, H2, H3. Highlighting your content with proper title tags helps the search spiders to better index the content.

It would be great to review the most critical issues at the start of your post and then add the details and examples closer to the end of the article. Include the catchy keywords into the snippet visible in the Google SERPs to increase your chance to improve the click-through rates of your page.

3. Read twice and keep it accurate

The absence of mistakes and mistypes, proper narration, as well as logical flow of the text, add up to the quality of your content and keep your readers interested. Use the tools like Grammarly or its alternatives to check for mistakes and read your content after it’s been written to make sure it is easy to understand and nothing is missed.

Healthcare SEO and Voice Search

Pronunciation of words is different from their written structure in many languages, but NLP methods make the pronounced words more understandable for search engines.

Almost all modern gadgets are equipped with Google assistants allowing to use the voice search functionality and find the required information quickly and easily just by saying “Ok, Google!” and then pronouncing the search query.

Creating voice-search-friendly content is both about what a user asks and how they are asking this. Some of the tips, in this case, are as follows:

1. Utilize the long-tail keywords that people mostly use in casual conversations. For instance, a question like “will my insurance cover PRP therapy?” sounds pretty conversational and understandable for users and Google voice search.

2. Include the long-tail key phrases into the titles and subtitles. The title can include the key question from a certain search query to make your post easier to find.

If you add the questions to the subtitles it will outline the question and the answer which will be included in the text of your post. Such structure makes your content easier to browse and the answers to the questions – easier to find, so this adds up to the quality of your content.

The Final Thoughts

Stay flexible and stay yourself when creating your posts since the value of your website depends on how human-friendly the content is, so just think and speak like a human in your SEO articles. Strategy is everything, but the quality is more of that.

Stay clear for your target users and potential customers to become trusted by the search engines. Stay tuned!