It has become more and more apparent that those businesses that are not leveraging the power of the Internet to feed their sales funnels are at an increasing competitive disadvantage. This includes businesses that supply both services and products. Medical practices are not isolated from the trend of consumers (or in the case of medical practices, patients) using the INternet to identify what business would best serve their unique needs.
This is one of the reasons that medical practices need to have a web presence, but merely establishing a website is simply not good enough. There are currently approximately 200 million active websites on the Internet. Even given the fact that medical practices attract patients primarily from the immediate areas where they operate, they still face significant competition when it comes to engaging with those patients seeking their services.
This is why Search Engine Optimization or SEO for medical doctors is so important.
What is SEO? SEO is the science of using keywords and phrases within the content of a website (including blogs) that have been developed to highlight the services and products of a business entity. The way in which these keywords are positioned and used on the website is designed to ‘trigger’ search engine algorithms to elevate the business on SERPs – Search engine Results pages. The higher the ranking the more chance there is of the consumer (or patient) clicking on the result and being transported to the webpage of the business – or in this case practice.
When done correctly SEO for medical doctors will allow the practice to appear on the first page of the search results (in most cases the Google results – it is after all the Gorilla in the Sandopiut of search engines). If the webpage of the practice is not search engine optimized there is a real risk that links to the business will be relegated to page two or even three of the results.
There is an old saying about dropping down the search engine results pages, ‘the best place to hide a dead body is on page three of the Google search results – no one ever looks there.’
In search, any doctor or medical practice that does not include SEO in its online marketing planning process is simply ignoring the huge numbers of people who are using the Internet to search for specialized service providers – and that will have a severe impact on the bottom line of the business.
