You’d love for your practice to be listed on page one of a Google search, but without spending a huge amount of your marketing budget… Is it possible?
Competing with well-known organisations like the NHS and various charities known for their expertise is a tough ask for your practice.
What you’re aiming for is people searching for you specifically. This ensures that the click-throughs to your website are genuine and will bring new patients to you.
Let your brand do the talking
Brand recognition is the main driver for click-throughs to a website, as it’s a brand they’re familiar with. When you search on Google you naturally choose the brand you recognise most to give you more information.
For this reason, building a strong brand is vital to getting the right type of people looking at your site. Ideally you need potential patients to put your practice name into their searches, virtually guaranteeing that you will pop up on page one.
Have an SEO strategy in place
Practices that focus on keywords that are too broad or too popular are destined to fail. Instead you need to drill down to unique, brand-related keywords that will ensure you get the right calibre of people coming to your website.
It’s an extra bonus to include local elements in your keywords, for example the county your practice is based in or medical conditions you are an expert in.
Our team can help you with choosing your keywords.
Optimise your website
Make sure your website can handle a large amount of traffic – and have a plan to turn the traffic into leads.
You also need to make sure search engines can easily crawl, read, and index your website. Think of this as little Google spiders crawling all over your website, picking up keywords, phrases, links, and optimised images, ready to send through to page one when a patient searches for specific terms.
Remember that your website needs:
- to load quickly
- have a simple and easy to use site navigation
- be responsive for mobile and tablet users.
Providing clear headings and content for each page or category of your website can have a huge impact on listings too.
Content is key
Add regular and unique content to your website. High-quality content increases your rankings in a Google search and also creates a better user experience for your customers.
The more information you have on your site, the more likely people are to going to talk about it. Use the keywords you want to be listed for throughout your website:
- Make sure the content on your website is easily read, and the links on each page are clear
- Create informative and friendly videos for people to watch and share on social media
- Set up blogs, providing your expertise on issues that matter most to your patients.
“Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic and 70% more leads than those that don’t” – HubSpot
Build your social media
Include any good news stories or PR you have for your practice in your social media feed. You can use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube… any social media platform that will get more people talking about and sharing your website content.
Google takes all this into account when ranking websites for the first page on a search result. The more people talking about your practice, the higher your ranking will be.
Still finding SEO and building your brand online a minefield?
Let us help you design your website. We write content proven to engage patients and increase SEO, and can help you track and monitor your online performance to make sure you’re getting the most out of your website.
Speak to the team at Rockbridge Web to see how we can help make sure your marketing budget is spent on the right activity.
