Medical SEO Questions & Answers From Physicians
PatientGain has hundreds of medical practices as customers and has completed thousands of Medical SEO and medical marketing campaigns. Our experts can help you boost your Medical SEO today and answer any questions you may have about this area of marketing.
Here are the top common questions and answers related to Medical SEO for doctors.
1. How long does it take for medical Search Engine Optimization to work?
Every medical practice is different, so there is no tried and true answer to this question that will apply to every single location. Generally, we see results from our SEO work begin to appear within 4 to 12 months. Many factors can determine the time it takes for results. Your organic competition plays a significant role in this time span. Generally, we see results in these periods:
Use Case : New website, new URL – with no previous history. We will divide medical practices website into three broad areas:
1) Low competition – will start seeing results in first 2 to 3 months.
2) Medium competition – will start seeing results in first 3 to 7 months.
3) High competition – will start seeing results in first 6 or more months.
Use Case : Existing website, existing URL – with previous history. We will divide medical practices website into three broad areas:
1) Low competition – will start seeing results in first 1 to 2 months.
2) Medium competition – will start seeing results in first 1 to 3 months.
3) High competition – will start seeing results in first 2 to 4 months.
Additional factors include:
- The physical location of your practice
- Services you are offering
- The user experience of your website
- Links on your website and to your website
- Mobile experience
- Load speed
- Website structure
- Quality of content
2. Can I copy content from another medical practice and use it on my website?
No, you can not copy content from another website to your website. You shouldn’t have duplicate pages on your website, even if it is content you wrote yourself. Duplicate content will drive down your SEO scores and makes your site less relevant. Stealing content from other websites can get you in trouble with those owners and lead to cease and desist requests. Using material from other websites hurts both of you.
3. How many words should be on each page of my website?
Content is king! With that said, it should not take 30 minutes to read through the content on one of your pages. For your home pages, you should have at least 1,000 words talking about your practice and outlining the services you offer. For individual service pages, aim to have at least 500 words or more. The more words you have on a page, the better!
However, avoid packing your content with keywords, fluff, and useless content. Try to make it as rich and informative a possible. It will make your website look more authoritative and help boost your overall SEO rankings.
4. Why do I need to give “alt tags” to my pictures?
Search engines can’t “read” pictures very well compared to reading words on a website. An “alt tag” tells a search engine what it is looking at. This will help improve your website’s SEO and give a complete picture of your website. Every image should have an “alt tag” associated with it describing what the picture is.
5. How long should it take to load my website?
To put is shortly, as quick as possible. Both your desktop and mobile website should load quickly. If it takes longer than 4 seconds for your website to load, you will start to lose sets of eyeballs. If your site takes longer than 10 seconds to load, you’ve lost practically everyone. What could be slowing down your website’s loading speed? The common culprit is usually unoptimized images or multiple tracking codes trying to load at the same time. Optimize these to improve your SEO.
6. How much money do I need to spend to be #1 tomorrow?
To be listed #1 organically, you can’t buy your way to the top. You could be in the first position when it comes to paid ads, but these are unrelated to organic results. The cost for that is dependent on the keyword you are targeting and the amount of competition there is. SEO work aims to improve your organic rankings, and that does not happen overnight.
7. Why are my competitors showing up in higher positions when I search for my business from a computer at my medical practice?
If your business is new, it is because those other businesses are established. Your medical practice is not a relevant choice for people yet. It may be appearing, but historically people have found answers to their searches elsewhere. How do you improve this? Mostly by improving your SEO and giving it time. Over time, you should inch higher and higher and nudge your competitors out of the top position.
Has your business has been operating for a while and noticed a new competitor has recently dislodged you from an organic position? More than likely, this business has done some SEO work to improve their search rankings. Check out their website and see if there is anything about their site that your site does not have. Look to see if their website is loading faster, if they have longer content pages, and overall user experience. While you shouldn’t steal content, it is fine to take ideas and use them for your own.
8. Should I Google my medical clinic or practice every day?
You can do a Google search for your business every day. It will not impact your SEO rankings. Key is that do not click on your own ads or someone else’s paid ads.
Some of Google’s algorithms are based on number of times each search term is searched. So if there may be an impact on some data Google collects. If you Google your business every day to check the search rankings and if your website is a top result, but you don’t click on it, that causes Google’s algorithms to think it was not useful result. It sees someone who searched for something but then didn’t click on anything, including your website. To Google, this means your website was not the right answer. Does that mean you should click on your website? Again, you should avoid doing this. If you click on it, and then immediately leave that website, it again tells Google that your website was not the right answer to a query. This can increase the bounce rate.
How can you check organic rankings? Google search console or Google AdWords “Ad Preview” tool to see the results of search terms in different locations. It’s free, and it will not affect your search rankings.
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