Medical SEO & Dental SEO Speed Rankings. Google’s new SEO algorithm now ranks website speed as a key important factor.

Rankings from hundreds of medical companies shows that if your website loads within first 3 seconds, you will have higher conversion rates and higher SEO rankings. How fast a website loads is directly related to revenue, conversion rates, and search engine rankings. According to Google’s CEO, there are over 200 “signals” used by the Google’s algorithms. Based on our experience, There are 12 key factors – Please scroll down and read them. Easy way to reduce the load time is to keep the main landing page very simple, no high resolution images. Use server and website caching. Use CDN, and several other factors are important. Another common strategy used is to convert every page to static HTML rendering prior to a user visiting your webpage. This speeds up the download. You can also disable “slide show” and replace with a static image. Avoid any animation. There are dozens of steps you can take to speed the loading of a page. Some hosting companies provide high performance servers connected to a dedicated CDN. This will also help with performance of the page speed.

Example of a very nice looking website. But very slow speed. On a mobile device, it loads in 12 seconds. This website has very low conversion rates.

Pages that loaded in less than 3 seconds had a highest conversion rate, top tier. We measured mobile patients only, as majority of the patients visit your medical and dental websites from a iPhone or Android phone.

Pages that load in 3.1 to 4.0 seconds conversion rate dropped by 6 % from the top tier
Pages that load in 4.1 to 5.0 seconds conversion rate dropped by 19 % from the top tier
Pages that load in 5.1 to 6.0 seconds conversion rate dropped by 34 % from the top tier
Pages that load in 6.1 to 9.0 seconds conversion rate dropped by 61 % from the top tier
Pages that load in 9.1 to 12.0 seconds conversion rate dropped by 84 % from the top tier
More than 12 seconds, we did not calculate

Example of very nice looking website – however it does not pass Google Core Web Vitals Assessment. So this type of website is a liability for this medical/dental practice.

The code of your website and images are the biggest culprits. The issue with medical websites is that if you use low resolution images, the site will not look attractive, specially if you are serving a high-end clientele.

Our data shows that for most medical clinics, the biggest factor for high rankings medical SEO, is the quality and quantity of the content and structure (code), attractive design and awesome user experience – specially on mobile.

 

Google’s new SEO algorithm now ranks website speed as a key important factor.

This new algorithm was launched sometime in mid 2021. Google’s page experience algorithm is designed to reward you for fast loading mobile websites. You can check the performance of your website, or any page at https://web.dev/measure/. It covers 4 major areas:

1) performance

2) accessibility

3) best practices

4) SEO.

So as a best practice, your strategy should be to be “green” in all of these areas. When you run tests on https://web.dev/measure/ , enter your website URL, and run it 4-6 times. Then take an average. Remember that this is a tool provided by Google, as a simulator that is close to what Google’s actual search algorithms’ see. So our view is that it is a very good way of evaluating a website. Here is the data from PatientGain’s website and another company’s website :

Bounce rates of medical websites greater the 5 seconds

Google’s tests confirm the same test results as PatientGain’s tests. Keep the web pages simple and light. 1) Have separate images for mobile and for full desktop 2) Pages should load with 4 seconds or less. Read more at Google’s test results here. PatientGain recommends using this site for page speed tests. 

Sometimes you may get a “Sales Pitch” – It starts like this. Check your Speed Rankings For Your Website. It is SLOW. And it’s killing your SEO. Let’s make it faster for you.

According to Google:

What are the definitions of ‘Good’, ‘Needs Improvement’ and ‘Poor’ site speeds

Thresholds for each category are applied consistently across site and page speed as well as across country and connection type. The speed categories defined by the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) guide are: Good, Needs Improvement and Poor. The thresholds for each category are as follows.

Good: 0-2.5 seconds
Needs Improvement: 2.5 seconds-4 seconds
Poor: 4 seconds and up

12 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors for Medical Healthcare Websites’s Google SEO

Over 78 to 81 percent of your online success is tied to Google search, PPC, maps, listings and posts. This data is collected from hundreds of successful healthcare clinics across the the USA and Canada. SEO is very important part of your success. Google search is the most accurate search engine. In the order of importance.

1. Website Pages Accessible and Readable by Google (verifiable) – Basically can google read your website? If this is not done properly, rest is an academic exercise
2. Content of the website – Unique and non-plagiarized. Content must be written just for your website, and should never be copied
3. Relevancy score – How pertinent is the information on the website compared to the “category” of the website – Every website has a “category” in Google’s index
3. Domain Age, URL and Authority
4. Speed Mobile Optimizations – Including website load time within 4 seconds
5. Content Optimizations for Images, Videos and Text based content
6. Technical Structure of the Website, server response, schema, proper tags and best practices
7. Business Information accurate and matches on Google Business page, Facebook business page
8. HTTPS pages 
9. User experience 
10. Links and references inbound and outbound 
11. Social Signals 
12. Page speed and AMP