There are thousands of healthcare providers in the United States competing for the same pool of customers. Effective marketing is vital for making your practice stand out from the crowd. Search engine optimization is one of the most important marketing tools in your toolkit.
Why medical practices need to stay up to date on SEO techniques
According to Google, almost three times as many visitors to hospital sites arrived there as a result of a search, compared to non-search visits, and 44% of them scheduled an appointment. Getting seen on search engine results pages is critical for attracting new patients.
7 SEO techniques that have become outdated
It is not just important to know how to use SEO in your digital marketing. You need to be using the most up-to-date SEO techniques. Search engines frequently change how their algorithms work and if you are using an outdated medical SEO strategy, your rankings will decline. These are seven examples of SEO techniques that used to work but no longer do.
1. Low-quality backlinks
When marketers discovered that search engines were ranking pages with lots of backlinks higher, they started soliciting backlinks to client’s sites. However, search engines caught on, and now their algorithms are better at distinguishing high-quality backlinks that add value to a site from backlinks added purely for SEO purposes.
2. Unoriginal content
Marketers used to try to get clicks and better rankings by producing large volumes of quick and easy content. However, everyone else started doing that too, so search engines changed their algorithms to penalize sites for low-quality content.
3. Keyword stuffing
Another tactic search engines caught on to was the practice of stuffing content with keywords to improve relevance scores and get higher rankings for popular keywords. Keywords are still important, but current algorithms penalize sites for the overuse of keywords.
4. Designing sites for search engines
To get pages ranked at the top of results, some SEO professionals started designing sites more for search engines than for the people using the sites. Search engines now take the user experience into account when ranking pages.
5. Creating pages for keyword variations
It used to be common to build pages for common variations of keywords. However, search engines now recognize this strategy, so it is better to build sites around topics that target a set of keywords.
6. Writing metadata for search engines
Metadata is still important for getting search engine attention; however, the algorithms now consider click-through rates when determining rankings. This means that if users are not clicking on your site, it will rank lower. Your metadata needs to be written for humans.
7. Adding the keywords meta tag
Search engines no longer check the keywords meta tag, so there is no point in using it. In fact, using it may just be telling your competition what keywords you are focusing on.
Doctor Genius can help you update your SEO strategy
Our content marketing strategy utilizes the latest digital marketing techniques to make sure your site gets noticed. At Doctor Genius we know that content is king when it comes to modern SEO. Give us a call today to find out how we can put our expertise to work for you.
Doctor Genius, located at 16800 Aston Street, Suite 270, Irvine, CA 92606, provides a range of services for practice success. We seek to meet our clients’ needs by providing a variety of marketing, SEO, practice optimization tools, and coaching to transform the healthcare experience. Though we work to provide the most accurate information, the content found on this website is solely intended for entertainment purposes. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that the information provided is entirely correct. You may not use the information on this site to cure, prevent, or diagnose a perceived medical issue. If you have healthcare-related needs, please speak directly to a healthcare professional. Never self-perform medical treatments discussed on this website. All images displayed are also for entertainment purposes only, and personal experiences may differ. Please note that the business tactics mentioned on this site might not be applicable to your industry or practice.
