SEO for Healthcare

Modern lead generation is all about reaching the right people at the right time in the right place. The healthcare industry, while certainly different from those that sell physical products and traditional services, has to play by the same rules. If you want to generate leads and bring in new patients, you need a robust medical SEO strategy that leverages the power of link building and helps your organization cut through the noise to enjoy optimum visibility.

SEO is a technical, less-exciting topic, but it remains one of the most important elements of modern marketing. According to a study by Google and Compete, Inc. that tapped into data from more than 500 hospital researchers, 84 percent of patients use both online and offline sources for hospital research. However, local search drives nearly 300 percent more visitors to hospital websites than non-search visitors. And 44 percent of patients who research hospitals on a mobile device end up scheduling an appointment. According to a separate study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 80 percent of all U.S. internet users – or roughly 93 million Americans – have searched for a health-related topic online within the last year. That’s up from just 62 percent in 2001.

In fact, the new study indicates that looking for health and medical SEO information on the internet is the third most popular online activity, coming in just behind email (93 percent) and researching a product or service before buying (83 percent). Across all industries, 94 percent of search engines clicks go to natural search – i.e., organic SERPs and not PPC ads. Furthermore, 33 percent of all clicks go to the URL in the first ranking position on Google’s page one. The second position receives an average of 15 percent of clicks. The third position enjoys 9 percent of clicks. In all, 75 percent of clicks go to search engine results pages or first page.