Would you like to consistently attract new patients from Google? Learn how to get your website to appear first on Google with our healthcare SEO guide.
Many patients search for health-related information on Google, looking for articles and helpful guides to learn about their health, symptoms and treatment options.
A review of 37 studies found the Internet to be the most used source of health information, with approximately 80% of Internet users seeking health information online.
Frontiers in Public Health, 2023
When a person uses Google, they enter a ‘search query’ into the search box, which is the combination of words that they use to find what they’re looking for. For example, if a person is looking for information about their health condition or symptoms, they’ll likely use any of these search queries:
- What is [condition name]?
- [Condition name] symptoms
- How to treat [condition name]
- [Condition name] therapists near me
The results people see in Google vary depending on the keywords that are used, and the location of their search. Keywords are the groups of words that trigger your website to be displayed in Google Ads, Maps or Search results. Sometimes the keywords might match your search query exactly, other times it’s a similar phrase match.
Once a user sees their search results in Google, they likely click on the first few websites and almost always on the first page. In fact, according to Smart Insights 2023 data, ranking in the top three web page results gets 68.7% of all clicks:
- First place: 39.8%
- Second place: 18.7%
- Third place: 10.2%
If your healthcare website is not found on the first page of Google, your patients will have a hard time finding your practice. So, how do you get on the first page of Google?
When a person types a search query into Google, they usually see three results:
The results that users receive in each of these three sections are based on completely different factors.
How to Get to the Top of Google
In this 3-part guide, we’ll review how to get your dental, medical or healthcare website found on the first page of Google. Here’s what you’ll learn:
Part 1 – Google Ads: Pay Per Click
Google Ads for doctors and dentists are text, image, or video advertisements displayed by Google in their search engine results page, on websites and apps, as well as in Gmail or YouTube. Get your business website found on the first page of Google instantly using Google Ads, and use their powerful analytics to focus your ads to a specific audience of people interested in your healthcare services.
Part 2 – Google Maps: Local SEO
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of tactics to increase the position of your website ranking in local search results, such as Google Maps. Many people use Google Maps when looking for a new dental or medical provider, so attract more patients to your healthcare clinic by increasing your rankings in Google Maps using healthcare local SEO for doctors and dentists.
Part 3 – Google Search: Organic SEO
Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of tactics to increase the position of your website ranking in organic Google Search results. Dental and medical SEO for doctors and dentists often provides the best long-term value for growing your practice with new patients compared to paid advertising.
After reading this guide, you’ll understand how to grow your healthcare practice by being on the first page of Google. Let’s get started!
Part 3 – Google Search: Organic Healthcare SEO
In Part 1, we reviewed how to get your healthcare website on the first page of Google using Google Ads for doctors and dentists. In Part 2, we explored how to get to the top of Google Maps using local SEO for healthcare.
Now, Part 3 is a healthcare SEO guide where we’ll explore how to get your website to the top of Google’s organic search engine results page using healthcare SEO.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making changes to your website and online marketing strategy to increase the position of your website ranking in search engines, like Google.
Being on the first page of Google is one of the most effective ways of attracting potential patients to your website, wanting to learn more about your dental or medical services.
According to Advanced Web Ranking, over 63% of all website clicks on Google are for the top three websites listed, and 40% are for the first website.
In other words, if your dental or medical website is not easily found on the first page of Google, your patients will have a hard time finding your healthcare practice online.
How Does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Work?
When a person conducts an online search, Google analyzes all of the websites in their database and presents those websites in their search engine results page (SERP). The first thing a person sees are paid advertisements through Google Ads, followed by business listings in Google Maps, followed by website listings in Google Search.
Google ranks websites based on over 200 ranking factors, which can be summarized into two primary categories: relevance and popularity. In other words, Google presents websites that are relevant or useful to the person’s search query and ranks those websites based on their popularity. They believe that the more popular a website is, the more valuable the information must be.
Google’s algorithms calculate the relevance and popularity of each website to display in Google Search based on organic search engine optimization (SEO) factors. Many of these factors are similar to local SEO factors, but in a different order and a different weighting is assigned to each factor.
According to Moz, there are many factors that Google considers to determine the relevance and popularity of each website, such as:
- Link signals: inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, linking domain quantity, quality and authority of inbound links to domain, etc.
- On-page signals: presence and consistency of name, address and phone number, keywords used in the headlines, website domain authority, etc.
- Behavioural signals: click-through rate from search results, session duration, bounce rate, mobile clicks to call, check-ins, clicks to call/directions/website, etc.
- Google My Business signals: proximity of address to the point of search, proper category associations, keywords used in the business title, etc.
- Citation signals: consistency in name, address, and phone number in all citations, citation volume, distribution, quality and relevancy of listings, etc.
- Personalization: location of a user’s city or country relative to business, physical address in the city of search, previous search history, etc.
- Review signals: quantity of customer reviews, increase in review recency, velocity, diversity, format and authority of customer reviews, etc.
Next, we’ll review the top three factors that Google considers in organic SEO: link signals, on-page signals, and behavioural signals.
Over 63% of all website clicks on Google are for the top three websites listed, and 40% are for the first website.
Advanced Web Ranking
What Are Link Signals?
When Google’s algorithms crawl the billions of websites on the Internet, links are the streets between the pages. Since the late 1990s, search engines treat links as votes for popularity and importance on a website’s ranking.
For example, a small website blog with only a few other websites linking to it has a lower degree of popularity than your university’s website or Wikipedia, as they both have millions of websites linking to their sites.
Websites that are considered trustworthy and popular are assigned a higher Domain Authority (DA), which is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. This score predicts how well a website will rank on a search engine results page and is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, such as the number of links pointing to it and the credibility of the websites providing the links.
What is your website’s Domain Authority (DA)? You can get a free Practice Checkup report to track your website visibility and keyword rankings, including your Domain Authority (DA).
One of the most effective strategies to increase your healthcare website’s rankings in Google Search is to focus on getting other websites to point links to your own, also known as ‘backlinks’.
Getting backlinks has more impact from websites that have a high Domain Authority (DA) and are considered trustworthy. Most institutions, such as governments, universities, and associations, are assigned a higher Domain Authority, as they have a high degree of credibility and trustworthiness.
In other words, focus on earning backlinks from your university, healthcare college, professional association, or any other institution’s website to increase your website’s rankings on Google search.
What Are On-Page Signals?
When other websites point a link to your dental or medical website, that practice is known as off-page SEO, which is any action that is taken outside of your own website to impact your search engine rankings. In comparison, on-page signals are any actions that you take inside of your own website to improve your search engine rankings.
A central component to on-page signals are keywords, which are words that define what your web page is about. In other words, they’re the words and phrases that people type into the search field of Google. If you summarize every element on your page – all of the text, images, and videos – into simple words and phrases, those are your primary keywords.
Keywords are the links that connect what people are searching for in Google with the content that your website provides.
For example, if a person types the search query “how to whiten your teeth,” Google will display websites that use the keywords “how to”, “whiten” and “teeth”.
The keywords need to be strategically placed in several places, including:
- Title tag: the title of your web page or post, near the front
- H1 header tag: the primary headline of your web page
- H2 header tag: the secondary headlines or sub-headlines of your web page
- Body copy: throughout the body text of the web page (keyword density ~2%)
- Alt attribute: the alternate text of the images on your web page or post
- URL: your website address that follows https or www, near the front
What Are Behavioural Signals?
When a person enters a search query into Google’s search field, Google is attempting to understand the intention of the person doing the search to display the most accurate website listings possible. Then, when a person arrives on your website from Google’s search engine results page (SERP), Google wants to know if your website met their expectations, answered their questions, and provided the content they were looking for.
In other words, Google wants to know about that person’s user experience.
Currently, most of the variables that Google can analyze directly include keywords, links, and website structure. However, these variables don’t tell Google about the person’s experience when visiting and interacting with your website.
Out of over 200 ranking factors that Google analyzes to determine their search engine rankings, they all have one underlying principle: user experience.
The experience that a person has when interacting with a website is difficult to quantify, measure and analyze. Because these signals are too complex for our current technology, it’s not as strong of a ranking factor as link signals or on-page signals. However, as Google’s technology continues to improve, behavioural signals that reflect user experience will grow in importance.
There are several behavioural signals that Google considers when trying to interpret a person’s experience when interacting with your website.
For example, imagine that you enter a search query, then clicked on the first website in the results page. If the web page wasn’t what you were looking for, or the page loaded slowly, or the content was poorly written, you’ll likely click the back button to go back to Google. You may try the second website and spend time exploring it further. This tells Google that the first website didn’t provide as good of a user experience to you as the second website.
When this action is aggregated over billions of search queries each day, Google can analyze the overall experience that all websites provide to people using their search engine.
When Google displays websites for people in their search engine results page, it calculates how many times each website is clicked, and based on the amount of times that it was shown, it can determine the click-through-rate (CTR). This is one of the behavioural signals that it considers.
If a person clicks on your website, doesn’t interact with any other links or pages, then clicks to go back to Google, this “bounce rate” tells Google that your website did not provide the user experience that person was looking for.
If that person stays for your website for 30 seconds, then goes to your competitor’s website and explores for over 5 minutes, your lower “session duration” tells Google that your website also didn’t provide as good of a user experience as your competitor’s website. Bounce rate and session duration are also examples of behavioural signals that indicate user experience.
Google’s algorithms calculate over 200 ranking factors to determine their search engine rankings. There are many different methods for improving your website’s rankings, and these that we reviewed in this guide are a solid foundation to get your healthcare website to appear on the first page of Google’s organic search results.
How to Get Your Healthcare Website to the Top of Google Search
Now that we understand the basic strategy of organic dental SEO, let’s dive deep into how to get your healthcare website to the top of Google Search.
First, where does your website rank to begin with?
You can get a free Practice Checkup report to track your website visibility and keyword rankings, which evaluates how easy or difficult it is for new patients to find you on Google Maps and Search results. This report also includes an on-page SEO audit to identify opportunities for optimizing your healthcare website.
The top five things you can do to improve your medical SEO results are:
- Install Google Analytics and Search Console to monitor SEO rankings
- Improve healthcare website’s on-page SEO for target keywords
- Optimize all website media and improve speed performance
- Write SEO optimized content, blogs and guides with target keywords
- Build high-quality, relevant backlinks from trustworthy websites
1. Install Google Analytics and Search Console to Monitor SEO Rankings
Google Analytics
Considered the gold standard in website analytics, Google Analytics is installed in over 55% of all websites around the world. It provides you with data on your website’s performance, including where your users are coming from and how they’re interacting with your website. This data is helpful for making improvements to your website’s user experience, as many prospective patients will unconsciously evaluate the quality of your practice based on the quality of your website.
Google Search Console
The best way to determine how Google views your website on their search engine is by using Search Console. This free tool provides you with data about your website’s performance on their search engine, including what keywords or search queries are bringing the most traffic to your website, each web page’s indexing status, or if there’s an issue with a web page, the quantity of links you have from other websites, and more.
2. Improve Healthcare Website’s On-Page SEO for Target Keywords
Website visitors found your website online because they were searching for keywords that are relevant to the content on your web page. Therefore, its best to assign one target keyword for each web page.
Ideally, you have one web page for each of your primary dental services where you target one primary keyword (e.g. root canal) with several secondary words (e.g. endodontics, root canal operation, RCT treatment) added as well.
Once you’ve identified your relevant keywords, you can add those keywords to your web page to increase your website’s relevancy for those target keywords. It’s not about keyword stuffing your website copy, as this will actually hurt your SEO rankings. Aim for a keyword density of about 2%, or about two instances of that word and related terms, every 100 words.
You need to strategically place your target keywords in the areas Google’s algorithm scans, such as:
- Page title: add target keywords to the front of the page title
- Meta descriptions: may not impact rankings, but increases click through rates
- H1-H6 headlines: add target keywords to your primary headlines H1, H2
- Body content: aim for about 2% keyword density, without ‘keyword stuffing’
- Images: add keywords to both file names and alternate text, optimize image size
- URL: add primary and secondary keywords to each web page URL
3. Optimize All Website Media and Improve Speed Performance
A one-second delay in page load time has been shown to cause a 7% loss in conversions/bookings and 11% fewer page views.
BigCommerce Essentials
The quality of your website is determined by the quality of your content. Your website visitors came to your website searching for content, either education to learn about their health or information to learn about your healthcare practice, team and services.
High-quality photography and video content captures user attention and retains them on your web page longer, increasing your website’s session duration, which is a ranking factor Google uses to evaluate user behaviour.
Unfortunately, media content that’s not optimized is often large, using outdated media file formats that slow down your website’s speed and performance.
Optimize your media content by ensuring the following:
- All photography is using latest media formats, such as WebP
- All videography is using the latest media formats, such as WebM
- All photos are compressed (<200kb) using tools, like: https://squoosh.app/
- All videos are hosted on a video hosting platform, like: https://vimeo.com/
- All photos and videos have keywords in the file name and alternate text
Completing all of the above ensures your media files are optimized to load quickly, creating the best user experience for your potential new patients. According to BigCommerce Essentials, a one-second delay in page load time has been shown to cause a 7% loss in conversions/bookings and 11% fewer page views.
It’s helpful to install a speed cache plugin (e.g. WP Optimize or Hummingbird) that reduces the size of your web pages by up to 90% with GZIP, reduces server load, and improves the user experience by reducing page load times. Faster speeds mean less visitor frustration, longer time spent on your website, more pages visited, and more appointments booked.
4. Write SEO Optimized Content, Blogs and Guides with Target Keywords
Fully 80% of adult Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for at least one of 16 major health topics online.
Pew Research Centre
In addition to adding target keywords in your web pages’ text for your health services, team and clinic, it’s also helpful to create health content like blogs and guides for your audience.
According to Pew Research Centre:
“Fully 80% of adult Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for at least one of 16 major health topics online. This makes the act of looking for health or medical information one of the most popular activities online.”
If your patients want to learn more about their health, they often look for information on a search engine, like Google. What they find are blog articles, electronic books (eBooks), helpful guides, and other forms of content marketing.
When online users find your blog article or eBook, which educates them on their health and provides helpful answers to their questions, it both attracts them to your website and they start to trust your practice as a healthcare expert.
SEO optimized content serves three primary functions:
- Attracts new users to your website searching for content related to their health
- Nurtures a relationship with online users to trust your practice as a health expert
- Motivates and encourages online users to contact your practice when they need help
When writing a blog article or guide, ensure the following:
- Target keywords in the headline, near the front
- Target keywords in body text (keyword density: ~2%)
- Total content length at least 2,000 words or longer
- Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) concisely
- Add SEO optimized media to retain user attention
5. Build High-Quality, Relevant Backlinks from Trustworthy Websites
So far, the first four strategies above are all part of ‘on-page SEO’, optimizing your website’s search engine rankings factors. The last strategy involves ‘off-page SEO’, building backlinks from other websites back to your own website. But, not every backlink has the same degree of value.
As mentioned above, different websites have different degrees of trustworthiness or credibility, which can be summarized into a website’s Domain Authority (DA). A backlink from a website with a high DA has higher value or SEO impact than a backlink from a website with a low DA.
In other words, try to get as many backlinks as you can from as many websites with high DA as you can. But, relevancy also matters. Getting a backlink from a website related to your specific industry in dentistry or medicine or optometry or physical therapy has more value than a website related to accounting or manufacturing.
So, how do you get backlinks from other websites?
There are hundreds if not thousands of possible strategies to consider. Here are a few:
- Build listings and citations from websites that you can access (e.g. Google Business, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Zocdoc, Healthdirect, RateMDs)
- Identify your partners, suppliers and associations that you want to earn backlinks from and start publishing outgoing links from your website to theirs. This will likely get their attention and they may choose to post a link back to your site.
- Write a helpful blog article or guide, then promote it online to get backlinks to it. You can contact other websites that may find it valuable to their audience to see if they’ll link back to it. For example, if you write a helpful guide on Invisalign, you can contact your supplier to see if they’re willing to post a link to your online guide.
- Contact journalists, media and PR specialists to offer your expertise as a subject matter expert for their articles and surveys. If they quote you in an article, they’ll post a backlink to your website.
- Conduct primary research and publish the data online as a helpful resource on your web page, attracting traffic and organic backlinks from other websites.
Building backlinks requires a well-developed and executed strategy to ensure you’re maximizing the results of your investment of time and resources. If you’re too busy treating your patients, we can get your practice website to appear first on Google with healthcare SEO for doctors and dentists.
Healthcare SEO to Appear First on Google: Conclusion
Healthcare SEO is one of the best long-term strategies for consistently attracting new patients to your healthcare practice, searching for information about their health. Most people search online for health-related information, so attracting these users to your website attracts potential new patients to your practice.
You can improve your website’s search rankings online by installing Google Analytics and Search Console to track your progress, improve your website’s on-page SEO for target keywords, optimize your media to improve speed, write SEO optimized content and build backlinks from websites with high Domain Authority (DA).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How is SEO used in healthcare?
In healthcare, SEO is used to improve a medical or dental practice’s online visibility and reputation in order to attract new patients to their practice. Healthcare SEO includes optimizing the website content, structure, backlinks and local listings for search engines, like Google.
What is SEO health?
An SEO health check or Practice Checkup is a diagnostic tool to evaluate your website’s online visibility using SEO principles. This give you an idea of how easy or difficult it is for new patients to find your practice online.
How can I rank #1 on Google?
To rank #1 on Google, implement the following steps:
- Improve your website’s on-page SEO
- Add high-volume keywords to each page
- Optimize your website’s technical SEO
- Include internal and external linking
- Create educational content optimized for search
- Improve your website’s user experience
- Build backlinks from high quality sites back to yours
What is medical SEO for doctors?
Medical SEO for doctors includes optimizing a medical clinic website with educational content patients search for online, including a biography of the doctor(s) that wrote each article. Including the physician’s biography in each blog article or white paper increases the authority and trust of each article, improving the likelihood it’ll get shared by search algorithms or AI powered LLMs. Then, the educational content can be promoted by distributing it online on medical and healthcare relevant communities to increase the reach, organically attracting backlinks, further increasing the medical website’s search rankings.
What is dental SEO for dentists?
Dental SEO for dentists includes optimizing the dental clinic website with helpful dental content patients search for online, with a biography of the dentist(s) that wrote each article. Including the dentist’s biography in each blog article or white paper increases the trust and authority of each content, improving the chance search algorithms and LLM models will share it online. This educational content can be distributed on dental communities and forums, increasing the reach and organically attracting backlinks, improving the dental website’s search rankings.
How do I show up on Google’s first page?
To show up on Google’s first page, optimize your website’s content using healthcare SEO principles, such as improving your on-page SEO, adding high-volume keywords that your patients use on each web page, improving your website’s speed and technical SEO, optimizing your internal and external linking strategy, creating educational content optimized for search engines, and building backlinks from other websites back to your own.
