Healthcare is big business, and some of the hardest keywords to target are healthcare-related. People want to capitalize on these high-value keywords, but for a smaller healthcare company, it’s hard to compete with the budgets of billion-dollar enterprises.
Don’t go the fast and easy route where your site will rank at the top of Google for a few weeks and then disappear.
Instead, you want to go for the long-term. This will take a lot of time and work, but it’s possible to rank for some keywords.
1. Start and End with a Strong Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is the key to online marketing today and in the future. When you’re engaging in content marketing, you’re creating a lot of different assets along the way. These assets can help your website rank higher in the results, and these assts themselves can also start to rank highly.
What assets should you be creating?
- Articles
- Announcements
- Blog posts
- eBook
- Infographic
- Interviews
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Whitepapers
Social media accounts are also a part of your content marketing strategy. Form a strong strategy, and implement your strategy knowing it will take time to really pick up.
2. Start Networking and Making a Name for Yourself
There’s a reason that you see the same faces and names in your industry: someone has made a name for themselves. When a person makes a name for themselves, it’s easier to engage in word-of-mouth marketing and people to link to all of these assets that you’ve created in your content strategy.
People follow authoritative figures much more than Joe down the street that just entered the industry.
You’ll want to:
- Reach out to others in your field
- Go to networking events
- Start answering questions on Quora
- Teach a class
These steps, all of which may not seem SEO-related, will lead to you being able to capitalize on new opportunities. You’ll be able to land guest posts and maybe even speaking events from the networking that you do today.
3. Pay Attention to Your On-Page SEO Tactics
There are a lot of elements in a medical website. Let’s say that you’re selling a hospital bed mattress. You might think there’s little that you can do to optimize your page, but there’s a lot that you may be overlooking:
- Create a keyword strategy
- Tailor your content to incorporate some long-tail keywords
- Optimize your site speed, as 70% of medical queries are on mobile devices
- Use medical schema on your site
Of course, you’ll want to keep your page spam-free, use authority links to your page using SEO outreach and content marketing, and optimize all of your media to allow for a fast-loading website.
When you have a medical website of any kind, it’s important to never deceive your users. This is an industry where deception is going to get you in trouble. Tricks and methods that can hypothetically inflate your search engine optimization in the short-term only should be avoided.
Your site needs to be fast, unique and genuine to be able to reach the top of the search results.
