Healthcare marketing is changing as the competition for private dental care, aesthetics and health treatments hots up. Most people now turn to search engines when they are looking for healthcare information and services. When they do this, you want your clinic to be the first result they see. Effective SEO is essential for clinics to attract, engage and convert local patients today.
Why SEO matters for UK clinics
SEO is not just about search engine rankings. It is about the visibility of your brand, increasing credibility and building up potential patient trust.
Globally around 7% of Google searches are healthcare-related, around 70k searches per minute, and more than a billion a day (National Library of Medicine). Brits consulted ‘Dr. Google’ nearly 50 million times in a year (Benenden Health).
Clinics need to be seen to be used by potential patients. Improving SEO makes your clinic stand out in a crowded healthcare marketplace. SEO can help your clinic to reach the right audience at the right time – when they are online searching for help.
Local SEO for UK clinics
Local SEO is the key to attracting nearby patients who will use your clinic. Assuming you are seeing patients in person, you need them to be close enough to your location to visit. The distance they are willing to travel depends on the frequency of the treatments they are looking for. For example, they might travel further for a one-off treatment.
Local SEO for clinics with physical locations (dentists, aesthetics, weight loss, chiropractors, etc) can use a variety of tactics. These include Google Business profiles, localised keywords, and accurate business listings on Google maps, all of which can drive local search results. Patients search for ‘near me’ results and local SEO helps clinics to build trust and drive foot traffic off these searches.
The basics of healthcare SEO
There are a few basics that every clinic needs to nail to improve their healthcare SEO. These will come as no surprise, they really are the basics to SEO for any local based service business.
Technical SEO – I have said it before and I will say it again, all the content in the world will not help your healthcare marketing if your website is broken. A technical audit is a great first step to make sure there is nothing holding your website back. A website needs to be fast, mobile-friendly and easy for search engines to crawl.
Content optimisation – content needs to be planned to optimise it for search engines and real people. Create informative, relevant and trustworthy content that answers patient’s questions and shows off your clinical expertise.
Authority building – on page optimisation is not all that is required. Local SEO will build your authority using quality backlinks and positive reviews on external platforms like Doctify to enhance your clinic’s reputation and search rankings.
User experience – so often I find that clinics have not thought about how to make it easy for visitors to book an appointment. If it is difficult to find out how to contact you or make an appointment, visitors to your clinic’s website will leave. Though it is not obvious, this is important for SEO!
Healthcare marketing success stories
Working with the tick-borne disease clinic on their SEO resulted in increasing their impressions by a factor of 10x and the click through rate by 20x. That’s not all, they received 45 enquiries in one month.
Social media can be a powerful part of SEO and in this case we increased brand awareness by showing this cosmetic dentist to over 35,000 local people in a very short period of time. We also increased engagement by 329%.
Common SEO challenges for UK clinics
The biggest challenge for UK clinics is increased competition. When I first started building websites, basic SEO had quick results. Now there is high competition for popular keywords advertising lucrative treatments. A strategic approach is required to compete against high competition.
The second common challenge I find is ensuring that information is in compliance with healthcare advertising regulations. Keeping information accurate, up-to-date and compliant is essential for effective healthcare marketing.
Next steps for SEO
Auditing your existing online presence and local listings is a great first step to improving the SEO of your clinic.
Invest in building a SEO strategy that will help your business compete in highly competitive times.
Spend time on keyword research which will help you to identify general and niche service terms that are relevant to our clinic and location.
Regularly update your website content to address patient’s questions. Great content will highlight your clinical expertise and specialisms.
Encourage satisfied patients to leave reviews and engage with your clinic online. This user generated content will provide proof of your excellent service.
Build backlinks with genuine, authoritative websites.
Monitor SEO performance and adjust the strategy as needed. This last step is often neglected. SEO is not a set it and forget it service, it requires ongoing work to maintain your presence online.
SEO in healthcare marketing
SEO plays a major role in healthcare marketing. Increasing your clinics visibility in search engines will ensure that you are found when prospective patients are searching online for help with their medical conditions.
Local SEO drives visibility and builds trust. It showcases your clinical experience and any specialisms that you treat. It puts your clinic front and centre for local people who need your help.
Think about SEO as a long term strategy. It builds your business over time and will grow as long as you invest in it. It works for your business day and night, 24/7, even when your phone lines are closed.
If you need help with healthcare marketing, I highly recommend an SEO audit to establish the current position of your clinic. This will identify immediate opportunities for growth and suggest simple SEO improvements to make straight away.
