The Ultimate Guide to Healthcare SEO

Introduction to Healthcare SEO

Healthcare is a sector where the value of traditional SEO for Google has remained high and consistent – people typically use Google to research symptoms and conditions, browse medical news and research, find healthcare providers, and compare treatments, medical devices and medications.

Yet SEO for healthcare is also especially challenging. Digital marketers in healthcare organizations must differentiate their inbound strategies and tactics for a variety of audiences and interfaces within Google Search alone, to say nothing of the complexity of optimizing for other algorithmic discovery platforms.

Below, we unpack some of the reasons why this is the case, and what kinds of approaches healthcare marketers can take to SEO to maximize the long-term value of the Organic Search channel, and to ensure that user journeys and brand reputation are also protected (and elevated) by the same tactics that work well for SEO.

How Is Healthcare SEO Different?

First, it’s important to understand the ways in which Healthcare SEO is NOT different from general SEO best practices: content should be helpful, the website should be easy and intuitive to use, and users should be able to easily find the information or action they’re looking for.

As our Director of Digital Strategy Jen Floyd put it in a podcast appearance discussing our Healthcare SEO research study, the winning approach to SEO for most high-performing healthcare sites is similar to “the core approach that we recommend to all of our clients: having a thoughtful taxonomy, high quality authoritative content, clear and prominent CTAs that don’t compete with each other or confuse a user, and a compelling and logical user experience.”

Cracking the Code on Healthcare SEO | Hosted by Aaron Burnett with Special Guest Jen Floyd

However, there are some unique aspects of Healthcare SEO that can make it more challenging and complex than other industries.

To understand why SEO for Google Search in particular is more challenging for healthcare marketers, it helps to understand two acronyms: EEAT and YMYL. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a discipline named after a nerdy acronym, SEO people love nerdy acronyms, and these two capture the core of Google approach to healthcare sites and content. EEAT stands for “Experience – Expertise – Authority – Trust”. These are the attributes that Google considers to be observable signals of content that should rank well for complex informational topics. YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life”. This refers to Google’s application of higher standards for the EEAT and overall quality and helpfulness of content that addresses topics related to finances and/or to health and well-being.

Why Is SEO Important For Healthcare Providers?

One key fact about SEO more broadly makes it central to healthcare marketing: people use Google for healthcare queries. While platforms like Pinterest, Perplexity and TikTok have taken some of Google’s total share of discovery behavior in recent years, Google still owns upwards of 90% of traditional search, according to the most recent data from StatCounter. What’s more, complex, high-stakes informational queries are still where Google’s interface has an advantage due to “People Also Ask”, AI Overviews and other SERP features that help users get questions answered quickly and reliably, and these queries are also where most consumers are also most reliant on Google. This makes Google still the central element and source of opportunity for acquisition and discovery strategies, as well as the largest or one of the largest overall traffic sources, for most healthcare websites.

SEO is also important because of the “O” – in a context where privacy and compliance concerns can severely limit targeted advertising, user customization and other leading-edge digital tactics, organic traffic can be a reliable source of value. Additionally, content that has the quality and relevance to perform well in search is often evergreen and can be re-used and re-formatted, meaning that successful SEO initiatives can cascade down into social, PR, and other channels and tactics that feed both inbound and customer loyalty initiatives.

Why is SEO Important for Other Healthcare Niches?

While large HCPs have some of the highest-volume opportunities to optimize for search terms that directly match their services, other types of healthcare companies can also drive reliable business value from an approach to SEO that is tailored to suit their audiences, their business models, and their regulatory environment.

Medical Devices & Pharmaceuticals

Like eCommerce brands and other consumer brands, medical device and pharmaceutical companies can use SEO for tried-and-true opportunities around high funnel informational content, especially when longtail keywords, highly specific FAQs, and other similar opportunities can be leveraged so that a brand is maximizing the SEO value of its specific expertise instead of trying to compete with WebMD for basic, high-volume queries.

SEO for medical device and pharmaceutical brands can also involve assessing and targeting user sentiment as communicated in brand queries – when SEO is integrated with digital PR, the two functions can combine for a powerful approach to understanding and addressing common perceptions, objections, etc. around your brand.

Medical device makers can target mid-funnel traffic through content like this that clearly and objectively explains how their devices treat specific conditions.

Small Specialized HCPs

For smaller HCPs that offer a specialized service, SEO strategy must first be carefully attuned to where the HCP can realistically compete for rankings. Usually, these brands do have an opportunity somewhere in the user journey to rank for valuable non-brand keywords, but these opportunities can be narrow and the diagnosis and execution must both be precise.

Often, these smaller HCPs also need to establish or re-enforce the expertise of key practitioners – as with other HCP niches, this is an area where PR efforts and SEO strategies can be more tightly integrated to determine the best opportunities for gaining visibility and establishing distinct, expert positioning.

Finally, smaller HCPs must have a fine-tuned approach to Local SEO to ensure they are maximizing their service-level optimizations and competing to win in their geographical footprint without resorting to “grey hat” or “black hat” local SEO tactics that almost always prove to short-sighted and difficult to maintain over time. Our SEO for Healthcare Study features much more detailed analysis of where specialized HCPs are – and are not – able to gain ground in localized SERPs while competing with larger HCPS.

As highlighted in our SEO Healthcare Study, Columbus OB/GYN dominates the Columbus market with both a seamless booking experience and clearly demonstrated EEAT signals.

Medical Research Organizations & Non-Profits

Organizations that conduct research, raise money and facilitate community in the health care space have intriguing opportunities in Organic search, especially given Google’s prioritization of expertise and unique, in-depth data. If these organizations can find ways to surface the kinds of valuable, detailed information they have access to, including information about the communities they serve or the insights of researchers and other experts, in formats that engage users and are legible to search engines, they can see impactful gains in Organic traffic and may be able to reach new upper-to-mid funnel audiences who are not yet aware of their services.

The challenges for these brands usually lies in defining their CTAs, user journeys, desired site actions and KPIs, and other elements that need to be integrated into a mature SEO strategy. These determinations may be much simpler for HCPs and consumer brands than they are for these brands who may have more vague or complex ideas around what exactly their digital marketing is meant to accomplish or drive. SEO experts need to take the time to deeply understand the goals and governing strategies of these unique organizations to ensure that work that is successful in terms of Organic search metrics also carries meaningful value by other measures and is well-aligned with overall organizational priorities.

Non-profits and research organizations often have more topical authority in Google, and therefore have a significant opportunity to influence users during pre-funnel and upper-funnel research phases.

Patient Journeys in Healthcare SEO

Simply put, investments in SEO for healthcare companies are rarely worthwhile if they are not accompanied by optimizations of the user journey. Organic search provides a powerful opportunity to align user intents (as expressed in keywords) with landing experiences and on-site funnels and CTAs, but many organizations treat SEO simply as an acquisition tool and fail to take advantage of the opportunities Organic traffic provides to qualify, engage and convert users into patients.

Source: What is Medical Marketing and How Does It Impact the Patient Journey? – Medical Advantage TDC Group

Our clients have seen the highest ROI and greatest internal support for their SEO initiatives when those initiatives also focus on opportunities like:

• Assessing how site navigation aligns with users’ expectations and vocabularies
• Adding logical internal links to both re-enforce content relevance to Google and allow users with different qualification needs to find the “next click” they’re looking for
• Testing CTA phrasing, placement, and sequencing
• Introducing sub-navigational elements to funnel users along desired paths to conversion goals
• Ensuring that Organic landing pages address as many subsequent informational needs as possible, not merely the primary informational need expressed in the search query
• Optimizing the interfaces that turn users into patients: provider search, appointment booking, etc.

The specific approach you take to harmonizing an optimized patient journey with optimized inbound content will vary depending on your business goals, tech stack and other factors, but the key principle remains: SEO should not be compartmentalized away from UX and CRO efforts but rather all of these tactics should be combined in a comprehensive strategy that allows for both acquiring and converting relevant traffic.

Keyword Research for Healthcare Websites

Keyword research is the foundation of an effective SEO strategy. For healthcare websites, identifying the right keywords can help attract more qualified traffic, improve search engine rankings, and ultimately bring in more patients. Here’s a simple, step-by-step guide to conducting keyword research for healthcare websites.

What’s Unique about Keyword Research for Healthcare

Keyword research involves identifying the words and phrases that potential patients use when searching for healthcare products and services online. Understanding these search terms helps you create content that meets their needs and answers their questions, making your website more visible and useful.

First-Party Keyword Research

Just as we increasingly see leading-edge health care digital marketing teams building advertising strategies around first-party data, successful Healthcare SEO strategies often begin with first-party data. Rather than turning to approximate or inconsistent third-party data on search traffic or making your SEO program reliant on resources that may not be HIPAA-compliant, you may be able to build a more precise and future-proofed approach to SEO by using first-party data instead.

There are two major sources of relevant first-party data for Healthcare SEO teams:

1. Paid Search Data:

One of the most valuable sources of keyword research for organic search actually lies within your paid search accounts. Here, unlike any other keyword research source, you can see how specific search terms performed historically on your site and how value they have for your organization.

By pulling a search query report from your Google Ads account, you can see what search terms your organization currently bids on, how much you spend, how much traffic you earn, and how many conversions they’ve driven. You can calculate a reliable conversion rate for each keyword, how much money it will save your organization to earn the traffic organically and prioritize keywords to target based on first-party conversion data. All other keyword research tools will simply provide the search volume, and at best, will rely on estimations for potential conversion rates. Using your own first-party search data, you can see your site’s actual, historical conversion rate by search term and prioritize your SEO efforts accordingly.

At Wheelhouse DMG, we run our clients’ paid search data through Lighthouse, our proprietary search analytics application, to uncover high-converting keywords to target organically that are known to drive business value through paid search.

Watch the Lighthouse demo to see how we illuminate high-converting keywords with paid search data.

2. Google Search Console:

Though not a traditional keyword research tool, Google Search Console is the best place to find “striking distance keywords” you can optimize to improve your search rankings. Search Console shows you what keywords you rank for in Google, as well as how many clicks and impressions each receives.

By looking not only at your top traffic-drivers but also the keywords ranking too low to drive meaningful traffic, you can identify optimizations for existing pages and new content that is warranted to achieve sufficient ranking. You can also find niche long-tail keywords that traditional tools may overlook.

Similar to how we run our clients’ Paid Search terms through Lighthouse, we also look at our currently-ranking Organic terms and use Lighthouse to find and prioritize opportunities at scale. Lighthouse makes it easy to find striking distance keywords we can optimize to earn more traffic share, see competitor insights across topics and service areas, and identify additional SERP features we can target to maximize our clients’ visibility. Too often, SEOs focus more on new keywords to target and not enough on existing keywords to improve. Lighthouse is our solution for finding areas to improve, quickly.

Google Search Console helps identify “striking distance keywords” – terms you already rank for but could optimize further – by showing your search rankings, clicks, and impressions to uncover opportunities for improving existing content and creating new pages.

Third-Party Keyword Research

There are a number of online tools you can use for keyword research. Our favorites are: 

1. Google Keyword Planner: A free tool by Google that helps you find keywords relevant to your business and see estimates on the search volume for those keywords. It’s unique in that it draws directly from Google’s own search data, making it particularly valuable for understanding how potential patients search on the world’s largest search engine. For healthcare organizations, Google’s location filter is especially helpful, as it lets you drill down into specific countries, states, and cities to get hyper-local search volume estimates.
2. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is a comprehensive SEO tool that offers extensive keyword data, including search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic potential. What sets Ahrefs apart is its ability to provide detailed competitive analysis, showing which keywords your competitors are ranking for and offering suggestions based on their performance. This makes it ideal for uncovering keyword opportunities that can help you outrank competitors in the healthcare industry.
3. Moz Keyword Explorer: Moz Keyword Explorer is a free, user-friendly tool that not only provides keyword suggestions but also gives insights into keyword difficulty, potential click-through rates (CTR), and priority scores. Moz is unique because of its proprietary “Priority Score” which balances volume, difficulty, and expected CTR to help you focus on keywords that are most likely to drive meaningful traffic to your healthcare website. It’s a great tool for healthcare marketers looking to prioritize their efforts effectively.
4. SEOmonitor: SEOmonitor is a more advanced SEO tool designed to help digital marketing teams manage and optimize their SEO efforts. It offers robust keyword research tools and helps track keyword rankings, forecast traffic into the future, and assess the potential impact of specific keywords on key business metrics like conversions and revenue. This can be particularly valuable for healthcare organizations that need to justify their SEO strategies with clear, data-driven ROI insights. It also has the unique ability to track AI Overviews, Google’s AI-generated summaries that are often found at the top of search results, and their potential impact on your organic performance.
5. SEMrush: SEMrush is a powerful all-in-one marketing tool that offers robust keyword research capabilities along with competitive analysis, traffic data, and trend tracking. SEMrush’s unique feature is its Keyword Magic Tool, which provides an extensive list of related keywords grouped by topic, making it easier to build comprehensive keyword strategies. Additionally, its competitive analysis features help you identify keyword gaps in your competitors’ strategies, making it a top choice for healthcare marketers who want to stay ahead of the competition.
6. Google Trends: Google Trends allows you to explore the popularity of search terms over time, offering insights into seasonality and emerging trends. What makes Google Trends unique is its ability to show the relative popularity of a keyword across different regions and over time, which is particularly valuable for healthcare organizations looking to understand and capitalize on seasonal health concerns or geographic-specific search behavior. It’s also an excellent tool for identifying trending topics that can inform timely content creation.

Once you have identified the keywords you wish to target, the next step is to optimize your on-page SEO, which we’ll cover in the next section.

On-Page SEO Strategies

On-page SEO tactics are often where SEO specialists focus most of their time and energy, and also where Marketing leads and strategists can get most overwhelmed trying to determine which tactics have actual demonstrable value vs. just being vague “best practices”.

We believe that On-page SEO tactics can still drive meaningful Organic performance improvements for many healthcare websites, but should always be approached a) with a clear theory of how they will benefit the end user and b) a clear hypothesis as to their intended impact on specific KPIs.

Optimizing Meta Titles and Descriptions

Metadata is one of the classic areas of focus for “old school” SEO that still can have value today.

In fact, even Marketers who are not SEO experts can optimize their title tags and meta descriptions by considering some relatively intuitive questions:

• Specificity: for each page type on your site, do the title tags and meta descriptions clearly distinguish the purpose of different pages?
• Differentiation: for specific pages with similar topics or titles, do the title tags and meta descriptions help to differentiate those pages?
• Competition: for the keywords and topics that you hope to rank for in Organic search, how do your title tags and meta descriptions compare to those for pages that are outranking you? Is there anything present in the meta data of competitor pages that could help to entice a click from search that you can emulate?

While making very small, tactical changes and continuous optimizations to meta data can be an important tactic for eCommerce sites and other highly transactional URLs, most healthcare brands will be able to make sensible optimizations just by considering these basic, functional aspects of title tags and meta descriptions.

Optimizing Content & Header Structures for Relevance

Luckily, the days of “keyword stuffing” are behind us, as Google and other search engines have made significant strides in natural language processing. However, you should still ensure the content you create is clearly relevant to the keywords you chose to target.

Search engines look at your URL, metadata, headings and body copy, among other elements, to understand what your page is about. You don’t have to go overboard with keywords, but you should make sure these elements clearly convey the topics and subtopics you speak to on your pages.

Use this page as an example. Without actually viewing the page, can you tell what it is about? What are the major subtopics it discusses? When a search engine crawls a page, a clear and descriptive heading structure helps it to understand the topics and subtopics the page is relevant to, so it can show it in search appropriately.

We’ve seen especially good results from a relatively low effort tactic when clients optimize their header structure. It is worth conducting a basic opportunity assessment regarding the headers of any page that you’re optimizing to gain more inbound traffic: do your H1s, H2s and H3s on the page reflect the full set of relevant subtopics and questions for the page’s overall topic? Do competitors who are outperforming your page for target keywords have more subheads, or subheads with more specific or relevant titles? If you put your header structure side-by-side with you competitors’ which page’s “spine” or outline looks the most helpful and relevant for uses just based on headers and subheads alone? These intuitive analyses can offer uncover significant opportunities for reformatting and optimizing underperforming content.

Best Practices for Healthcare Content Creation

As emphasized elsewhere in this guide, the process of creating on page content for healthcare sites should be guided from planning to execution by clear theories about the end user: what do your patients need, what are they trying to accomplish or determine, and what kinds of content details, designs and formats are they going to find most understandable and helpful?

Adhering to this criteria can be complicated however by the simple fact that most healthcare content creation is (and should be) a collaboration between marketers, designers or creatives and subject matter experts. When this works well, it leads to content that has enough “EEAT” to rank well in Google while also being well-designed, user-friendly, and efficiently integrated into a broader strategy. When it works less well, it can lead to ineffective and confusing publishing workflows and content that gets stranded at various bottlenecks along the way.

At Wheelhouse, we help clients approach this challenge by developing thorough content brief and content calendar formats. We find that putting thought and effort into these governing documents from the start and ensuring that our content strategy initiatives center on these documents, leads to better outcomes and more scalable approaches.

Formatting Techniques for Readability

SEO-focused strategies often sacrifice basic UX considerations in favor of including the maximum amount of optimized content on page. This risk can be mitigated through some of the following approaches:

• Include an outline or table of contents: include these navigational elements at the outset of long pages so that users can use “jump links” to navigate directly to relevant sections.
• Utilize expandable/collapsible navigational elements: ensure that long copy sections, subtopics, FAQs, etc. don’t lead to a ponderous UX, especially on mixed intent pages.
• Experiment and consider your full device mix: test page layouts on various devices and browsers.
• Include an accessibility review: ensure that font sizes, colors, etc. and other key content design elements conform to best practices for accessibility.
• Design elements that highlight key content: use pull quotes and other extractions or highlights of key data points and details to make content more “skimmable” and to draw the eye to key takeaways – this is also an area where content designers can enjoy the creative inspiration provided by magazines, leading-edge online publications, and other resources that have developed a wide range of tactics for exactly this use case.

Technical SEO for Healthcare Websites

Structured Data

Structured data, or schema markup, is a powerful way to enhance your website’s search listings and help search engines better understand and display your pages. Schema markup is a type of code that describes your content to search engines and allows them to display more detailed and helpful information in search results.

For healthcare websites, we recommend marking up your pages with the following schema, based on your organization and content type.

• Hospital – For describing hospitals and their services.
• Physician – Specific to individual healthcare professionals like doctors.
• Patient – Describes a patient in medical contexts.
• MedicalClinic – For describing clinics or outpatient services.
• MedicalOrganization – A broad category for healthcare-related organizations.
• MedicalEntity – A general type for medical-related content.
• MedicalCondition – For describing medical conditions.
• MedicalSymptom – Used to specify symptoms associated with medical conditions.
• MedicalCause – Describes causes of medical conditions.
• MedicalRiskFactor – Identifies risk factors related to medical conditions.
• MedicalRiskEstimator – Used for estimating medical risks based on certain factors.
• MedicalProcedure – Describes medical or diagnostic procedures.
• SurgicalProcedure – Used to describe specific surgeries.
• MedicalTherapy – For describing therapies or treatments.
• Drug – Specific to pharmaceuticals and medications.
• MedicalTest – Information about medical tests and diagnostics.
• Diet – Describes different kinds of diets recommended for health.
• MedicalGuideline – Information regarding clinical guidelines.
• MedicalScholarlyArticle – Scholarly articles related to medicine.
• MedicalStudy – Describes medical studies or clinical trials.

By using schema markup, healthcare websites can provide search engines, and searchers, with more detailed information about their website and organization.

Site Speed Optimization

While website speed is a minor ranking factor, it plays a crucial role in a user’s experience on your website. A fast-loading site ensures that patients can quickly access important information, which is vital in seeking urgent care. In rural areas with limited internet access, a slow website can be particularly frustrating, potentially driving patients to seek information elsewhere. Here are some of the best ways to ensure a fast-loading website:

• Optimize Images: Compressing and resizing images to reduce their file size without compromising image quality is one of the easiest ways to reduce website bloat and increase website speed.
• Lazy Load Images: Along with optimizing image size, lazy loading only loads imagery when needed and requested by the browser. Lazy loading can also be used to load iframes and videos. Take this a step further by utilizing the browsers built-in lazy load technology, further reducing the size of your JavaScript resources.
• Minify and Bundle CSS and JavaScript: Minifying and bundling CSS and JavaScript reduces the amount and size of resources in a network request.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A Content Delivery Network is like a network of strategically placed servers around the world. When you visit a website using a CDN, the content (like images, videos, and other files) is delivered from the server that is closest to your location. This means the website loads faster because the data doesn’t have to travel as far to reach you.
• Reduce Redirects: Minimize the number of redirects to lower the time spent following multiple HTTP requests.
• Choose a Fast Website Host: Consider website hosting providers that are known for fast speeds and reliable uptime to ensure quick server response times.

XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt

XML sitemaps are essential for healthcare websites because they ensure all pages, including those not easily discoverable through normal navigation, are indexed by search engines. This is vital for healthcare sites, which often have complex structures with numerous service pages, doctor profiles, and patient resources. Additionally, well-indexed sites help healthcare providers stay competitive by appearing more frequently and prominently in search results.

• Include All Relevant Pages: Ensure that all important pages, such as service descriptions, doctor profiles, and blog posts, are listed in the sitemap.
• Update Regularly: Keep the sitemap updated to reflect any changes or additions to the website to ensure search engines have the latest structure.
• Submit to Search Engines: Submit the sitemap to major search engines like Google and Bing through their respective webmaster tools to facilitate better crawling and indexing.
• Monitor Indexing Status: Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor which pages are being indexed and resolve any issues related to missing or improperly indexed pages.
• The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine crawlers on which pages or folders should not be indexed. For healthcare websites, this can be crucial in protecting sensitive information and ensuring that search engines do not waste resources crawling and indexing irrelevant or duplicate content.
• Include Your Sitemap: Including your sitemap in the robots.txt file is important as it provides search engine crawlers with a direct link to your sitemap, ensuring they can easily find and index all the important pages on your website.
• Restrict Sensitive Areas: Use robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing areas that contain sensitive patient information or administrative data.
• Avoid Duplicate Content: Prevent indexing of duplicate pages, such as printer-friendly versions or session-specific URLs, to avoid SEO penalties.
• Test the File: Regularly test the robots.txt file using tools like Google Search Console’s Robots.txt Tester to ensure it is correctly implemented and does not inadvertently block important content.
• Keep It Updated: As the website structure evolves, update the robots.txt file to reflect any new sections or changes in access permissions.

Building a User-Friendly Website

User experience (UX) design is essential for healthcare websites to ensure patients can easily navigate and find the information they need. A well-designed user experience reduces frustration, increases patient satisfaction, and ensures accessibility for all users, including those with disabilities. Healthcare websites must be intuitive, with clear information architecture and easy access to critical resources like appointment scheduling, doctor profiles, and patient portals.

• Intuitive Navigation: Ensure that the website’s navigation is straightforward, with clear labels and a logical flow to help users find information quickly.
• Fast Load Times: Improve page load speeds to reduce user frustration and prevent potential patients from leaving the site due to slow performance.
• Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Use prominent and easily identifiable CTAs to guide users towards key actions such as booking appointments, contacting doctors, or accessing patient portals.
• Consistent Branding and Design: Maintain a consistent visual style and branding across the site to build trust and recognition.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Optimize the website for mobile devices to provide a seamless experience for users accessing the site from smartphones and tablets.

Accessibility

Accessibility and inclusive website design is especially crucial for healthcare websites because they ensure that all users, including elderly users or those with disabilities, can navigate and understand vital information. An added bonus to accessible design is that it naturally creates a better user experience, which is a key factor in search engine rankings.

The key elements that affect accessibility include:

• Image Alt Text: Clear, descriptive alt text helps screen readers convey image content to visually impaired users and improves image search rankings.
• Keyboard Navigation: Websites should be fully navigable via keyboard for users who cannot use a mouse, benefiting both accessibility and SEO.
• Accessible Forms: Proper labeling and instructions make forms easier to navigate for screen reader users.
• Readable Content: Using clear headings, concise paragraphs, and bullet points ensures information is digestible for all users.
• Mobile Accessibility: Mobile-friendly design is essential, especially for users with touch screen devices.

Mobile Optimization

Google primarily uses a mobile-first indexing approach, meaning it predominantly uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. A mobile-optimized site will therefore improve SEO performance, leading to better visibility in search results. This is crucial in the competitive healthcare industry, where top search rankings can significantly impact patient acquisition and retention.

• Responsive Design: Implement a responsive design that adjusts seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations, ensuring the website looks and functions well on any device.
• Touch-Friendly Navigation: Design navigation menus and buttons to be easily tappable with a finger, avoiding small links or closely spaced elements that can be difficult to select on a touchscreen.
• Readability: Ensure text is large enough to read without zooming and that content is structured in a way that is easy to scan on a small screen.
• Fast Load Times: Optimize images, enable browser caching, and minimize code to ensure fast load times on mobile networks, which can be slower than desktop connections.

Local SEO for Healthcare Providers

Local SEO is a critical component of an effective online marketing strategy for healthcare organizations. By optimizing for local search, healthcare providers can improve their visibility in local search results, attract more local patients, and enhance their overall online presence.

The Importance of Local SEO

Local SEO focuses on optimizing your online presence to appear in searches conducted by potential patients in your geographic area. Local SEO helps ensure that your practice is visible to those who are actively seeking healthcare services nearby.

Optimizing Your Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is a valuable tool to reach patients looking for a provider near them. Here are the core ways to optimize your Google Business Profile:

• Claim and Verify Your Listing: To ensure your healthcare practice is listed on Google Business Profile (GBP), follow the steps to verify your listing. This will give you control over the information displayed, like your hours of operation, contact information, and photos.
• Complete Your Profile: Provide accurate and up-to-date information, including your practice’s name, address, phone number (NAP), website, and operating hours. Be sure to choose relevant categories and subcategories that accurately describe your services.
• Upload Photos and Posts: Upload high-quality photos of your practice, staff, and services. Use GBP posts to share updates, announcements, and special offers.
• Encourage and Manage Reviews: Encourage satisfied patients to leave positive reviews on your profile. Respond promptly and professionally to all reviews, addressing any concerns and thanking patients for their feedback.

Local Keyword Research

Local keyword research is essential for healthcare organizations aiming to attract patients within a specific geographic area. This process involves identifying and targeting keywords that include location-specific terms, such as “dentist in [City]” or “urgent care near [Neighborhood].”

By focusing on these local keywords, healthcare providers can improve their visibility in local search results, making it easier for nearby patients to find their services. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, which we covered above, can help identify the most relevant local search terms. Incorporating these keywords into your website’s content, meta tags, and Google Business Profile ensures that your practice ranks well for local searches, ultimately driving more traffic from potential patients in your area.

Building Local Citations and Listings

We’ll go into more detail on the importance of backlinks below, but for now, understand that local citations and listings are an important element of enhancing your local presence online. Here are some tips for building your presence in local citations:

• Ensure your practice is listed on major local directories, such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, and healthcare-specific directories like Healthgrades and Zocdoc.
• Consistency is key—ensure your NAP information (name, address, and phone number) matches across all listings, including your website and social media accounts.
• Regularly audit your listings to ensure NAP consistency. Correct any discrepancies to maintain trust and avoid confusion with search engines and patients alike.
• Implement LocalBusiness schema on your website to enhance your local search presence. Schema markup provides search engines with additional information about your practice, and LocalBusiness schema is especially useful for local healthcare providers.

For a deeper dive into local SEO, check out our Local SEO Healthcare Guide.

International SEO

If your organization operates in multiple countries, there are unique SEO considerations to be aware of to ensure you show the right version of your website to the right users. These include:

• Global Website Structure: Country-specific domains (e.g., .fr, .de) or subdirectories (e.g. /fr/, /de/) for different languages and regions allow you to tailor your content to different audiences and help search engines identify which version of your site to show to users. It also helps to build trust with your users, as the content better speaks to them as opposed to simple, translated pages.
• Hreflang Tags: These indicate the language and region for each version of a page on your website. This is important for ensuring the correct version of your site shows in search based on the user’s location and language preferences. These are placed in the HTML <head> section of the page. If you can’t edit the HTML of the page, such as with PDFs, you can place them in the HTTP header or in the XML sitemap.
• Localized Content: Simply translating a page into a different language often misses the mark with the end user. We recommend taking the time to tailor the content to each culture, using imagery, tone, and messaging that resonates with your unique audiences in each region. Gathering first-party data from different markets or regions, and conducting user research with those geographically and culturally distinct audiences can be key to capturing the nuanced differences in conventions, expectations, cultural commonplaces and other factors that could easily make seemingly-innocuous marketing choices confusing or aggravating to your intended users.
• International Keyword Research: Many keyword research tools, including Google Keyword Planner , let you filter to specific countries, regions, and languages to get high-fidelity search data in your international markets. Knowing how users search locally not only lets you optimize for keywords with the largest volume, but it also helps you identify your true competitor mix and tailor your content to your users’ language preferences.
• Compliance with Local Healthcare Regulations: Ensuring compliance with local healthcare regulations, such as HIPAA in the United States and GDPR in the EU, should be top-of-mind when expanding to new markets. Some have strict data collection and storage requirements, while others also stipulate who you can and cannot market to, such as Germany’s laws prohibiting marketing medical devices to children under 14.
• Tracking and Analytics: Google Analytics and Google Search Console make it easy to break down performance by country, and tools like Lighthouse allow you to see the search landscape in specific regions and the search engines your customers use, including Russia’s Yandex search engine and China’s Baidu. Depending on your target regions, you must consider the appropriate search engines to optimize for in addition to the regulatory requirements of your analytics setup in each country.

These are the main pillars of international SEO to keep in mind as your organization expands into new markets, though the rest of the information in this guide still applies to SEO no matter the target audience.

Content Marketing in Healthcare

In working with a wide variety of healthcare clients over the years, from some of the largest hospital groups in the U.S. to specialized clinics and from medical device companies to research institutes, Wheelhouse has consistently observed that the most effective Healthcare SEO strategies feature effective content repurposing, and an integrated approach that synthesizes Organic search ranking opportunities with other content marketing goals and strategies.

Creating Patient-Focused Content

Building a content marketing strategy that effectively targets SEO opportunities while also efficiently supporting other initiatives and channels begins and ends with understanding your patients. As Senior Director of Content Strategy at Fred Hutch Cancer Center David Patton put it in an episode of our Digital Clinic podcast, content strategists should ask a simple question: “how do our patients consume information?”

By remaining focused not only on the questions patients have and the keywords they enter into Google search but also on the content formats and channels that resonate most with them, you can maintain the perspective necessary to consistently have your content marketing strategy align with patients’ needs.

It’s also important to recognize that, for large brands, personalized and localized content is more likely to move the needle for patients than brand-level content that may not be relevant at all to a specific user. As Kevin Madden, Assistant VP of Web Experience at Providence, pointed out in his interview with our Digital Clinic podcast, a focus on universal brand content can be “a very efficient way to build a website, but it’s not the most productive way to build a website from a patient’s experience. Patients generally don’t care what’s going on outside of their state or what other insurances are accepted outside of their market, or…for most types of care, [are they] willing to travel very far.” So, large providers with a geographically distributed presence should be investing in personalization and localization in parallel with other content marketing strategy efforts.

Role of Multimedia Content

High-quality video content is often the most obvious investment that healthcare brands can make, especially when they meet the following criteria:

• Distinctive yet Straightforward: video style feels contemporary while also not so heavy on trendy visual style or references that it becomes quickly outdated.
• SEO Relevance: video topics and transcripts can target SEO opportunities.
• YouTube Relevance: video can drive additional discovery traffic on YouTube.
• Other Social & Discovery Relevance: video clips and segments can be repurposed on TikTok, Reels and other Organic inbound channels in addition to video ad formats.
• Low Need for Updating: video topics are relatively evergreen.

Whenever healthcare brands have the opportunity to invest in video strategies that meet this criteria, they should do so.

Infographics were once the favored media format for almost every digital marketing channel or format and while their novelty has declined over time, infographics are still often relevant for healthcare digital content strategy because of their utility in offering expert information in a concise yet authoritative format that can be repurposed and shared easily.

Images and illustrations can also be quite useful for healthcare sites, especially when symptom/condition content can use images to give examples, make distinctions, etc. High-quality images can also lend credibility to content about medical technology and leading-edge devices or treatments. And diagrams, flow charts, tables and similar graphics can be used to illustrate processes, treatments and other key pieces of information that HCPs need to communicate to patients and potential patients.

Optimizing Videos for Search

As we noted above, videos are often incredibly valuable in healthcare. Whether you’re explaining how a new medical device works, how to identify symptoms of a disease or condition you treat, or demonstrating your organization’s expertise in a field, optimize video content can help you connect with audiences and drive business value beyond traditional web content.

Here are the main aspects of video optimization to keep in mind:

• Optimizing Video Titles and Descriptions: Use clear and concise titles that reflect the content of the video and align with what users search. This helps search engines understand what the video is about, so it knows when to show it in search. It also helps people know what to expect from watching the video, which generates more engagement. Always opt for a clear, descriptive title over a more creative one (e.g. “How to Effectively Manage Diabetes” instead of “Winning the Glucose Game”).
• Transcripts and Closed Captions: Including full transcripts either directly on your webpage or as a downloadable file helps search engines crawl the video content and can improve its visibility in search results. Closed captions help with accessibility for users with hearing impairments and non-native speakers of the language. Search engines can also index captions, which can improve search visiblity.
• Schema Markup for Videos: VideoObject schema and healthcare-specific schema, such as MedicalCondition or MedicalProdedure provide search engines with valuable information about the video, which helps the video appear as rich results in the SERPs.
• Video Placement and Embedding: Place the video prominently on a relevant page, as opposed to in a dense video library, to earn better search visibility. Avoid placing the same video on multiple pages when possible to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Thumbnails and Engagement: High-quality, custom thumbnails often earn higher engagement and clicks than the default thumbnails. For healthcare videos, use relevant, professional imagery that aligns with the topic and gives users an idea of what to expect by watching.

There are plenty of additional best practices for creating high-quality and engaging videos for your audience, however, these are the ones we recommend prioritizing from an SEO perspective.

Link Building Strategies

Link building is a hotly debated topic within the SEO community. Google and other search see backlinks to your site as a “vote of confidence” that other sites trust your website, so much so that they would be willing to send their users to it through a link.

However, Google takes a hard stance against unnatural inbound link building, and it reserves the right to assess a manual action, or penalty, against websites found to have engaged in a black-hat link building scheme.

This doesn’t mean that link building isn’t important. It does, however, mean that site owners must focus on genuine methods of link building, which we’ll discuss now.

The Importance of Backlinks

As we said above, search engines view backlinks as a “vote of confidence” that other sites trust your website. Sites with a large number of links from highly reputable websites are viewed as trustworthy and authoritative, which bodes well for rankings in search.

If someone searches for information about “preventing a heart attack,” and Google has a handful of similar pages it could show users, would it trust the site that was created a week ago and has zero links from other websites, or, would it trust the one that has been linked to by Forbes, the New York Times, Men’s Health magazine, and other highly authoritative sites?

That’s the logic behind link building as it relates to website authority in search rankings. However, there is also an element of brand awareness at play. If you yourself can get linked to from sources like Men’s Health magazine, you can gain meaningful brand exposure in your target market.

Techniques for Acquiring High-Quality Links

There are a number of ways to generate quality backlinks, genuinely, to your website, including:

• Developing High-Value Content: Educational articles and blog posts that users find interesting and webmasters find valuable to share with their users is a common way to attract more backlinks naturally. Infographics, videos, and other visual content works well for healthcare especially, as it helps the average patient understand nuanced medical content like symptoms, conditions, and treatment options.
• Collaborate with Influencers and Industry Experts: Interviews, webinars, podcasts, and expert roundups are especially valuable methods of creating unique, high-value content that other sites would appreciate sharing with their users. The key is to not simply recreate content that is already readily available, but instead, create something unique that adds to the conversation.
• Leverage Local Directories and Listings: Healthcare-specific directories, like Healthgrades, Zocdoc, and Vitals not only build links, but they also give you prominent exposure to local audiences.
• Community Involvement: Participating in local health events and sponsoring community activities earns you genuine media exposure that often leads to links from reputable news publishers. Traditional PR like this often yields quality backlinks and brand exposure at the same time.

Link building is not the quick-win it used to be for SEO, but it is still important for healthcare-oriented websites who compete with highly-reputable organizations in search.

Measuring SEO Success

Understanding the key metrics of Healthcare SEO is essential to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts and ensure that your website is reaching and engaging your target audience. The following metrics lay the foundation for using the right tools to monitor and enhance your SEO performance.

• Organic Traffic: Organic click traffic as a metric measures the number of visitors arriving at your website from non-paid search results. For healthcare providers, tracking organic traffic is important because it indicates how well your content is attracting and engaging potential patients through search engines like Google.
• Keyword Rankings: Tracking and optimizing keyword rankings is vital as it directly influences your website’s visibility in search results, which is crucial in a competitive industry like healthcare. When you focus on the right keywords, you not only increase your chances of being discovered by potential patients but also attract more relevant traffic that is likely to engage with your content and ultimately convert into actual patients. This targeted approach helps ensure that your website meets the needs of your audience, leading to improved trust, credibility, and long-term success in patient acquisition.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate might indicate that users are not finding the information they need, which can be critical for healthcare websites that aim to provide informative and engaging content. Reducing bounce rates can lead to better patient engagement and higher conversion rates. It’s important to compare bounce rate to like-pages within your site, as they can vary drastically with intent and position in the marketing funnel.
• Core Web Vitals: These are Google’s specific metrics related to user experience, including loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. For healthcare websites, where user trust and satisfaction are important, ensuring that your site meets these standards is vital for both user experience and search engine ranking.
• Backlinks: The quality of external sites linking to your healthcare website is more important than the sheer number. Backlinks from reputable medical journals or health organizations send strong signals to search engines, enhancing your site’s authority and trustworthiness.
• Key Business Actions: The value of SEO initiatives should always be measured in terms of desired business KPIs if possible – appointments scheduled, consultations booked, MQLs, etc. If your measurement and reporting structure does not allow for this kind of attribution of meaningful business metrics to SEO efforts or other digital campaigns, you should consider investing in an analytics or BI engagement in addition to channel-level digital investments to ensure sophisticated, strategic decision-making going forward.

Tools for Monitoring SEO Performance

After identifying the key metrics that are essential for your tracking needs, the next step is to determine the right tools to monitor your performance. While there are numerous free SEO tools available, others can demand significant investment, sometimes running into tens of thousands of dollars. It’s important to consider both your budget and the volume of data you’ll be managing when selecting your SEO MarTech solutions.

• For tracking organic click traffic: We recommend sticking to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC) for monitoring organic click traffic because these tools are not only robust but also free and widely supported by the SEO community. GA4 provides deep insights into user behavior and engagement, while GSC offers precise data on how your site performs in Google’s search results. Together, they give a comprehensive view of your organic traffic, allowing you to track performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions without the need for costly third-party tools.
• For tracking keywords:We commonly rely on Google Search Console for position, click, and impression tracking. Not only does GSC contain the most accurate results, but you can easily push this data to any BI app. Additional free tools include Ahrefs free tools, if you’re running ads, Google Keyword Planner, AlsoAsked, Google Trends, SERP Checker, and more — just search for ‘Free SEO Tools.’ For paid options, we recommend Ahrefs for its competitive pricing and robust features. Ultimately, choosing a paid keyword tracking tool should be based on the volume of keywords and the complexity of the groups you want to track.”
• For Monitoring & Improving Bounce Rate: We recommend using GA4’s Reports or Explore tool to monitor your bounce rate. Reports provide a high-level overview of page performance, allowing you to quickly filter similar pages and identify those performing below your average. The Explore tool takes this a step further, offering advanced filtering and customization options for deeper analysis. Improving bounce rate can be time-consuming, often stemming from poor content or user experience. To address these issues, refer back to the technical and content sections within this article.  Some tools to help improve bounce rate include:
• For User Experience Optimization:We highly recommend A/B testing frequently. VWO conforms to HIPAA and will sign a business agreement. VWO also includes a built-in heatmapping tool. With the combination of heatmapping and A/B testing, you can easily pinpoint bottlenecks on your page and safely test an optimization. The additional bonus with testing is that you receive data-backed results to support insights that experience, intuition and competitor research may have led you to.
• For Page Speed (UX): Page speed is also a factor in bounce rates. We recommend using Lighthouse built into every Chrome or Brave browser. This free tool takes everything a step further by looking at core web vitals as a hole. Use it to easily detect bottlenecks in page speed, content layout shifts, accessibility issues and more.
• For Content Issues: Most SEO experts or inbound marketing agencies can conduct a comprehensive ‘Content Gap Analysis’ or a similar evaluation to identify where your content is missing search opportunities that your competitors are successfully targeting. This analysis highlights tactics that you can feasibly imitate or improve upon. Every reputable SEO tool includes features to facilitate this type of analysis, making it accessible even to non-experts, though it can be time-consuming. If you’re already investing in SEO expertise, whether in-house or through a vendor, you should expect to receive actionable, tactical insights regularly on how to close the search gap with your competitors. If you’re not getting these insights, we’d love to help.
• For improving Core Web Vitals: In addition to Lighthouse, we recommend using PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix for a comprehensive analysis of your website’s performance. PageSpeed Insights not only conducts a Lighthouse audit but also pulls Chrome User Experience Report data from the past 90 days, if available, giving you a real-world view of how your page performs. While Lighthouse might flag issues like Largest Contentful Paint, real-world data could show a more favorable scenario. We strongly advise following recommendations from Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights and utilizing built-in browser technologies whenever possible. Tools like native lazy loading, CSS capabilities, and more can help reduce image and JavaScript bloat. However, it’s crucial to ensure that the browser technology you’re relying on is at least three years old. Tools like Built With can help you verify that a particular technology is the best choice for your needs. Additionally, Modernizr or vanilla JavaScript can be used to load support libraries when certain features are unavailable, ensuring broader compatibility and better performance.
• For Backlinks: Registering for tools like Ahrefs not only gives you access to powerful keyword tracking and research capabilities, but also gives you access to their suite of backlink tools.

Data Driven Adjustments

Future Trends in Healthcare SEO

Emerging Trends & Technologies

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, healthcare providers must stay ahead of emerging trends and technological advancements to maintain a competitive edge. With increasing government scrutiny on data privacy and the growing influence of AI, the future of Healthcare SEO will be shaped by a complex interplay of regulatory changes and cutting-edge innovations.

Understanding these shifts will only grow more essential for developing strategies that not only comply with new standards but also leverage the latest tools to enhance patient engagement and improve search visibility.

HIPAA Compliance & Crackdowns

Increased scrutiny on HIPAA compliance in digital marketing is driving significant changes, especially with tools like Google Analytics. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has highlighted that many healthcare providers are unknowingly violating HIPAA by using analytics platforms that collect and store patient data without proper safeguards. As a result, there has been a surge in enforcement actions and a growing awareness of the need for HIPAA-compliant alternatives.

Healthcare organizations must now be more vigilant when selecting marketing tools, ensuring that collected data does not compromise patient privacy. The HHS has issued updated guidelines, urging providers to reassess their use of tracking technologies and to consider HIPAA-compliant options to reduce the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access. Wheelhouse DMG has developed a solution for HIPAA compliant analytics with a signed BAA called Compass, which works with Google Analytics, Meta, and other platforms that are not HIPAA compliant.

More Search Competition

In August of 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in the search engine market. Depending on which enforcement actions the federal government takes, this ruling could lead to a slow but significant shift in Google’s dominance.

Even apart from Google’s increased regulatory pressure, alternative platforms like AI-driven tools, social media, and other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo may become more relevant and valuable for reaching audiences. If LLMs prove to drive longterm changes in consumer behaviors, SEO will be one of the fields most directly affected, not only by challengers to Google but also by more sophisticated and popular chatbots and evolving user expectations around dynamic or personalized web experiences.

The uncertainty and vast range of possible outcomes from these overlapping developments and trends highlights the importance of expanding digital marketing efforts beyond Google, ensuring that healthcare providers remain visible and competitive across a broader range of online platforms.

Artificial Intelligence is Here to Stay

AI is increasingly becoming a powerful force in search engine results pages (SERPs), SEO tools, and content creation. While AI-driven tools can greatly enhance keyword research, content analysis, and even generate content briefs, it’s essential to recognize the limitations of AI in producing authentic, accurate healthcare content.

We strongly recommend that AI be used to support the content creation process, not to replace the expertise of healthcare professionals. AI can provide a solid foundation by drafting outlines or briefs, but the actual writing should always be done by a healthcare professional to ensure the information is accurate, reliable, and meets the ethical standards required in healthcare communication. This approach not only maintains the integrity of the content but also builds trust with your audience.

Preparing for AI-Driven SEO

AI tools are increasingly vital for keyword research, content optimization, and predictive analytics, offering innovative ways to elevate your SEO strategies. Platforms like Google’s generative AI in search, OpenAI’s SearchGPT, and Microsoft’s Bing AI are not only transforming how search engines interpret queries but also how they deliver personalized, context-rich results.

However, these advancements bring significant privacy concerns, especially regarding the handling of PHI and PII. It is crucial to avoid inputting sensitive data into AI systems not designed with healthcare privacy in mind. To mitigate these risks, consider using private, secure AI models specifically tailored for healthcare. This approach allows you to harness AI-driven insights while safeguarding privacy.

As you incorporate AI into your SEO strategies, it is essential to align with Google’s updated E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines. Google now emphasizes content created by individuals with direct experience in the subject matter, alongside traditional expertise. While AI tools can greatly assist in content creation by providing data-driven insights and generating content briefs, the final output should be shaped by healthcare professionals who bring authentic experience and specialized knowledge. This not only aligns with Google’s quality standards but also ensures your content is credible and resonates with your audience.

AI should complement, not replace, human input in content creation. The complexities of healthcare information require the discernment and expertise of professionals who understand the intricacies of medical care and regulatory compliance. By maintaining a human touch in the final content, you ensure that your material is both accurate and meaningful, which fosters trust and credibility with both search engines and readers. Striking the right balance between AI and human expertise is crucial for success in the ever-evolving landscape of Healthcare SEO.