It’s not good enough simply to have a web presence.
Patients are searching for doctors, medical practices and hospitals via search engines, like Google, so whether or not you’re found on the first page can make a significant impact on the number of patients you see.
Furthermore, it’s in your best interest to have some control on how your name or practice comes up on search queries. Because if you don’t, it’s likely that negative news items or other unsavory information will be associated with your name instead.
So, I’m happy that the American Medical News wrote about the issue, going over some basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques (via The Entrepreneurial MD) that one can utilize.
It’s a good place to start, but in the end, they recommend outsourcing this task. If you’re so inclined, there’s also plenty of resources on the web if you’re reluctant to hire a consultant.
I highly recommend Darren Rowse’s post on the topic, How to Grow Your Blog to the Next Level With SEO, as well as Brian Clark’s tips on writing blog headlines, How to Write Magnetic Headlines.
Applying the advice from these two posts can significantly improve how your site or blog ranks on Google.
Related posts:
- Google yourself: Tips for your search engine reputation
- PubMed and its search engine
- Patients are striking back at doctors via Google
- Winter break
- Why your primary care practice is failing
- Should search engines have built-in diagnostics?
- How building your brand can improve your medical practice
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Outsourcing SEO is not a wise choice. Companies charge a lot of money for doing very little. Most of the SEO stuff can be done by non technical persons including doctors. Some of the tips are:
1) Figure out the keywords patients are using to find doctors in your area
2) make sure your domain name has few of those keywords.
3) Use keywords in the text and title of your website. ( Not too excessively though!)
4) Get quality links from other websites.
These are great resources for physicians to start thinking about SEO. In my job I deal with SEO every day for MGMA, so I translated this experience in a blog about SEO best practices for medical practices.
It’s interesting that no matter the company or industry, we’re all trying to do the same thing online to get noticed by customers — or in this case — patients.
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