Why Doctors Looking to Grow their Patient Base Should Consider SEO

doctor photoProfessionals well-established and experience in their careers may not be aware of the benefits of search engine optimization.  However, for doctors looking to grow their patient base and the size of their practice, search engine optimization (SEO) presents the most effective solution.

Fortunately, search engine optimization doesn’t require a huge budget to get started.  You can get started and generate effective results for as low as a few hundred dollars per month, but it may be more effective to spend slightly more than that.

Here’s a general example of how search engine optimization would work for a doctor:

  1.  He or she would work with an experienced SEO professional to learn which keywords would work best
  2. Generally, the keywords would be geo-targeted in order to ensure people in the local area find your practice
  3. Back links are built to the website’s home page, driving up its ranking
  4. More patients call and contact you because they can now find your practice easily online

There are many more internet marketing techniques that can be used to help increase the number of patients your practice recieves, but those are the bare essentials you will need to get started.  You can have your internet marketing professional perform other techniques for you, or you can do them on your own.  Here are a few additional strategies an SEO professional might use in order to help your business get discovered online:

  • List your site in major business directories (Angie’s List, Google Places, Yelp! and many more…)
  • Develop benefits-oriented META titles and descriptions that contain 1 mention of your keyword and a geo-targeted term
  • Create a separate page on your site targeted around each geographical region you intend to serve (suburb, city, state, country)
  • Encourage your customers to provide you with positive reviews at major business directories
  • Respond to any negative reviews publicly by providing a solution
  • Build links with other local businesses
  • Use Facebook and Twitter to grow your client base

If this sounds like a ton of work, that’s because it is.  If you can use one service out of all of these, the best choice is the back linking.  Why?  Because it has a very large impact on your site’s rankings, and it might even have the largest impact of all factors taken into account when your site is ranked.  Additionally, it will cost you a fair amount of money to add on all the other tactics, and more than likely they won’t provide as great of an impact.

What is the Net Effect of SEO?

When a professional has executed a search engine optimization strategy successfully, the net effect is increased patient inquiries regarding your practice.  And, the additional revenues you generate based on those inquiries far outweigh the expense associated with search engine optimization.

Last Updated on March 15, 2015 by Dan Stelter

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