As a top healthcare professional, do you feel overwhelmed by the dizzying pace of technological change sweeping the medical field? Do you spend enormous sums investing in emerging technologies and upgrading the skills of your talented team of caregivers, and yet the feeling persists that your services are not enjoying the traction you deserve?
The solution lies in targeting potential patients and increasing patient footfalls in your clinic or institution using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Because, as a skilled and successful healthcare professional, you want to figure in top search engine results pages (SERPs) when customers search your niche-related keywords.
A successful business trajectory follows when you adopt critical healthcare SEO solutions that increase patient traffic coming your way.
Let’s take a closer look at the transformative changes energizing the medical field, and how medical SEO helps you meet every challenge head-on.
1. Tuning Into Patient’s Needs: Become An On-Demand Healthcare Service Provider
By 2025, three-quarters of all internet searches will be performed through mobile devices. Billions of potential patients will be researching medical professionals, clinics, and healthcare institutions, and booking appointments using mobiles.
By depending solely on your reputation and skill sets, you may attract patients in the immediate neighborhood. In the process, you could be missing out on the broader audience that online freelance medical professionals are tapping.
Search engine optimized content marketing will convey your message, pinpoint your location, and emphasize your availability. You’ll be highlighting the unique medical skill sets that specific audiences are searching.
SEO Tip: Ensure that your website loads faster, has avant-garde security features, and is mobile friendly.
2. Responding To Changing Market Trends and Patient Preferences Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is undoubtedly the most radical change sweeping the healthcare sector. AI is the boat that you can’t miss if you want to cross the stormy seas of medical marketing success.
You may be aware that AI, more particularly the Machine Learning algorithm, is used by major search engines to rank professional healthcare services. The flip side of the coin is that you can use AI and create content marketing strategies that make you more relevant to searchers looking for healthcare advice.
The solution lies in using analytics expertise or tasking software like Google analytics. This helps you identify the latest market trends dominating your niche. You gain a better understanding of patients when you demographically segment audiences by gender, location, browsing history, and medical choices linked to your skill sets.
The AI data-driven insights on market trends and patient preferences will help you target audiences with greater accuracy. Your customized messages will spur patient conversion and increase business. A more targeted marketing strategy ensures that you attract the ideal patient more likely to commit to a long-term healthcare relationship.
SEO Tip: Focus on improving medical schema and optimize all title tags and meta descriptions to reflect the keywords specific to your audience.
3. Using Virtual Reality For Delivering High-Quality Healthcare Services Online
Patients on the lookout for the ideal healthcare service love medical professionals that are up close and personal, and are more engaging, and interactive. The long-suffering patient desperately needs a platform to air his feelings and discuss treatment options and costs with trustworthy healthcare professionals.
Fortunately, there’s a solution that promises to elevate the doctor-patient relationship to a new level, and it is virtual reality marketing. By integrating virtual reality into your content marketing strategy, you’d be emulating the success enjoyed by the world’s top healthcare brands.
SEO optimized brand imaging personalizes the healthcare service. The medical professional comes closer to the patient who enjoys the immersive experience and connects with the healthcare service in a profoundly personal way.
A note of caution: The VR inspired content strategy must be careful in addressing the pain points of the patient, and not focus exclusively on brand imaging. Once you know the social medium that your core patients use, you can tailor VR to suit the medium of communication.
SEO Tip: By optimizing images and videos, you significantly improve page load speeds, elevate page ranking, and boost the user experience.
4. Engaging Healthcare Professionals and Patients Using Medical Device SEO
Medical devices have shifted the emphasis from ailment-related counseling to preventive healthcare services. These devices play an essential role in discovering underlying problems that could develop into significant health issues. The market for wearable healthcare devices is estimated to reach $27.49 Billion By 2026.
Medical devices, especially wearable devices such as exercise trackers, heart rate trackers, and blood sugar monitors, are cost-effective ways of collecting health data. Companies marketing these devices, using the right strategies and targeted keywords, can expand their services by engaging doctors and transforming the lives of patients.
SEO Tip: Tap the potential of niche audiences using long-tailed keywords. Instead of targeting a bigger audience through “Heart rate monitor,” try “Heart rate monitor for diabetic seniors.”
5. Leveraging Predictive Analytics Models To Detect Health Scares and Boost Preparedness
Healthcare services are universally programmed to respond to ailments and diseases as and when definitive symptoms appear. With the advent of artificial intelligence, we now have tools for predicting the likelihood of diseases becoming significant issues.
We have crossed the distance from reactive healthcare to preventive healthcare. AI-inspired machine learning algorithms could be programmed to monitor traffic in search engines and social media to isolate commonly used medical keywords.
Using predictive analytics (PA) models, it’s possible to discern patterns of keyword usage that warn you of potential epidemics.
SEO Tip: Heighten your visibility in search engines when topics relating to your niche are trending. For example, your PA model may indicate that a health scare is threatening Europe. Using the content tag “European crisis,” you could promote the article, “European crisis: Will it affect your travel plans?”
6. Promoting Healthcare Services Using Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
We are in an era where negative patient reviews and unsatisfactory experiences can seriously damage one’s reputation. This is why healthcare providers are adopting conversational software such as chatbots and virtual assistants to stand in for human voices. The software can be programmed to respond to a wide range of queries in a manner that satisfies the patient’s intent.
Unlike humans, chatbots are non-judgmental, quick, efficient, and are ready with their responses 24/7. The applications are diverse. A virtual assistant, helping a medical practitioner by monitoring the patient’s medical condition, may suggest drugs most appropriate to the stage of the disease.
SEO Tip: It’s estimated that more than three-quarters of Google voice searches will be responded by chatbots. Maximize the use of keywords that populate conversational searches related to your area of medical expertise.
7. Securing and Safeguarding Data Privacy in Healthcare Using Blockchain
Precisely what kind of technology is Blockchain? The new technology uses cryptography to digitally record and timestamp transactions as blocks of encrypted data connected in a chain, and which cannot be tampered with.
How is Blockchain relevant to healthcare? Blockchain helps maintain an electronic health record of patient data in a secure, reliable format that can’t be hacked. This has great importance for caregivers, pharmacists, insurance providers and many other players in the healthcare sector.
How does SEO connect with Blockchain technology? Several healthcare providers are switching to Blockchain inspired platforms for service delivery because of Blockchain’s reputation as a secure, trusted, and immutable record of data. So, healthcare providers leveraging the best SEO practices will be in a position to attract more customer traffic and increase conversions.
SEO Tip: To integrate Blockchain with existing web pages, use competitive SEO analytics tools to strengthen critical keywords, restructure landing pages, and promote high-ranking content.
Conclusion
Healthcare SEO delivers a whole new level of visibility to medical practitioners, insurers, pharmacists, caregiving institutions, and non-governmental agencies influencing and molding public opinion on healthcare issues.
The ultimate objective of medical SEO is to increase awareness of your services among new patients, and to forge long-term doctor-patient relationships so you can deliver more targeted, high-quality healthcare.
The healthcare service provider need not be apprehensive of the technological innovations and transformative changes that are sweeping the medical sector. The need of the hour is the adoption of avant-garde SEO solutions that open the gateways to marketing success.