Increase the performance of your healthcare website in Google using 3 FREE SEO tools (2 minute read)

Healthcare websites are often built to provide value to either patients or HCPs, but don’t always get the organic traffic needed to really make a difference.

This article is intended for healthcare marketers looking at finding simple but effective tactics to drive search engine traffic to their website. I will show how using 3 FREE tools, if executed correctly, can help boost your sites organic visibility online.

Google Console (GC)

If your website has Google Analytics installed (which most websites have) then you have access to GC, which is a powerful and extremely valuable free tool.

• Step 1: Log-in to GC, it will show you all the keywords your site is ranking for which is driving the most traffic
• Step 2: Look at what pages those keywords are driving traffic to
• Step 3: Take the title tag and the meta description of key pages and make sure you include the keyword and optimise the title tag to be more appealing to increase clicks

Here’s an example of how increasing click-through rate can positively improve your rankings. Let’s say your website is in position 5 within the search results and, over a 30-day period, people who search for a keyword click on your result more than your competitors, Google will move you up the rankings.

Tip: Type your target keyword into Google and look at the title tags of all your competitors, think to yourself how can I make my title tag stand out more?

Google’s engineer Paul Haahr states “high CTR can affect your ranking as it gives the signal that your page grabs the users’ attention. Rankbrain can actually affect ranking to results that show up higher than they should have been, with the number of CTRs determining the permanent position”

Ubersuggest

This is a great tool to expand on your existing content to make it even more relevant to your audience and rank for more keywords which ultimately will deliver more clicks.

• Step 1: Pick an existing keyword that you want to drive more traffic from (you have already found the keywords your site ranks for from the Google Console section)
• Step 2: Take that keyword and add to Ubersuggest, it will tell you all the other long tail versions of that keyword (these are other terms your customers are searching for in Google) – if your site already ranks for the short tail keyword then you will have no trouble ranking for long tail version
• Step 3: Analyse the keyword results and find some other relevant keywords that get a good number of monthly searches

Now integrate these keywords into your existing content. For example, see screenshot above, one tactic could be to add a sub-header called ‘The physical symptoms of depression’ as we know this is something prospective customers are interested in.

This term gets 1,300 searches per month – now expand on this topic making sure you fully answer the needs of the query. A previous infographic I created called Pharma’s On-Page SEO Checklist will also help you optimise your content to deliver best practice.

• Step 4: Now repeat the above steps for other key pages, you will find after 30 days your site should start increasing traffic as you rank for more keywords and get more traffic

Google PageSpeed Insights

The faster your website loads the better the user experience, so it only makes sense having a faster site will help improve your rankings. People use Google more on their mobile than desktop which is why Google has an index just for mobile, so a primary focus for increasing performance should be on mobile.

PageSpeed Insights analyses the content of a web page on both mobile and desktop then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Your website will be given a performance score as a benchmark. A score of 90 or above is considered fast, and 50 to 90 is considered average. Below 50 is to be slow.

To see the performance score of your website go to PageSpeed Insights and copy and paste the URL of the page you want to analysis into the search bar and hit ‘Analyze’. If your score could do with being improved send the recommendations to your website developer (or give us a call). Once the changes have been made re-analyse the URL and see what difference it has made!

Conclusion

If you want to increase organic traffic:

• Find your best preforming pages and make the title and meta description more appealing to improve clicks – we know improving CTR improves search position
• Use Ubersuggest to find further content ideas related to what you are already ranking for, which you know prospective customers are looking for. This tactic, if delivered correctly, can dramatically boost your site’s visibility online
• Improve your performance score by increasing your page loading speed, particularly on mobile

Make sure with all these tactics to benchmark your results so that you can measure and further improve results.

Which other search engine optimisation techniques are you currently implementing? Are you achieving the desired results?