Investing time and resources into search engine optimization (SEO) is the only way to consistently get your healthcare practice to the top of search results. SEO is the process of optimizing your website content, design and overall user experience for search engine results related to your target audience’s most common searches. Offline SEO — meaning search results about your practice outside of your website — also plays a role in how your practice appears in search results. This may include your Google Maps pin, physician directory profiles or your social media pages. There is a lot of digital content produced by your practice or written about your practice, which is why SEO is an investment that will have a great financial impact over time.
How Do I Get My Healthcare Practice to Rank on Google?
Families around the world are searching online for the best healthcare practices for every family member; your practice should be present in those searches. With over 3.5 billion searches on Google each day, how does your practice rank high and get more clicks than your competition? It all starts with content planning. Conducting keyword research and producing relevant content is the ultimate goal. The most obvious content needed is the webpage content itself. However, there’s more to SEO than that. The most overlooked pieces of content needed are the page title and meta description.
- Page Title, or Title Tag, refers to a short description of a webpage and appears at the top of a browser window and as the title of each entry in search results.
- Meta Description refers to the brief summary of the content placed underneath the Page Title in search results.
Tips for Writing Meta Descriptions
Meta Descriptions are often completed as a last minute summary sentence of the webpage. What healthcare practices often forget is that meta descriptions are displayed in search results – driving more clicks and organic website traffic to your practice’s website. The goal of writing meta descriptions should be to create a keyword-rich, relevant summary of the webpage that is enticing enough to get a click from a search results page.
Let’s explore how to do that:
- Watch Your Character Count: It’s recommended to keep it around 150-160 characters. Otherwise, meta descriptions will trail off and could potentially hide some keywords.
- No Duplicates: You wouldn’t copy the exact same webpage content over and over again, right? The same is true for meta descriptions. Duplicated content hurts search engine rankings for being unoriginal and an indirect source.
- Prioritize Keywords: Your practice will want all your web pages to rank for every relevant keyword. With a short character count, you will have to prioritize the most relevant keywords for that specific web page’s core content.
- Don’t waste space: Generic call-to-actions (such as Learn More) will not add any value to your meta descriptions! Keep it specific and use the core keywords you want to rank for.
Points Group is an award-winning marketing agency specifically designed to help healthcare practice reach more patients. Need help boosting your content and don’t know where to start? Contact us today!
