Healthcare SEO: How to Get More Organic Traffic

What Is Healthcare SEO & Why Is It Important?

Search engine optimization (SEO) for healthcare organizations is a set of practices focused on optimizing a facility or practice’s online presence to appear prominently on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Healthcare SEO is important because it helps prospective patients find and connect with providers who offer the care they’re looking for. 

Essentially, high rankings (positions) in search results translate to more visibility, more website traffic, and likely more business. Especially when you consider that three in four people search online for doctors, dentists, etc. 

Let's explore the key ways you can improve your healthcare SEO. 

9 Effective Tactics for Your Healthcare SEO Strategy

1. Create Content Relevant to Your Niche

Creating high-quality content around topics within your specific healthcare niche (e.g., primary care medicine or sports physical therapy) helps you appear for keywords your target patient population is searching. 

To create quality content, it’s a good idea to:

• Use clear, simple language—not medical jargon
• Create content about common patient questions and concerns
• Provide genuinely helpful information
• Follow a rigorous editorial process for all content

An example of a healthcare organization with relevant online content is Cleveland Clinic. Their blog covers all the main topics their providers help patients with.

Cleveland Clinic also has a library filled with pages on highly specific conditions and symptoms, podcast episodes featuring in-depth interviews with medical professionals, and more. 

To find content ideas in your niche, use the Keyword Magic Tool. It shows you how often people search for specific keywords and how competitive those keywords are.

For example, “allergy” gets 49,500 searches per month (as indicated by the number in the “Volume” column).

But it has a very high keyword difficulty rating. This is a score out of100% that tells you how difficult it is to rank in the top 10 results for a keyword—the higher the score, the more competitive the keyword.

If your website doesn’t yet have much visibility in search engines, you’re unlikely to rank for a term that’s so competitive. 

But “allergies vs. cold” has 18,100 monthly searches. And its keyword difficulty score is 46%. 

Focusing on that second term may be a better idea because you’re more likely to secure a prominent ranking. And starting with low-competition keywords means you’ll be able to build authority that makes it easier to rank for more difficult terms later on.

Next, click on the icon in the “SF” column to open a preview of the SERP. 

Study the top-ranking pages to see how the content is structured, what subtopics they cover, etc. 

After this, you might decide to create a blog article that succinctly conveys the main differences between a cold and allergies. And covers related questions searchers are likely to have about the topic. 

Doing this will help you create content that meets what patients are looking for. And that has a good chance of ranking well in search results.

2. Demonstrate E-E-A-T

Conveying Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) assures prospective patients that you’re reputable and also aligns with what Google wants to prioritize in search results.

This is especially true in the healthcare space. Because healthcare is a Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topic, meaning content about it can affect a reader's safety, health, or financial well-being. 

Healthcare content clearly falls into the YMYL category, so it’s held to a higher standard.

Here are some tips for creating content that meets a high E-E-A-T threshold:

• Cite reputable primary sources, including medical journals and knowledge from medical professionals
• Display professional certifications and affiliations on your site
• Regularly review your content to ensure it’s still accurate
• Get healthcare professionals to write or verify your content

For example, Baylor Scott & White Health does a great job of showing their expertise and experience by showing that actual doctors author their content.

3. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Creating and optimizing your Google Business Profile (a listing Google can display in Search and Map results) makes it more likely to appear in relevant search results that potential patients are seeing.

This is what a GBP can look like on a SERP if it’s well-optimized:

As you can see, it’s prominent on the page and includes important information like reviews and business hours.

First, create or claim your Google Business Profile. If you don’t know how to do that, read our Google Business Profile guide.

Then, optimize your profile to increase your chances of ranking well for local searches by:

• Providing all relevant information, such as your practice name, address, phone number, website, and hours
• Choosing the most relevant options for your business categories
• Adding high-quality photos of your facility and equipment
• Using relevant keywords in your description

Also, get name, address, and phone number (NAP) citations in other important directories. Because that can further boost your visibility in local search results.

For example, healthcare professionals and facilities can get listings on Yelp.

Showing up on these sites helps more potential patients find you. Plus, consistent information across these platforms shows search engines that you’re trustworthy. 

You can manually distribute your information across listings. But it takes time. 

To speed up the process, use Semrush's Listing Management tool.

After you sign up for a plan, you’ll be able to automatically distribute your information across directories. And you can monitor your listings from a single dashboard.

Further reading: Local SEO: What Is It & How to Do It

4. Encourage Reviews

Encouraging current patients to leave reviews is useful in healthcare SEO because potential patients are more likely to trust and choose providers with reviews showing others have already had good experiences. 

According to a recent study, 71% of consumers always or regularly check reviews before using local businesses, and that can include healthcare providers. Only 4% never check reviews.

On top of building trust with prospective patients, getting plenty of good reviews can boost your local rankings. To help you appear prominently for searches like this:

Encourage reviews by asking patients for them using follow-up emails after appointments. Or by displaying QR codes in your waiting room that let patients leave reviews.

Then, respond to any reviews you receive to show that you appreciate feedback. 

Just be sure to avoid disclosing any personal information. It’s best to stick with a simple message like “Thank you! We’re glad you had a good experience at your appointment.”

To simplify the process, use Semrush’s Review Management tool.

You can even use the tool to generate responses for your Google reviews. 

For negative reviews, a thoughtful response can demonstrate your commitment to patient care. And it gives you an opportunity to remedy the situation and potentially turn a negative experience into a positive one.

5. Build Authority with Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and getting enough of them from reputable and relevant sites can improve your SEO results.

Why? 

Google considers backlinks to be endorsements. Generally, a site with a large number of relevant backlinks from reputable sites is seen as more trustworthy. 

Backlinks often occur naturally when others link to valuable content on your site (e.g., original studies). But you can speed up the process by reaching out to websites to let them know about content you’ve published that their audiences are likely to find useful.

Semrush’s Link Building Tool makes this easy.

Just follow the prompts to set up your project. Then, go to the “Prospects” tab to find websites you’d like to contact for a backlink.

When you find a promising option, click “To In Progress” next to it.

When you’re ready to reach out, go to the “In Progress” tab and click “Contact” next to the prospect you want to send a message to. 

From there, you can easily craft an email that includes a link to a relevant piece of content on your site along with some explanation about why you think it would be valuable to their audience. 

This type of outreach is just one way to gain backlinks.

Here are some other ways to proactively boost your link profile:

• Encourage your providers to speak at healthcare conferences and seminars
• Partner with local charity organizations
• Ask your providers to share their insights with publications looking for expert perspectives

6. Build a Strong Technical Foundation

Following technical SEO best practices is largely about making sure that search engines can effectively crawl (find), index (store in a database), and rank your content. 

To see if a page has been indexed, check Google Search Console (GSC). 

Just enter the URL into the search bar at the top, and GSC will tell you if the page is stored in the database of pages that are eligible to be shown in search results. 

If not, click “Request Indexing” to ask Google to crawl and index the page. 

If you notice that a lot of your pages haven’t been indexed, there may be a wider issue. 

Technical problems like broken links, missing code, or duplicate content can get in the way of Google’s crawling and indexing processes.

And other technical problems can keep you from ranking well—even if your content has been indexed.

To help your site perform as well as possible, follow these tips:

• Use a clear site structure and organize your webpages into categories
• Ensure important content isn't hidden behind login walls
• Avoid using too many redirects (when one URL automatically sends users to another URL). Overdoing these can slow down your site and confuse search engines.
• Keep page load times as fast as possible
• Make your site mobile-friendly 

To check for these and many other issues, use Semrush’s Site Audit tool.

To run an audit, enter your domain, and choose your settings (check out this guide if you need help).

Then, click “Start Site Audit.”

Once the audit is complete, you’ll see a dashboard that shows you key technical data about your site.

Click “View details” under “Site Performance.”

You’ll see information about how quickly your site loads. And a list of issues.

Click “Why and how to fix it” next to any error or warning to learn more about it. And how you can improve.

7. Make Your Site Accessible

You’ll want to prioritize your site’s accessibility to ensure all patients, including those with disabilities, can use your site effectively. 

While accessibility doesn’t directly affect rankings, a smooth website experience improves user satisfaction. And that can support your SEO efforts.

To ensure your site is accessible, pay attention to these elements:

• Alt text for images: Alt text is a brief description of an image. Screen readers use this text to describe images to visually impaired users.
• Keyboard navigation: This allows users to navigate your site using only their keyboards, which is crucial for those who can't use a mouse. Test your site by verifying you can access clickable elements using only the “Tab” key. 
• Proper color contrast: Ensure text stands out clearly against its background to make your content readable by users with visual impairments
• Clear headings and subheadings: Divide content into logical sections and apply relevant heading tags

These are just some basics. Review W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative recommendations for more details. 

8. Use Relevant Schema Markup

Schema markup (often called structured data) is code you add to your webpages to help search engines understand your content better. And it also makes you eligible to display enhanced listings that help you stand out.

Like this:

Healthcare organizations often use the following structured data types:

• Organization
• Local business
• Review snippet

Google recommends using the most specific subtype for organization and local business structured data. Which likely means using MedicalOrganization and MedicalBusiness schema. 

Implementing schema markup is somewhat technical.

But you can typically rely on AI tools like ChatGPT to generate structured data. Or, ask a developer for help.

9. Monitor Your SEO Progress

Monitor changes in visibility and site traffic to see if your healthcare SEO work is paying off.

Start with Google Search Console. Which shows how well your site is performing in search.

You’ll see a graph showing your overall performance. Below that, you can find a list of the specific search queries that brought visitors to your site.

It’s also a good idea to use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track organic traffic to your website.

Go to “Reports” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic acquisition.” And you'll be able to see exactly how many visits are coming from organic search. 

Semrush's Position Tracking tool lets you monitor rankings for the specific keywords you’re targeting.

Follow the prompts to start tracking your chosen terms

Then, you’ll see an overview of your rankings for those terms in Google. And the tool even provides AI-powered insights that estimate your potential performance:

Boost Your Healthcare Organization’s SEO

SEO can help you reach more potential patients who are interested in the care you provide.

And getting started is relatively simple, especially if you sign up for a Semrush account.

Sign up now to start improving your results.