Healthcare is a critically important field, but that does not make it exempt from the challenges of marketing and brand awareness. Between building ad campaigns and handling public relations, there can be a huge host of hurdles to overcome when you are trying to get your healthcare business noticed.

One of the biggest bumps in the road to healthcare success is search engine optimisation - something that can make or break any business across any industry. But how do you approach SEO from the unique perspective of a healthcare company, especially if you are only offering a select range of healthcare products or services?

Here are some SEO trends and techniques to consider if you are trying to break into properly optimising your healthcare SEO. Remember: every business needs to tackle its SEO in a unique way, so do not follow these as hard rules if something else would make more sense.

Understand Your Analytics

Always use tools like Google Analytics or other platforms, even if you are only a small healthcare business with a brand-new site. Keeping track of your analytics allows you to understand where your audience is coming from and why, which is essential to any business’s success.

Analytics are not just good for comparing your site’s growth - they can tell you how your audience finds you, what content they are being drawn to, which pages they tend to bounce off (leaving right after arriving), and so on.

The more information you can gather about your site’s SEO performance and the audience you are drawing, the easier it will be to optimise your online presence further. Having access to data about who’s finding your site and how can be invaluable for reaching a wider range of people.

Beyond that, looking over your analytics properly can help you identify areas where you have made mistakes or harmed your own SEO rankings, giving you defined problems to fix. This is a lot better than simply fumbling around with different SEO tactics and hoping they benefit your site.

Stay Trustworthy

One of the biggest mistakes a healthcare business can make is violating their customers’ trust - and, by extension, damaging their online reputation or perception. A single fact-checked article can be worth far more than ten poorly researched ones, even if the bad articles do not harm your brand at all.

A healthcare business needs to deliver information that is accurate and properly researched, whether that means a source-heavy article about certain drugs or a simple how-to list for keeping your posture healthy. If your audience trusts and relies on you, it becomes easier to market services to them.

Search engines also try to focus on relevant and high-quality content, which includes up-to-date articles and guides. Even if your target audience barely ever sees an article you wrote, you will only get SEO benefits if search engines are sure that it is correct and valuable to the people you are targeting.

Healthcare can already be a difficult field to break into as a new business owner, especially when it comes to something like supplements that have a history of scam products and placebos. The last thing you want is to come across as an opportunistic scammer because you published an article with major mistakes in it.

Make Navigation (And Content) Simple

Healthcare is a complex network of different fields, terms, products, and services that the average person barely understands. Between medicines with multi-stage names and highly specific terms for different medical procedures, a normal customer can easily get confused.

SEO involves your own site just as much as the content you produce for other platforms, so you want a website that a new user can understand. Make sure that they know how to navigate around to find the information they want, and do not overload them with information they will not understand.

For example, if somebody is trying to understand how to recognise anaphylactic shock, do not flood them with terms they do not need to know. Explain what they have to do quickly and clearly, and make sure that the article expresses how important it is to respond to the issue quickly.

The average user only needs to know the important details behind a specific medical issue or other healthcare topic - symptoms, side effects, dangers, emergency response steps, and so on. Keep the more specialised information in other pieces of content or in a separate section of the article.

Use Local SEO

In simple terms, local SEO is SEO taken to a smaller sample size and a simpler focus - you look at your local audience rather than the entire internet. Local SEO can be an incredibly powerful tool for finding and targeting audiences in your area - whether that means a city, state, or country. 

More and more patients are turning to the internet to find local healthcare options, from doctor’s offices and pharmaceutical stores to online healthcare stores and health food shops. This means that they are generating a whole heap of new local healthcare SEO trends to target.

By targeting your local area, you can specifically target the people who are most likely to be in your local target audience. This might sound like common sense—and it is, to an extent—but it is something that many healthcare businesses completely overlook.

Dentists can target people within walking or driving distance of their office, while medical equipment rental services can aim for customers within a delivery range that they want to target. Not only can they focus on a nearby audience, but they can tailor their local SEO work to match the topics that the audience is looking for.

What Else?

If you are not sure where to take your SEO efforts next, turn to experts or reliable sources for more ideas and pieces of advice. This list of healthcare strategies for SEO is a good example, outlining some solid starting points that can apply to any healthcare business.

Whatever audiences you are targeting and whichever products or services you offer, it is important to have a plan in place and an understanding of how you can achieve it. The more you know about healthcare SEO as a whole and the more tactics you are aware of, the easier your SEO efforts will become.