You manage several online assets: from a company website, product and disease information on blogs, to social media channels. But are your targeted healthcare professionals and consumers actually seeing your online information? Do you have Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) best practices in place? SEO is a critical component of making your digital assets work hard for you.
These techniques facilitate the indexing of your online content by search engines, like Google, Bing and Yahoo. SEO helps your digital assets rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), making your online content more visible when your target audiences look for online solutions. (Particularly relevant now that the Coronavirus pandemic and ensuing lockdowns have exploded online traffic.)
Here are five SEO tactics that you can put in place immediately:
Consult Google’s Keyword Planner to discover the most searched for phrases in your healthcare category and consider the most frequently asked customer questions you receive. These will help you identify the keywords and phrases to include in your website, blogs and social media posts to ensure your content is relevant to your target market and search engines.
Many people are now using voice search via their mobiles versus typed search via their desktops. Someone with a knee injury, for example, may type “knee injuries” into Google; however, if doing a voice search, may ask “How to care for a knee injury?” Consider catering for the more detailed voice search requirements via a blog which is headlined using the longer voice search phraseology.
Include a sitemap on your website outlining its contents and structure. This helps the search engine spider index your healthcare site correctly, and enhances your user’s experience.
Include your keywords in your website content. Use the keywords as naturally and colloquially as possible, as search engines penalise for so-called “keyword stuffing”.
3. Hook them with quality content
SEO is not only about attracting your customers to your digital assets; it’s also about how much time they spend interacting with those assets. The more time spent, the higher your search engine rankings.
4. Use social media to drive rankings
Social media helps to facilitate two-way conversation between your brand and your customers, as well as building relationships to create a loyal customer base. It’s a form of link building that can help drive traffic to your website from a larger audience than you’d normally be able to reach.
Focus on quality over quantity when it comes to content shared on social media. Put emphasis on engaging your audience’s passion points and joining in discussions that are in line with your company and brand’s expertise.
When you write blogs and create vlogs for your website, optimise the number of people in your target market who view these. Place links to these assets on your social media pages and consider launching a branded YouTube page. (A video is 50 times more likely to rank organically in search).
At Cingulate we’re putting the abovementioned tactics into practice for both our clients and ourselves.
Need an online strategy for your portfolio? Contact us today via www.cingulate.co.za and let us help you define your online strategy!