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Health literacy is an essential component of health education that enables individuals to take an active role in managing their health and well-being. However, a significant portion of the population lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate the complex health information landscape. Individuals with low health literacy may have difficulty understanding health information, accessing healthcare services, and making informed decisions about their health, which can negatively impact their health outcomes.

In recent years, social media has emerged as a promising tool for improving health literacy.

Firstly, it offers a platform for individuals to access a wide range of health-related information in real-time, from trusted sources such as health organizations, healthcare professionals, and patient advocacy groups.

Secondly, social media allows for peer-to-peer interactions, enabling individuals to connect with others who share similar health concerns and engage in discussions about their health. This social support and engagement can promote health literacy by increasing motivation, building confidence, and providing a sense of community. Additionally, social media can facilitate the sharing of personal experiences, leading to increased awareness and understanding of health issues.

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With the majority of people turning to the internet to search for healthcare information and services, it’s essential to ensure your website is easily discoverable and highly visible. In this post, I’ll provide you with some effective tips to increase the visibility of your healthcare website and attract more potential patients to your practice.

1. Audit Your Competitors/Peers

By auditing your competitors (or your peers) websites you can gain valuable insights into what works well and identify areas for improvement on your own website. If their websites are more streamlined, functional, and fresher than yours, they may be drawing in more patients with a stronger online presence.  Critically evaluate the sites in terms of look, design, and functionality. Do they include a blog? Helpful checklists? Pre-registration forms patients can fill out to save time before their appointment? An online appointment system?  Screenshot the design features you think work well and think about how you might incorporate them into your own website.

Read How To Conduct A Competitor Audit on Social Media for more tips.

2. Sign Up For Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that will help you identify how well your website is performing over time. By analyzing your website’s metrics, such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, and time spent on the site, you can identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance user engagement. A high bounce rate can negatively impact your website’s search rankings, as it indicates that visitors quickly leave your site without finding what they were looking for. By regularly monitoring and analyzing your website’s metrics, you can make informed decisions to optimize your site’s content and design, resulting in increased visibility and improved user experience.

3. Tailor Your Site’s Information To Reader Needs

Is your website nothing more than a glorified brochure? By identifying the most frequently asked questions in your practice, you can create content that directly addresses these concerns and provides helpful answers. This can include blog posts, videos, and FAQs that provide practical advice, tips, and insights related to common health issues or medical procedures. By offering this type of content, you demonstrate your expertise and establish trust with potential patients, which can ultimately lead to increased traffic and conversions on your website.

4. Use Keywords Strategically

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that people use when searching for information related to your business or industry. By incorporating these keywords into your website’s content, meta tags, and other elements, you can help search engines understand the relevance and value of your site for those search terms.

Recommended Reading: The Power of Long-Tail Keywords for Driving Traffic to Your Website

5. Optimize Your Site For Local Search

If you want more people to find you online, you need to optimize your website through good search engine optimization practices. And if you want to attract new patients, your website also needs to be optimized for your local area. When someone uses the internet to locate a Medical Practice nearby, it’s critical that your website appears in those results (searches on mobile devices containing the phrase “near me” has skyrocketed in recent years). Optimizing your website for local search includes adding your practice’s name, address, and phone number to your website. You should also include local keywords in your website content, such as the name of your city or town. Additionally, getting positive reviews from patients on popular review sites like Google My Business can also help improve your local search rankings.

Why and How You Should Optimise Your Medical Website For Local Search

6. Optimize Your Site For Voice Search

The majority of patients searching for information on the web still trust search engines but the way people search for information online is changing. Increasingly, people are using voice search on their smartphones, tablets, or voice assistants (like the Amazon Echo or Google Home devices) to search for information on the internet (yet another compelling reason to make sure that your site is optimized for mobile). In essence, voice searches are largely about answering questions. Here are some tips to consider while generating content for voice activation devices.

7. Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Responsive

With the increasing use of smartphones and tablets, more and more patients are searching for healthcare information and services on their mobile devices. In addition, Google’s algorithm now prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in its search rankings, which means that having a mobile-responsive website can have a significant impact on your visibility in search results.

To check if your website is mobile-responsive, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool provided by Google. Simply enter your website URL, and the tool will analyze your site and provide feedback on its mobile-friendliness.

8. Include A Blog

Including a blog on your medical practice’s website can have numerous benefits. It can help establish you as an authority in your field and provide valuable information to potential patients. Regularly updated blog content can also improve your website’s search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your site. When creating blog content, consider the topics and questions that your patients are most interested in. This can include information about common health conditions, treatments, and preventative care tips. You can also write about industry news and updates, and share patient success stories or testimonials.

Need a topic for your healthcare blog? Here are 12 ideas to get you started

9. Drive More Traffic With Social Shares

Enabling social sharing buttons on your website is an effective way to encourage visitors to share your content on their social media profiles, which can help increase the visibility of your website and attract more traffic. By making it easy for visitors to share your content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you also increase the chances of your content going viral and reaching a wider audience. This can ultimately lead to more traffic, more backlinks, and higher search engine rankings.

10. Include Patient Testimonials

Adding patient testimonials to your website is a great way to build trust and credibility with potential patients. Make sure to include testimonials from a variety of patients, including those who have had different types of procedures or treatments. You can also include testimonials from patients who have had positive experiences with your staff or who have been pleased with the overall atmosphere of your practice. To make the most of patient testimonials, consider including them on your homepage or a dedicated testimonials page. You can also sprinkle them throughout your site on relevant pages or blog posts. Finally, don’t forget to promote your patient testimonials on social media and other marketing channels to maximize their impact.

11. Use High-Quality Images and Videos

Adding high-quality images and videos can be an effective way to create a more visually appealing website and improve the user experience for visitors. In the healthcare industry, images and videos can be particularly powerful in helping patients understand complex medical procedures or conditions. However, it’s important to keep in mind that using images and videos comes with some considerations. For example, it’s important to ensure that any images or videos you use are properly licensed and don’t infringe on copyright laws. Additionally, images and videos should be optimized for web use to avoid slowing down your website’s loading time.

10 Places To Find The Best Free Images For Your Healthcare Marketing

12. Add Clear Calls-to-Action

Your website should have clear calls-to-action (CTAs) that encourage visitors to take the desired action, whether it’s to schedule an appointment, fill out a form, or call your office. Make sure your CTAs are prominently displayed on your website and are easy to find. Additionally, it is important to use action-oriented language in your CTAs to make them more effective. For example, instead of just saying “Click Here,” use a more specific and action-oriented phrase such as “Schedule Your Appointment Now.” By using clear and compelling language in your CTAs, you can increase the likelihood that visitors to your website will take the desired action.

13. Make Sure Your Website Is Secure

Ensuring that your website is secure is crucial for building trust with your patients. HTTPS encryption protects the data that is exchanged between your website and your visitors’ browsers, making it much harder for anyone to intercept or tamper with that data. It’s especially important if you have a patient portal or any other feature that requires users to submit personal information. In addition to HTTPS encryption, displaying security badges, such as the Norton Secured Seal or the McAfee SECURE trustmark, can help reassure visitors that your website is safe and secure. These badges are a visual indicator that your website has undergone certain security checks and meets certain standards.

14. Consider Paid Advertising

While organic search results are important, consider using paid advertising to increase your visibility online. With tools like Google Ads and social media advertising, you can target specific demographics and interests, allowing you to reach the people most likely to be interested in your services. Additionally, paid advertising can be a good way to supplement your organic search results, especially if you’re in a highly competitive market. Just be sure to set clear goals, track your results, and adjust your strategy as needed to get the best possible return on your investment.

Wrapping Up

Your website is pivotal to your digital marketing strategy. And with more patients than ever searching online for you, it’s imperative that your website is optimized for them to find you.  Investing time and resources into optimizing your website can pay off in the long run with increased traffic, more patient inquiries, and ultimately, more business. It’s a worthwhile investment that can help set you apart from your competitors and position your practice for success in the digital age.

The internet is a vast and ever-growing space, with billions of users accessing an endless array of websites every day. But which websites are the most popular, attracting the highest number of visitors?

With an estimated two billion websites in existence, the internet can seem like a never-ending maze of information and content. However, traffic numbers reveal a select few websites receiving the bulk of internet traffic.

A recent article by Visual Capitalist has delved into the data to reveal the top 50 most visited websites, offering insights into the most popular online destinations and the types of websites that attract the most traffic.

With the internet becoming increasingly central to our daily lives, the ranking of the top 50 most-visited websites provides valuable insights for healthcare marketing. By understanding the websites that receive the most traffic, healthcare marketers can determine the most effective platforms for promoting their services and connecting with their target audience.

Click here to learn more

Looking for some inspiration for Valentine-themed content?

Check out these examples from previous campaigns. I really like the way they’ve incorporated the theme but stayed nicely on brand.

 

The Irish Heart Foundation tick a lot of boxes with their use of a dedicated hashtag #showsomelove.

Your patients are searching for you online. In today’s digital age, patients are more likely than ever to turn to the internet when seeking health information and medical services. As a result, it’s crucial for medical practices to have a strong online presence in order to attract and retain patients.

With 77% of all health inquiries starting at a search engine, and 72% of internet users looking for health information online in the past year, having a well-optimized website, an accurate Google My Business listing, and relevant, up-to-date information can make a significant impact in attracting potential patients and establishing a trustworthy reputation.

In this post, we’ll explore why and how your medical practice should prepare for the increasing trend of online health inquiries through voice search. By preparing for voice search, medical practices can stay ahead of the curve and ensure that they are easily discoverable to patients searching for health-related information online.

While the majority of patients searching for information on the web still trust search engines the way people search for information online is changing. Increasingly, people are using voice search on their smartphones, tablets or voice assistants to search for information on the internet – yet another compelling reason to make sure that your site is optimized for mobile!.

With the increasing use of virtual assistants and other voice search devices, people are able to search for information hands-free and in a more natural, conversational manner. This shift towards voice search makes it even more important for medical practices to optimize their websites for mobile devices and ensure that their content is optimized for voice search queries, using clear and concise language, conversational tone, and schema markup to give search engines more information about the content on their site.

How people are using voice search

In research carried out by BrightLocal, consumers were asked how they used voice assistants and voice search for local business. The top three most demanded voice search functions involve finding restaurants, grocery stores, and food delivery, with clothing, accommodation, and medicine following closely behind.

The Voice Search for Local Business Study also revealed that 46% of voice search users use voice search to find local businesses daily.

How to optimize your website for voice searches

In essence, voice searches are largely about answering questions, not about focusing on individual keywords. SEO is fast becoming AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation). When people talk to their voice assistants, they don’t form their inquiries the same way that they do in typed search queries. Rather, they tend to ask conversational questions, for example, “What’s the closest dental clinic to me?” instead of “dental clinic near me.”

When it comes to attracting potential patients, having a strong online presence is essential.

With the majority of health inquiries starting at a search engine, it’s crucial to make sure your website is optimized for search engines so that you can be easily discoverable to people looking for information related to your medical practice.

One important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) is optimizing for long-tail keywords, or specific, longer phrases that people are using when searching for information online.

In this post, we’ll go over the steps you can take to optimize for long-tail keywords and improve your website’s visibility in search results.

Optimizing for long-tail keywords involves identifying the specific, longer phrases that people are using when searching for information online. Here are some steps to optimize for long-tail keywords:

#1 Conduct Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research is the first step in optimizing for long-tail keywords. By using tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush, you can gain insight into the specific, long-tail keywords that people are using when searching for information related to your medical practice. This information can help guide your content creation and website optimization efforts, ensuring that you’re targeting the right keywords and attracting potential patients to your website.

When using keyword research tools, look for keywords with a high search volume and low competition, as these are often the most effective keywords to target. You should also consider the context in which the keywords are being used, as well as their relevancy to your medical practice, to ensure that you’re targeting the right keywords for your audience. By conducting thorough keyword research, you’ll be able to identify the long-tail keywords that will help improve your website’s visibility in search results and attract more potential patients to your website.

#2 Create content around long-tail keywords

Once you’ve conducted keyword research and identified the specific, long-tail keywords that people are using when searching for information related to your medical practice, the next step is to create content around those keywords. This can include blog posts, FAQ pages, and service pages that specifically target the keywords you’ve identified.

When creating content, make sure to include the long-tail keywords in the title tags, headings, and meta descriptions of your pages to improve your website’s visibility for those keywords. Additionally, it’s important to write high-quality, informative content that provides value to your potential patients. This will not only improve your website’s visibility in search results but also establish your medical practice as a trustworthy source of information, helping to build trust with potential patients.

Incorporating long-tail keywords into your content creation efforts is an effective way to improve your website’s visibility in search results and attract more potential patients to your website. By creating content that specifically targets the long-tail keywords you’ve identified, you can ensure that your website is discoverable to people searching for information related to your healthcare practice.

#3 Incorporate long-tail keywords into page titles, headings, and meta descriptions

Incorporating long-tail keywords into the titles, headings, and meta descriptions of your website’s pages is an important aspect of optimizing for long-tail keywords. By including the keywords in these key elements of your website, you can improve your website’s visibility in search results and attract more potential patients to your website.

• Make sure that the title of each page on your website includes the main long-tail keyword for that page. Keep the titles concise and descriptive, and make sure that they accurately reflect the content of the page.
• Use headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to structure your content and make it easier for search engines to understand the relevancy of your page to a specific keyword.
• The meta description is the brief summary that appears below the page title in search results. Make sure to include the main long-tail keyword for each page in the meta description to help improve the visibility of that page in search results.

#4 Use variations of long-tail keywords

Using variations of long-tail keywords is an effective way to improve your website’s visibility in search results and reach a wider audience. By using different variations of your target keywords, you can ensure that your website is discoverable to people using different phrasing or wording when searching for information related to your practice.

For example, if your target keyword is “best orthopedic surgeon near me,” you could also include variations such as “top-rated orthopedic surgeon near me” or “best orthopedic doctor in the area.” This can help improve your website’s visibility in search results, as search engines will recognize that your website is relevant to a wider range of keyword searches.

It’s important to note that when using variations of long-tail keywords, you should avoid keyword stuffing, which is the practice of overusing keywords in an attempt to improve visibility in search results. Instead, use variations of your target keywords in a natural, seamless way throughout your content to ensure that it remains high-quality and informative.

Wrapping Up

By following the steps outlined here you can improve your website’s visibility for the specific, long-tail keywords that people are using when searching for information related to your medical practice, and ultimately attract more patients to your website.