Medical Marketing Enterprises, L.L.C.
Website Optimization, SEO, Reputation Management for Medical Practices
Share your knowledge on other websites. This can result in increased website traffic to your own site and improve your SEO. By contributing content to other websites, you expose yourself to a new and different audience and get better website rankings.
Guest blogging, HARO and participating on community forums are just three examples, but there are more. The basic message is that you might consider sharing your expertise on OTHER websites and make sure your contributions are cited in the form of hyperlinks back to your own site. These hyperlinks are called “backlinks.”
Quality backlinks can significantly improve your SEO.
This is a database where JOURNALISTS find reliable SOURCES when researching an article or story. Journalists post queries looking for expert SOURCES who belong to the site. Health providers (you) function as a SOURCE.
HARO sends out 3 daily emails of journalists looking for Sources. If interested, you will respond via email, thus connecting you with the journalist.
Usually a short interview is conducted via email or phone. If your content is used in the final story, your contribution should be cited. You gain exposure to a new audience. Ideally, you will also get a link to your website.
The HARO website is www.HelpAReporter.com.
As a “guest” you will write an article for someone else’s website. Ideally, you will write an article on a related website, i.e. health related website, on a topic of which you are an authority.
The article will be written exactly as if you were writing on your own site, but with the exception it will be published on a foreign website. In return for creating content for the host, you, the guest, should insert 2-3 hyperlinks (backlinks) to your own site.
Again, this gives you exposure to a new community AND, through backlinks, improves your SEO.
There are many forums, chat rooms and bulletin boards where patients share information about health concerns or ailments they have in common.
As a healthcare authority, you may choose to join in their conversations to educate this community to share your knowledge and educate this new audience.
As with the other examples, this will expose you to a new community and give you the opportunity to build backlinks.
All the best,
Randy
Search engines rank individual web pages wherever and whenever possible. This means each of your web pages might rank well for a particular keyword given the assumption you’ve paid attention to SEO.
Understanding that search engines rank individual web pages focused on keywords will help you avoid a common SEO blunder.
Each of your providers should have their own “About” page, and here’s why.
Keywords are pretty tricky to understand, but for our purposes are synonymous with topic or subject. Each or your articles must be focused around 1 (or possibly 2) keyword or topic.
The topic of your article should be the keyword for which you want to rank.
Best practices dictate that the keyword should appear in certain locations of your article: the title, subheaders and comprise no more than 2.5% of the total words of the page.
This is the probably the best SEO plugin around. The free version is terrific and I have been using it for years after letting go of a paid optimization service.
YOAST will walk you through the process of optimizing each of your articles so that you may maximize your opportunity for high rankings.
Each of your providers should have a separate “About” page. Cramming all providers onto the same page gives you only one page to rank for the services your provide.
Chances are that your providers each specialize in one facet of your practice. This should be your keyword. For instance, as a retina specialist, my about page should be focused on the keyword “retina specialist.” (Admittedly, it’s two words, but one keyphrase.)
If all your specialists are grouped on the same page, it becomes very difficult for that one page to rank any specialty. A single webpage can realistically rank well for only one or two keywords.
By creating separate pages, you now have multiple opportunities to rank!
There are several ways to generate traffic to your website. The best source of traffic is free. The best source of traffic is organic traffic.
Organic traffic is the result of the patience and hard work you have put in to generate rankings through content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
Paid traffic on the other hand may some merit, especially if your website is up and running and you are already generating your organic traffic.
There are three types of paid traffic:
The image shows a typical search engine results page (SERP). A SERP is generated when using particular keywords to generate a search.
Organic search are the webpages which appear in area C and are the result of content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). Results in area C are the most credible and trusted.
Pay per click advertising includes clickthrough ads (area B) and banner ads (area A). There is no difference between ads in A or B except the price paid by the advertiser (i.e. you).
Paid ads appear based upon the original keywords used to generate this particular search. The advertiser chooses the keywords for which the ads should be displayed.
Using similar techniques, YouTube presents video ads to the viewer based upon the keyword used to find video content and based upon the subject of viewed videos.
Pay per click and YouTube ads use very similar methods of presenting ads.
Facebook boosts may provide the best method for “laser targeting” an audience, that is, your ability to display your ads based upon your exact criteria (age, zip code, preferences, etc.). Facebook uses a combination of demographic information, behaviors (what you and your contacts do on FB) and contact information (your friends) to give the best targeted attention compared to other platforms.
In short, Facebook advertising gives you better methods to target your audience.
Without out a doubt, consider paid advertising, or paid search, only after your website is already generating organic traffic (you are writing articles and using SEO). Also, paid advertising may be better for advertising goods compared to services.
All of us hate to write. Written text articles, however, are the best for our website search engine optimization (SEO) and rankings.
There are alternatives to producing content without the standard rigors of creating original content on a routine basis.
PowerPoint presentations are popular amongst physicians because all of us like to talk and we have all given lectures to a town hall, rotary club or church group to market ourselves.
PowerPoint lectures are great for your SEO for two reasons; 1) PowerPoint presentations are considered “text” files for the search engines and 2) you can create narratives of the actual presentation.
Uploading the actual .ppt file and posting on your site is perfect for your SEO. Search engines rank text files (i.e. written text articles) the best. A PowerPoint presentation can be indexed just like your written article.
You might also consider writing down the narrative of your presentation and posting as well!
Video is also a nice alternative to writing. Video by itself does not have the same impact on your SEO as a published article, but publishing the narrative of the video is an excellent alternative for your SEO.
This is a great model as you are able to post on two different types of platforms (video/audio and text).
I produce a weekly podcast with my co-host Russell Faust, M.D. Our website, RussandRandy.com, a website on Healthcare and Medical Internet Marketing, was created to run parallel to our podcast.
After each podcast episode, we post an article to our website featuring the same topic as the episode. It’s an easy option to creating original content on a weekly basis.
All the best!
Randy