Introduction to SEO for Medical Professionals
My name is Kent Campbell, I'm CEO of Reputation X and we do a number of things. We change search results around sometimes when there's something unflattering in search results such as drug trials gone wrong or celebrities that had an issue for example. What we do is we fix Google search results and some of the tools that we use is search engine optimization quite often. I've been asked to put this presentation together regarding SEO for medical professionals and what I'll do is just run you through the basic things that pretty much anybody can do to improve your ranking and search results.
That's actually very easy to do, but coming up with thousands of different search phrases that people who don't know you can make up for those is actually pretty difficult. There's a lot that you can do, many clinics just don't do this stuff because they just don't know how or they've got the wrong people doing it.
I'm going to show you through seven or eight or nine different tips that you can do to improve your standing so that when someone does a search, they find your website and they come to you rather than your competitors. We're going to get you to show up higher in search results and we're going to show you some of the tools that we use and a lot of it you can use with Google with some strategies that you can use to improve.
Just a quick overview of what we're going to talk, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make a list of topics that you should think of as buckets and inside of those buckets are the search phrases that you'd like to come up for.
Most people just start going Oh gee, I don't know. I'm just going to come up with some search phrases and they say, “I would love to come up for Botox or something like that” which would be virtually impossible for your average clinic but a lot easier for Web MD and other companies.
Once you've made a little list of topics only then do you put your keywords in and their long tail keywords. What's a long tail keyword? A long tail keyword, a keyword like Botox, is super difficult to rank for as you can imagine, but a long tail keyword, like Botox injections in New York is easier to rank since it has lower search volume. It is less difficult to rank by localizing your search terms. Instead of Botox injections, which everybody would just love to come up number one for all around the world, what you really want to do is you want to come up wherever you are for example - those are the longer tail keywords.
They're like keywords with two, three, four, five words in them. I have to say now with a lot more voice search coming in, Google voice and Alexa, is that people are changing the way they search. They used to just type search phrases in the old days of five years ago and today they're doing things more verbally which is only going to increase. Of course, when you search something with your fingers and we search for something with your voice we tend to use a lot more words in your voice than you do typing it in. That's why long tail detailed keywords are really the ones that you want to start going for now.
The first thing we're going to do is build a pillar page for each topic on your site and then once you've built that pillar page. we're going to build pages on your site for each one of your subtopics, and then you've got a blog. Well, somebody in the office has to blog and uh, you want a blog.
Every week would be great, we blog at reputation probably three to five times per week, but starting at once a week would be great. Then you want to build and create a link building plan to measure and track your results.
There are two kinds of SEO, SEO stands for search engine optimization. There's on page and off page SEO, on page is what you do to your own site because you control your site whether it's your personal site, your clinic site or some sites for various locations - that's something that you can control.
You can really get in there and tweak it and you can go nuts doing that. Then there's off page SEO, that is what happens with other people's sites, other company sites that you don't control and you want them to do something that's going to help you in your web results..
These are harder to control unless you're a hacker which I don't recommend. The first thing that you need to do is to make a list of the topics that you want to come up for. As I said before, each topic is a bucket and is like a silo and inside of it live all of these search phrases.
You'll get access to this presentation later and you can see I've got these links on the bottom. That'll give you more information about any topic that I'm talking about and they're not just our website. There are expert websites all over the web that'll give you simple and concise, clear steps in what to do.
I'm going to give you the overview now, so you make that list of topics - but how do you do that? You brainstorm, you need to brainstorm and spend some time in the whiteboard, brainstorming topics and ideas. There aren't any bad ideas yet, there will be bad ideas later. You can also ask customers what would you be looking for in services that we provide and you're in Google - what would you ask Google or type into Google and just listen to them? What are customers saying? they're going to come up with things that you never even thought of before.
You are going to use all the big words but somebody who's looking for your services may not use the same kinds of words that you're using - that's why it's really great to listen. What search phrase did you type in and found us? that's interesting, write that down.
You want to have these topics so I've got example here on the right-hand side, Botox, dermatology, cosmetic enhancements, eczema, and things like that depending on your specialties. You want to have a handful of topics - these are really the keywords.
They're the topics that the keywords live in and your objective is to make your website, the experts on a specific topic. You want to be an authority and you want your site to be authoritative. You are brainstorming these topics and then you're going to start filling them with your keywords for these topics.
Let's say you wanted to come up with #1 for Botox - good luck! What you really want is you want keywords that relate to it. Nobody just types in Botox, they might start with that but their second search is going to be Botox injections.
You can see on the right-hand side that we use a tool that allows us to see what a lot of these search phrases are that people type in. When you think about something like Botox, you think about injections - Botox injections.
What this means is you're not just talking about the general theme about Botox, you're actually addressing each one of the different types of questions that people are asking about that particular topic and by doing that enough your site becomes an authority. Google looks at that authority and says this is probably the best site for answering all the questions, they have 300 pages on Botox and all of the possible iterations of that people are coming to the page. This site is spending time there and they're not bouncing back into search results and has authority.
You can see it says Botox injections, the KD at the top of that column means keyword difficulty. You can see that the keyword difficulty for Botox Injections is 54, which is high.
You can see can I lie down after Botox injections? it doesn't mean that not that many people are searching that phrase or doesn't mean it's not popular. It means that a lot of people are not competing for you for that particular search. If you wanted to have a page on your site about that and addressing that, there's a good chance that you're going to not have to work that hard to come up high in search results for that particular question.
In Step 2 we find key words for your site. You're going to brainstorm topics and some keywords but there are better ways to find keywords. Here is a great place to look for keywords and is just use Google, because if you do a search for Botox and then you scroll to the very bottom and you're going to see searches related to Botox. What Google is doing is taking the types of things that people search for related to that search term and they're listing them right there for you to scroll down.
You can do a search for your main topic and then scroll the bottom to see Botox pictures, Botox poison, and Botox injections. Do you need to create web content about each of these? No, of course not if it doesn't fit whatever your topic is, you don't need to.
To do that you can be very selective and pick and choose one like Botox injections, for example. Let's say that I clicked on Botox injections and I scroll the bottom again and now I can see another layer of this onion, Botox, injections, cost, and side effects, and things like that.
Somebody didn't sit around and just make these words up, these are the actual searches to the search term, Botox injections. What you're really doing to become an authority site is to ride as in search results. you start with your main topic and then you address subtype, and then you can address further subtype topics nested inside of each other.
Maybe you can start to see that the content of your website grows like the roots of a tree. The purpose of Google is to organize the world's information and if you can help Google do that by being an authority.
A lot of texts really helps, subheadings inside the text, and links to other places on your site which address more granular questions. All of these things build this tree out for you and allow you to kind of own a particular search phrase, now you can own it globally or you can own it nationally.
Owning it locally is a lot easier though, you're going to find that it's going to be a heck of a lot easier to rank locally. Always start local and then you can work your way out as you're] it grows nationwide or globally. If you don't have a clinic in Bangalore, then you probably don't care about ranking there so consider where you want your prospects to come from.
You can use fancy tools, you can just look at Google and it's totally free and you just click there and you just copy and paste all your, your words together including your main topic with all the different sort of subtopics underneath it which you can also use tools to save time.
We use AHREFS.com, it's company in Pennsylvania and what that'll do is you can get a 7-day trial for $7 and then it gets a lot more expensive. You can put a search phrase in there and it'll give you this information and it'll tell you about what the keyword difficulty is.
Botox injections is hard and it's 48, the search volume is 5.3 K and that's the national search volume. There are over 5,000 searches per month for that specific search and think if we were in the first position for Botox injections which the first position gets about 43% of all clicks, you can do the math.
You're going to get 43% of about 5,000 searches, a couple thousand searches a month just for that one search topic being in the first position. You don't have to just click through Google and AHREFS.com is a time saver. You can do the math on that and see if it's worth it for you to use a tool like a AHREFS which we use every day at reputation X, multiple times a day. These are your keywords and remember it national versus local always remember start local and you can go national later.
How do you do local? You just make sure that the geographic name is embedded in the text that you're writing about. For example, Google is going to look at your website and they're going to see where your address is because you've identified your location, using your Google, my business console. You've put your address on your site and you may have used some special code like schema or some hidden code in your website. You want to make sure the Google knows what your location or locations are and that'll really help you out.
I do want to show one other thing and look at the difference here. If you were trying to go for Botox injections in New York, the keyword difficulty for that is only eight. Not that hard to rank for in relative sense, if you're in New York right now and you're trying to rank for that you're probably rolling your eyes.
It's not nearly as hard as it would be to come up for a global search and without the New York it would be 48 that's considered hard to do.
The third step is to build a pillar page on your website for each topic so if you've got a Botox topic, you might want to have this one, long page for everything you need to know about it. Then from that page you will have snippets of the subtopics built in the little paragraphs about the subtopics and links to other pages.
You start with this sort of main page that covers all aspects of it is a good long page of 2000 word, images, videos and all of that. If you want to learn more, there's a Neil Patel blog post on pillar pages with an explanation of what pillar pages are. I highly recommend you check out his site.
Once you built that pillar page then you're going to build blog posts for each subtopic. For example, if your main keyword for your pillar page is Botox, you can then create other things like do Botox injections for migraines work? Why do we have that title in the blog post? the reason why is because the keyword you're going for the phrase is Botox injections for migraines. If you can take that key phrase and work in naturally into the title it's going to give you a much better chance of ranking for that particular keyword.
The pillar pages, the main page, and the subtopic pages work together. For example, WebMD starts with this pillar page and then it says in this article, how does Botox work? How is Botox procedure done? those are all links within the article and also pages that are related to that on the site so you can see how it's this, you know, everything's related to each other.
They've not only addressed the overall topic but they've addressed each of the sub topics individually as well in that pillar page. You can see how this thing's growing here with pages working together and the have 300 or 400 blog posts.
You can borrow, borrow from the best but don't copy back if you wanted to rank for something. You don't want to copy the text that anybody has and it needs to be absolutely unique. People still think all I have to do is copy the text and put it in - that actually doesn't really work.
If you can just look at the top three search results for whatever search phrase you're going for and read them, question the video, or whatever you need to do and understand that your objective is to make something that's clearly better than what they're writing about. That's the thing, it doesn't have to be longer but needs to be better and long article doesn't hurt. You want it to be better, stronger and you want it to be faster.
You can see here that you want your headline to have your search phrase in it and you want to have a subhead with more text that explains more about what it is and what people are asking for. You want to make sure you've got the answers in your blog posts.
You've created a subheading inside your pillar page that now links out to something that expands on that topic. You keep doing that and you've got supporting articles that you can link to external articles as well. Remember, linking to external articles is good but it's not nearly as good as linking to an article that's better on your own website. Internal articles on your website Google is going to eat this up guaranteed, it works for us and it works for our clients.
How many of you click on five ways to know why a cat vomits? I never knew that there were five ways to do that and you're going to click on it - you guys do it all the time admit it.
The reason they do that is because they would think that clicky headlines and put a question in someone's mind hopefully make somebody say I've got to click on that. I need to find out what happened and they do. Once they get there, they have to be satisfied with that, that you're satisfying their need for that information and they don't click back.
That's why you need good content that people don't come to your site and then think that's horrible and then click away. Google sees that somebody came to your site and they immediately left, it's called a bounce and that is bad.
Google sees that was a really good headline but apparently the content on the page sucked and so the site will drop in rankings. If that happens too often and your site has a high bounce rate, you can drop out of all kinds of search results, even ones that you're not directly competing for - it really does weaken your site.
Content really is King and we can also utilize video which is really great. One of the great things you can do with video is interview somebody then take the text and you put that text in the content. You can use or you can just take the text I'm saying right now and put it into text on the website that you've got auto-generated texts that you can put on your website.
You didn't have to write it but you do need to edit it a little bit and Google looks at it and they eat it up. People like to also come and see videos because they spend time on it and if you have a three minute video, if you've got a video that's three minutes and they're going to read the stuff and watch the video then you got them to stay on your page for 4 minutes.
Google watches all this behavior and watches everything you do even when your computer's off and they're going to see what you do and they're going to see what other people do. They're going to see that they came and they had a long dwell time on your page and they spend a lot of time on your page and it did not bounce. Video really helps you with that because people can chill out and watch the video.
To get back at point, what do you mean I have to blog? How often do I have to blog? if you do it once a week, that'd be great if you can't do it once a month, but just do it in the way that I'm talking about here. At reputation X we do new blog posts one to five times per week and we'll do maybe one or two blog posts of our own. We also invite contributors who know about our space and who can write about it and we have our content manager take a look at what has been submitted to us - those are called guest posts.
While we might have one or two of our own, we might have two or three guest posts that other people want to put on our site each week. It costs us nothing, except for the editing time to get these guests posts and we have a little link at the bottom all of our pages which states write for us.
People look for right for us in the SEO space and their reputation management space and they come to our site and they write for us because they want links and they want to get their name out there as writers and we're happy to help them.
It's fine, it's not spammy and it helps search results. That's how you can blog five times a week without actually having to blog five times a week. If you're a single practitioner and you've got to do your finances, your marketing and your SEO or you actually have to do your job it becomes kind of difficult to do that. Oftentimes you can outsource to somebody, but in the medical field you need outsource to somebody who knows what they're talking about. You can't just accept random people who want to write for you and they're trying to get a link from you. You can't put that stuff up on your website, especially in the medical field, you have to have experts doing it and you might have to pay people
At the bottom there is a content plan created for you, this is the actual content plan that we use. I've got three things in that content plan so a content plan is something you definitely want to use because it keeps you organized. If you just say we're going to blog more often, you're going to blog probably for the first week, maybe two and then you're going to forget about it - create a content plan. We already know all of the blog posts we're going to write for our blog for the next year.
I've got the parent topic for the whole year in column C as well as the subtopic, the title of the article, and the actual URL. We use the word count as to how long it should be and we shoot for a thousand to 2000 words, if we can. We even put in the first paragraph if we're having somebody write it because we want to make sure we control the first few sentences and make sure we get our search phrases in there.
Many people who write professionally are paid on the number of words right? Paying them 10 or 20 or 30 cents a word allows them to put a lot of fluff and filler in there since that's how they get paid. You don't want to find people who are blah, you have really need to just cut to the chase.
Have bullet points at the top of your blog if you need to, but you need to satisfy people within two seconds. That's why we want to make sure that we always write that first paragraph whether we're having our internal team doing it or whether we're farming it out or guest post. We'll rewrite the first paragraph as well as edit the whole thing to some degree and you're going to definitely want to do that.
Let’s talk about off page SEO here which is to develop a link building plan. For example, if you have the same content on two different sites or close to the same sites and everything else being equal and site A has no other websites linking to that content and site B has 25 links, B is going to shoot up in search results and yours is going to be lost. I don't care if you spent 4 hours writing it, it doesn't matter but you have to have some links coming into it, at least one or two links.
This is sneaky, but it works to find sites that are linking to your competitors and you steal their links. You go to the sites that are linking to your competitors and you contact them. and you say I notice you're linking to this article over here but we've got this new article way better.
Would you consider for the sake of your users changing the link from our competitor’s article to our article, which is clearly better. I encourage you to click on the link and they'll look at your article and it's so good and think this is the best darn article I've ever seen on this particular subject and they will change the link.
So, how do you do this? A friend sites. The first place I start right is with your friends, right? You start with friends from medical school, people from conferences, et cetera and reach out to them. You can do an outreach email by just asking them for a link or saying that you're going to share some content that you're going to create for their website which will link to your website.
You can get links from existing content, go and find other experts have written on this and say we have this really great thing and we've got a great reference on our site and would probably help if you would link from this. They'll often do it but unfortunately not nearly often enough. You can go to blog directories, Google blog directories, or best blog directories and if you've got a blog with good content you can submit it to the directory.
The directory is going to have a little blurb that you'll probably write about that and then they're going to link to your blog or to your posts - that's a good way of doing it. There's a lot of free links out there, don't forget about your chamber of commerce locally. You want to have your chamber of commerce linked to your site, but you might want to have your chamber of commerce linked to a separate page in your site not the homepage.
Why wouldn't you boost that particular page in search results? Conversions are why you want to build these links from other sites to the most converting page. You're going to get linked naturally to your homepage so link to your subpages. You want to make sure that every subpage on your site has as a minimum of one really good link.
This is how you learn how to get links, I've already given you a link here, moz.com which is a beginner's guide to link building campaign. Moz.com will give you pretty exhausting information about exactly how to do this.
As I mentioned earlier that you can send an email, start with friends and they're much more likely to return your email. Google likes sites with a lot of authority and if you send it off to somebody saying if you can help me out and I'm looking to expand our internet presence. I'd like to write an article for your website and it would help your Google SEO as well as ours. Would you be open to that? You can send these out and offer to create content for other people's websites explaining to them it's going to help them in Google. It's also going to help you as well, because you're going to embed a link in it. That's called guest posting, but start with people you know and then once you've exhausted that you can start with people you don't know - it's called outreach.
You also need to measure your success. Hopefully most of you have something like Google analytics on your site. If you don't, I strongly encourage you to get it and you want to be able to measure everything that happens on your site. Use Google analytics to track how many more links does your website have than it did last month or if you went the quality of your links. Are they links from Russian PR companies or are they links from people and clinics in your industry? What is the traffic is your website, is traffic going up? Are links that are coming into your awesome content? Are they generating website traffic? Which pages or links are generating the most traffic? If you've got an article that's just suddenly generating a lot of traffic, don't just sit back and update the blog post so to move to the top of your list - make it better.
Then of course you want conversions, how many people are signing up and they're filling out a form? That's how you track your conversions so track and measure your success and that's how you do that. There is Google analytics and also Google Search Console which is also free for tracking domains. Unless you use software it's virtually impossible so Google search console is going to help you figure that out.
For example, this is our link building over the years. You can see starting in 2015 we had hardly any links and over time we've been doing exactly what I'm telling you to do right now and you can see that over time we've got 450 links that doesn't even include hundreds of domains lost through link attrition.
You want to track how many links you're getting? You also want to track your search phrases. The first step it was to create those buckets with the topics and then have the sedan well, subheadings and the subtopics.
Well, these subtopics for us is reputation management. We rank number one for all of these things and it's because of the content on our site and inbound links. You can track these things and see where they go like your stocks and you want them to be going up all of the time, even though they won't.
This particular tool is called SEMrush, semrush.com, and that's what we use to track our rankings. It's not free while Google search console is free and you can use that as well but it's just not quite as user friendly.
Here's bonus step number #1 and that is the speed of your website. Google likes fast sites and several years ago they went to mobile first search, which means that they don't care how fast your site really is on a desktop computer since they've already got a fast internet connection. They're using the sort of lowest common denominator here and what they're looking for is does your site perform well on mobile searches? Your website is judged on how fast it loads on a phone.
Our current homepage is not fast enough so we used Google Page Insights to measure the speed. We got a score how fast our current homepage loads and only had a score of 48. We do pretty well but it only has 48, there's a lot of room for improvement. We paid a company, third party company, to come in about $6,000 and they're optimizing our site.
We're not changing the design but what they're doing is going through and reducing size images and they're taking out unneeded JavaScript and a bunch of other technical things to speed that page up. They're also making different versions of the pages that will load faster on mobile devices or on tablets or on desktop computer.
I have a lot of work going into it and so you can see right there our numbers have gone from 48 to 63 and it's not done yet. It won't be done for a month, so we're tracking it and it's only going on for a couple of weeks that they've been doing this optimization on our side. We're already up to 63, just in our sandbox site.
I gave you the URL. if you want to look at the sandbox site and see how that works. You just type that super long URL into it and our goal is to get 85 or even 90 - that's how fast we want our site to be. Most sites are built using the WordPress platform and while WordPress is really great there's not a lot of overhead in that.
There are lots of plugins you can use as well to speed things up and it does a lot of really great things. One thing it does horrifically is page speed so be careful of the platform you use. WordPress is really great for most or a big organization with a lot of things going on.
We've got kind of a more robust system, but the problem is HubSpot and we'll keep but it really needs to be tweaked because it has a lot of overhead in the code that slows the site down. Walmart figured if they can speed their site up by 2 seconds of loading time they would get 10% or 20% increase in purchases or some giant amount by speeding up the site.
Maybe in the office you can't do that but you can certainly think about it and bring it up with your developers. All we do is go in and we reduce the size of their images so they're super small and fast. They don't look any smaller, but they are smaller to Google.
Be careful that your website is secure, the little locker in the upper left-hand corner of your browser. Well, if it's not locked that means your site's not secure and your site should start with HTTPS. It's worth it to buy security and Google will show you better results if you use a secure domain, um. Also, refresh your blog posts, just because you write a blog post doesn't mean you sit back, we suggest doing it at least twice a year. Just go back to your old blog posts and refresh them and update the information.
Google will also notice the changes to your blog posts, Google will crawl your site more often when you have fresh content. It's also a lot quicker and cheaper to go back to your old content and upgrade it than writing a blog post. It will increase your search volume and will increase your search rankings to do that while increasing your conversions to give you more business and money.
When you're done or when you've sort of plateaued try this all on your own. When you've done the best that you can possibly do then use a third-party agency. Reputation X is great and I work there, that's why I say that there are other great companies as well. We'll take it off your hands and move it definitely to the next level and it'll happen a lot faster cause we have fancy tools.
Everything works together and you can do all of this and have more conversions, have better search results, and you'll be an authority in your space so you'll be able to retire a lot earlier. Thank you very much, Appreciate it!
