Is your medical website in good SEO health? Is it able to perform its activities of daily living, such as engaging visitors on the internet and bringing you new patients? If your medical website suffers fatigue, lethargy and social isolation, you may need to perform an SEO health check.
Keeping your medical website healthy is similar to helping a patient maintain his health – both require periodic checkups. Performing a health check on your medical website helps you detect asymptomatic abnormalities that might cause future problems in search engine results.
Grab your stethoscope and tongue depressor, and get ready to perform an SEO health check on your medical website.
General Appearance
Assess the general appearance of your website. Look for broken links, missing graphics and poor navigation. Search engines use robots that “crawl” around your website. Broken links prevent the robots from crawling around your website; this negatively affects your rankings on those search engines. Use a free broken link checker for quick results.
Vital Signs
Check your website statistics to find out if its number of visitors is within normal range. Higher visitor rates are optimal, of course, and need no further treatment. Anemic visitor rates indicate further examination and testing is necessary. Use a free keyword density analyzer for fast keyword analysis of your website.
HEENT
Keywords are the head, eyes, ears, nose and throat of website SEO. Internet users type keywords into Google and other search engines in hopes of finding your website – you must simply predict which keywords your patients will use then sprinkle them throughout your website.
Keyword placement inside content should resemble a Snellen eye chart, where E, FP and TOZ are your strongest keywords and DEFPOTEC is your weakest keyword. For even better SEO results from your keywords, make your keywords resemble an hourglass inside your text with your most important keywords appearing frequently in the first and last paragraphs.
Check your title tags and meta descriptions. Your website’s title tag should appear in the browser chrome, which is that border around your web browser window, and in search engine results. Make sure your title tags are keyword rich, with the most important keywords appearing as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.
SEO Heart Check
Page content is the heart of SEO. Website writers should provide relevant, keyword-rich content to keep your website page rank at optimal health. Each page should contain quality content and be free from errors.
Check your website’s BMI to make sure your site is not bloated and overweight. Duplicate content can cause negative health effects for your medical website, similar to unhealthy effects of excess body fat. Like visceral fat around your website’s abdomen, duplicate content slows load times and causes sluggish performance. Copyscape is a free and easy way to check for duplicate content.
Musculoskeletal Assessment
For maximum SEO performance, your website should be fast and strong. Your website should load quickly or you will lose visitors. According to KISSmetrics, 47 percent of website users expect a site to load in less than two seconds; 40 percent of people will leave if your website takes more than three seconds to load.
Performing regular SEO health checks keeps your medical website healthy and vital. Schedule an appointment with your SEO practitioner to learn more about optimizing the search engine health of your medical website.
Lynn H is a medical writer and content marketing specialist. She works with B2B and B2C organizations to promote brand awareness and increase sales.
