As far as being an authority online in the field of medical businesses go, Google is the best to become so. A medical business needs to convince its patients to in order to gain them. Furthermore, patients nowadays depend fastidiously on Google to base their opinion of a medical business.

If a medical business doesn’t show up on Google, it isn’t an option they chose to get their medical care from. Google is turning into a significant platform of how patients find medical businesses and medical care in their neighborhood. Google is without a doubt the main spot where patients seek you out, estimate your online presence, and get the information to contact you.

But what if your medical business doesn’t just show up on Google but is favored by it? Obviously, Google can’t favor businesses but there is a way to achieve the closest thing to that. Google is now allowing businesses to get verified and create a “Google Presence”. 

What Is Google Presence?

Google is one the biggest places you get your patient flux from. You target almost 90% of your marketing efforts, whether SEO, PPC, or SEM. But in order to become a verified authority, you must have “Google Presence”.

 Google presence refers to having your medical business show up in a verified way, whenever a patient looks you up. Not only does it add to your online standing but drives patient traffic and increases your business’s market value.

How Do You Create A Google Presence?

To create a Google presence, you must get your medical business verified. To achieve that, you must create a Google My Business (GMB) profile. Google My Business is a no-cost tool for businesses to manage their presence online. As the name indicates, Google My Business permits you to make a professional profile on Google.

It ensures that the medical business always shows up with you the primary data patients need, to visit your medical facility or medical site. Creating a GMB profile increase the market value of your medical business and portrays it as an “authority” to patients.

What Are The Benefits Of Creating A Google Presence?

Google is the biggest mainstream search engine online. It receives 63,000 searches per second in a day. Now imagine having your medical business basically being “rooted” for whenever someone looks up “medical clinic near me”. By adding all your SEO marketing efforts along with your Google presence, your medical business will be unbeatable.

Your Medical Business To Shows Up in Google Maps Searches

While a fast Google search is the most straightforward way to seek out a medical business, most patients use Google Maps to find medical businesses near them. By creating a Google My Business profile and finishing getting verified, your medical business along with your medical facility will begin to show up for patients who are located near you. This is an extraordinary advantage that permits patients to find a medical business near them right away. 

Get Listed In Google’s Local 3-Pack

By making a Google My Business profile and creating a Google presence, you can increase your chances of making it Google’s highly fought after listing. This listing is called Google’s Local Pack.

All your SEO efforts have one objective, and that is to get into this listing. By creating a GMB profile, your medical business will appear before organic searches. This increases your business’s visibility and presence.

Permits You Free Google Advertising

Marketing your medical business via SEO is a great way to gain patients, however, it may not always work out. This is why you seek after paid ads. But by creating a GMB profile, you can avoid both and advertise for free.

A Google My Business profile offers a  quick and free advertising option for you on Google. With this advertising campaign, you make the most of Google’s traffic, converting them into your own while costing you next to nothing.

Induces Patient Traffic And Generates Leads

Just by having a GMB profile and your medical business appearing in neighborhood searches of patients, you are 70% more bound to pull in patients flowing to your medical business.

Just by having the name of Google next to yours is enough for patients to pick you. A survey lead in 2018 found that patients who discover a medical busy via their Google My Business profile are 50% more likely to pick them for medical care.

Having A Google Presence Is Vital For Your Medical Business

Creating a Google presence via creating a Google My Business profile is perhaps the most beneficial approach to help your medical business’ online standing and gaining the spot of your area’s patient searches. Having a Google presence strengthens your medical business’s foundation and further supports it as it gains success.

SEO, SMM, SEM, and PPC all seem so interrelated with each other when you are a doctor testing your hand in medical marketing. However, correlated they may be, they all stem from their parent marketing strategy known as Search Marketing. To become a successful medical business owner, online you must understand the links and routes of search marketing to promote your medical business in the most profit inducing way.

Search marketing is a fundamental marketing system for online businesses to get traffic, stand out and develop their business online. Yet, search marketing can be quite a cumbersome task if you can’t get its basics right. Those basics involve free medical SEO and paid SEM.

Understanding the difference between paid SEM and free medical SEO, their strategies, and their relationship is crucial for you to get your medical business to stand out online and begin generating leads for you. Their names may sound quite similar; however, they are two different marketing tactics to deal with online promotion and marketing.

What is Free Medical SEO?

Free SEO services or just simply put, Search Engine Optimization is the part of the search marketing system that utilizes completely organic strategies to acquire visibility and patient traffic in search engine result pages or SERPs. With free medical SEO, you as an online medical business don’t have to pay for your ranking on SERPs.

What is Paid SEM?

Similar in name entirely different in nature, paid SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the part of the search marketing system that acquires patient traffic and leads by using paid ads to pop up on SERPs. A paid SEM campaign incorporates setting up the objectives for acquiring patient traffic and improving the ads as the campaign ventures on. With paid SEM, you get what you paid for.

When To Use Free Medical SEO Tools

Using medical SEO as a sole marketing strategy won’t cost you but it also means that you are advancing with it knowing there isn’t a definitive chance you would be getting patient traffic proportional to your SEO endeavors. By employing medical SEO, you step forward with the best hopes and uncertainty. This doesn’t mean SEO isn’t a successful marketing strategy but it always does not scratch up to the effort you put into it.

However, there are certain circumstances where the need of employing SEO strategies becomes dire. These cases include:

• When you can play around with medical keywords: You don’t want to spend your marketing budget excessively on medical keywords that aren’t especially competitive. This is where you can use free medical SEO for your benefit.

• When you are suffering from a tight marketing budget: This is the situation when employing SEO isn’t just the best however the only choice. Paid ads won’t help you much if you cannot properly spend on them. If you want to keep up your patient traffic flow, using medical SEO is your only choice. 

• When you are starting out: It is almost foolish to spend all your marketing capital in using paid ads if you are just starting out with your medical business. To get familiar with online search marketing, you must first experiment and discover and the best way to do all that while earning patient traffic is using SEO as your initial marketing strategy.

When To Use Paid SEM Strategies

While medical SEO is one of the most popular and successful marketing strategies of search marketing, it doesn’t always earn back the same ROI as put into it. With employing SEO as your marketing strategy, you don’t always get the flux of patient traffic as you hope. This is where most businesses choose to also look into paid ads or paid SEM. Paid SEM always pays out but it becomes necessary to make it your marketing strategy when you are experiencing cases such as:

• When you are suffering from an algorithm change: It is known that algorithm changes can get your rankings down in a blink of an eye, which is why everyone who owns an online business dreads them. To earn your rankings back, employing paid SEM is the most fastest and secure. Not only does it helps your medical business get its rankings back but also stabilizes it.

• When you have competitive medical keywords: It is very foolhardy to use SEO for your campaign of competitive medical keywords. Not only are they precious but require extra care in marketing them. To earn all their worth, using paid SEM is the best and profit inducing way. 

• When you need a great flux of patient traffic in a limited time:  Free SEO takes time to reach out and start earning patient traffic back. Simply waiting for your medical SEO to kick in won’t get you anywhere if you need patients, fast. Using paid SEM can help you achieve that is faster and better. Your paid SEM campaign starts earning your patient traffic immediately after its initiation.

Do Paid SEM Strategies Affect Your Medical SEO?

However similar they may sound, your paid SEM strategies and your free medical SEO strategies don’t really affect each other. While they both revolve around medical keywords, their way of working, earning patient traffic and maintenance is entirely different.

While one is free and the other requires you to buy it, they both require effort and attentiveness. It is smart, however, to employ both if you want a healthy flow of patient traffic. It is advised that you should start out with just SEO and later look into paid SEM to avoid any unfortunate financial losses.

Using Paid SEM and Free SEO To Promote Medical Business

Paid SEM and free medical SEO are both successful marketing strategies of search marketing. Both of them have their qualities and shortcomings and for best outcomes, the smart way is to employ both to market your online medical services. You simply need to explore them both until you settle on a ground that you know fits best your business objectives and goals.

Medical businesses offering telehealth has become a norm. It is a service that patients expect to see offered by every established medical business, whether pandemic or not. However, incorporating telehealth services into your business framework is no easy thing. Deciding to offer telehealth services resembles beginning another business.

To offer telehealth services, there are certain rules and guidelines to follow, a framework of the process of incorporating telehealth into your medical business, and realizing how much worth you will get out of offering it. It is a complex process, nonetheless, but it can be made easier if you follow a guide and know your way around it.  

What Is Telehealth Services?

Telehealth services are a way of medical businesses offering their medical services to patients in a virtual medium. Instead of patients physically being in a medical facility to receive medical care, it is provided to them in their homes by video calls, voice calls, or virtual app consultations.

How To Set Up Telehealth Services For A Medical Business?

Similar to extending your medical business, deciding to offer telehealth services can become a jumbled mess if you don’t have a structured game plan. Here is a game plan that will help you figure out how to assemble a telehealth program:

Base Analysis

This is a fore step that will help you calculate the base measurements and figure out the rest of your strategy. The base analysis consists of carrying out a sort of survey that will help you realize the market for your program and recognize the persona of your patients, which will distinguish your intended patient group.

Design And Structure

The core objective of designing your telehealth program is satisfying your patient’s needs and exceeding their experience. Numerous telehealth program designers make telehealth programs that perform very well from a technical perspective, yet come up short when it comes to the patient experience.

Quality Testing

Once you have a prototype of your telehealth program, test it out by creating a fake group of patient profiles. If it runs smoothly through them, you can carry on. This is a fundamental step in creating a telehealth program as it gives you insight into your progress, shows what is lacking and what can be improved.

Polish And Finesse

The second to last step is making sure all the rough ends of your telehealth program are tied. The things you should consider rechecking before launching your telehealth program services are:

• Simple for patients and staff to use and operate.
• HIPPA complaint
• Safe and free of any errors
• Eligible for bearing patient traffic load

Launch And Feedback

Finally, after quality tests and final checkups, you should have a working telehealth program at your hands at this stage. Make sure you announce its launch on every promotional and marketing platform. Moreover, its promotion is something you should be carrying out months before its launch so patients can look forward to it. Once you launch it, keep your eyes open for any sort of feedback.

What Are The Benefits Of Providing Telehealth Services?

Aside from the fact that telehealth services are now considered the norm and a defining aspect of a medical business’s success and reputation, they are beneficial both for the patient and the medical business providing it.

Builds Your Patient Reach

Distance and travel time among patients and medical businesses can restrict their relationship. You would be surprised to know how many patients are impressed by your online standing, medical site, and services but will not pick you if you are far away from them. By offering telehealth services, that loss of patients is revived.

Improves Patient Experience

If you are a successful medical business, your waiting room likely stays crowded. This can mean a negative point for you, however, because patients don’t want to wait to receive medical care. With introducing telehealth services, patients don’t have to wait at all. It improves their overall experience and may end up with them leaving a positive review for you.

Convenient and Accessible Medical Care

Virtually receiving medical care is favored by at least 74% of patients worldwide. Not only is it a convenient way to provide medical care but a favored way to receive it by patients. With pre-made appointments, it is time-saving, convenient, and accessible than in-person visits.

What Are The Guidelines For Setting Up A Telehealth Service

Even after following the game plan above, there are still guidelines that you have to follow when you decide to offer telehealth services to your patients.

Deciding When To Use Telehealth

Telehealth cannot cover all your medical services for doctors. There is still some medical care that will require you to do in-person visits. Still, you can offer telehealth services to patients who want medical care for diabetes, hypertension, mental sickness/social wellbeing, etc. It is up to the medical business to decide when it is agreeable to provide medical care via telehealth.

Virtual Prescriptions

Prescriptions on telehealth are a tricky matter. As mentioned before, for certain medical conditions, such as mental wellbeing, it is alright to provide virtual prescriptions. But the doctor must have a prior relationship with the patient before prescribing.

Educating Your Patient

You must inform and thoroughly educate your patients before providing them telehealth services, They must know every aspect of the program and the security you will provide their personal information. Only after their consent, can you provide them telehealth services.

It Is Now A Medical Business Necessity To Offer Telehealth

It is important for a medical business nowadays to offer telehealth services, whether in the form of an app or just plain virtual consultations. Not only is it crucial for your business’s success but for improving your patient’s experience.

Getting backlinks through a natural and organic way is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks in medical marketing. While you may come across many sites that will claim you to get a thousand guest post backlinks per day, their worth and strength will be next to nothing when you go through a search engine algorithm change.

This is why medical guest posts are an incredible SEO and backlink acquiring tool when utilized accurately. Essentially, there are two advantages to guest post. To start with, you get to advertise your medical business to various patient crowds and increase your patient traffic, and secondly, you get several organic backlinks to your medical website design.

If you post on a truly mainstream medical blog, you can get a big flux of direct patient traffic to your medical site. The next best benefit of medical guest posting? You get truly organic and authentic backlinks that can withstand any search engine algorithm changes. If the site that is hosting your medical posts is a high ranking one and it is in your field of business, it adds to the strength and power of the backlinks.

Find Medical Sites That Host Guest Blogging

This is where you might want to spend a little more attentiveness on and pick out the host sites that have high rankings. Numerous sites that host guest posts have a different segment or page where they list their guest posting rules. Simply type in your niche of guest posting or medical field on Google followed by “guest blog,” “write for us,” etc.

For instance, in case you own a medical business that provides orthodontic services, you could look for:

“Orthodontist” + “guest post”

“Orthodontist” + “contributor”

“Orthodontist” + “write for us”

These search terms may help you come up with guest posting host sites. Pick out several of them and observe each. Read their rules and choose the ones that will collaborate best with your objectives and type of medical guest posts.

Keep A Close Eye On Your Rival’s Backlinks

While the saying “it is always best to know what the enemy is saying” would be too extreme in this situation, it is however a good practice to always keep an eye out for your rival’s success and their method of achieving it.

You can learn a lot from your rivals if they have a successful medical business. Find out what host sites they are using and will they work for you. To figure the rate of your rival’s backlink generation, you can use the tools such as Moz Link Explorer to see the sources and rate of generation of their backlinks.

Refine Your Medical Content Ideas

Guest posting is a much more serious task than just posting medical content on your medical site’s blog. You need to be more precise when picking out medical content ideas fr your guest post. Think of the ones that you know patients want from you. Once again, research and see what is working out for, for instance, other Orthodontists online.

You can also use tools like BuzzSumo to come up with medical content ideas. You can also use some more online tools like CoSchedule to come up with great post titles. Once again, see the host site and what kind of medical guest post they allow, this can help you base your ideas for your own medical guest posts to pitch to them.

Start Your Medical Outreach

It is now the defining stage for your medical guest blogging to acquire backlinks. Revert back to the host site of your choice and click on their “Get in touch with us”. Attempt to search for an email address if available. If not, you can make use of their contact forms.

That is the simple part. The more troublesome part is to pitch and sell your idea to high-authority online host sites. A simple and straightforward email is probably not going to give you a great result. You can follow them on social media platforms and get in touch with them.

That is an extraordinary method of making yourself known. If you have a successful medical business, following them on social media online will do the trick. You won’t even have to pitch your guest posts, they’ll offer to have them on their host site for you.

Compose Your Medical Guest Posts

If you get offered to post on a host site or your pitch gets accepted, it is now time to carefully maneuver what you have got to say. You need to come up with medical content that is precise, has a mention of your medical services, and will get patients to click on it. A couple of key things to be remembered when composing these medical posts are:

• Always make sure that your medical guest posts follow the rules and guidelines of the host site.
• Your medical guest posts must be SEO compatible.
• Always provide a link back to your medical site. This is a crucial practice in order to get backlinks from your medical guest posts.

Track and Measure

Now is the time to stand back and observe. You may not get it right from the first few tries, yet with practice, you will definitely notice your medical guest posts generating backlinks for you. Guest writing for a host site is a tedious and cumbersome task.

After the submission of your first batch of guest posts, track their performance see what is lacking and what needs work. Compare yours to other guest posts on that host site. SEO experts to keep track of your backlink profile and generation. Make sure to set up regular backlink checks to keep track.

Gaining Backlinks Via Medical Guest Posting Still Works

Many marketing experts assert for guest posts to acquire backlinks. When an authoritative and legitimate host site displays your medical posts bearing your medical business’s name, your backlink generation speeds up. The quality of these backlinks is organic and verified by Google itself.

Search engine algorithm changes are something that everyone who owns an online business dreads. A single algorithm change is enough to jumble up any rankings you have and change your patient traffic rate and can take your medical site from its high ranking and push it way down to the second search result page.

Search Engine Algorithm

While search engine algorithm changes are updated for improving the user experience, they can be the cause of all your marketing efforts going down the drain. Algorithm changes are unavoidable and there are few things that can protect your medical site from getting the full hit of them.

It is said that if your medical site follows white-hat SEO practices, you are safe from the algorithm changes; it can still be affected by them, nonetheless. Even if Google doesn’t disclose the secrets of how it ranks sites after an algorithm change, it does provide some useful protocols that can protect your medical site from the get-go.

Use Your Medical Content As Armor

Your medical content is the bread and butter for your medical site. It decides your medical site’s success and can be the saving factor for it when you go through an algorithm change. You should protect your medical site by posting protective medical content on it that will be reason enough for patients to seek out your medical site and get you those high rankings.

Your medical content is something that plays a permanent role in building up your online standing and you can benefit from it for several months after posting it on your site. Google recognizes valuable content and regards it highly.

If your medical content is of such a high-quality that patients especially seek it out on the internet, Google will have no choice but to keep your medical site in its high-ranking lists and keep you sheltered from the algorithm storm.

Perform Weekly Site Audits

Site audits should be on your to-do lists from the very start. Every successful online business carries out regular site audits to identify the aspects of their sites that are flourishing, the ones that need work, and the ones that should be taken down. Site audits are especially useful for protecting your medical site against search engine algorithm changes as well.

By carrying out weekly site audits, you can be made aware of the three main aspects of your medical site that Google looks into. These three defining aspects are:

• Site loading time
• Site indexing
• Site navigation

Excel in all three of these and Google won’t find a reason to throw your medical site in the algorithm storm and mess up your rankings. By carrying out a site audit, you can find out the loading time of your medical site and work on it to improve it, correct your site indexing and simplify your site’s navigation. 

Besides that, you can also check whether your Google My Business profile is updated and running, your medical content meets Google’s guidelines (content that should be longer than 500 words but shorter than 2000 words), and that each page of your medical site is unique and purposeful.  

Stick With Your Target Medical Keywords

The best way to avoid letting all your rankings flow away with an algorithm change is to create some base strengths and keep them strong enough to endure anything. Picking out target medical keywords is one of them.

While you can experiment and test while carrying out a keyword campaign, set aside your core medical keywords and work on improving them so they can protect you from any algorithm change. Don’t be fooled by the idea of choosing extra keywords to encourage more traffic during an algorithm change.

This can cause you to lose the keywords that work for you and any chances of patient traffic. These new keywords can weaken the importance of your current target keywords and therefore you may lose a large portion of the patient traffic you generally get. This can expand the effect of the algorithm change.

Focus On Authentic Linking

There is a very popular saying regarding backlinks that goes as “be wary of the bite of a backlink”. The truth of this saying may hit you during an algorithm change if you are not careful with where you get your medical backlinks from. During an algorithm change, Google specifically picks out sites that have weak and unauthorized sources for their backlinks.

 If your medical site is one of them, you may end up losing more than just your rankings. To avoid this predicament, simply employ backlinks from safe and authorized sources that Google recognizes and be sure to have them generate at a safe rate.

Generating backlinks too fast may also end up with your medical site getting in Google’s list of suspicious sites. According to the latest algorithm change, Google’s main focus isn’t on the volume of backlinks but rather on the authenticity of their sources.

Keep Other Doors Of Patient Traffic Open

Aside from losing your rankings, an algorithm change can cost you losing your patient traffic as well. This can affect you even more if you only use your medical site to promote your medical services. To avoid losing so much patient traffic, simply create different traffic inducing platforms to keep up your patient flow.

Social media is especially beneficial in this case since you are not leaving all your eggs in one basket. By using social media marketing for medical practice to promote your medical services, you are creating different doors for patients to find you in case your medical site is suffering from an algorithm change and your rankings are down.

Search Engine Algorithm Changes Are For Improving User Experience

While search engine algorithm changes may negatively affect sites, they are designed to improve user experience. If any site fails to keep up with the new algorithm guidelines, it simply gets weeded out by it. To avoid suffering from the same fate, make sure your medical site is safe by the above 5 protective protocols.

The medical field is continually evolving, new practices and ways getting introduces to make the healthcare industry better than before. Though telemedicine was introduced a while ago, the usage of its services now has been greater than ever, especially now in the current period of the pandemic. It is now expected out of every known medical business to provide telemedicine services to their patients.

Gaining patients is no walk in the park, which is why most successful medical businesses offer telemedicine as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) so they can at all times stay connected with their patients and never give them a chance of deserting their medical services. These medical businesses offer telemedicine services as a monthly subscription service while staying HIPAA compliant.

What is Telemedicine?

Telemedicine is possible one of the convenient and advanced approaches to offer medical services to patients. Medical businesses and service providers make use of phones and the internet by doing virtual calls, and group consultations to offer their services without having the patient visit their medical facility, physically.

Besides offering consultation to patients, doctors use telemedicine to do therapy sessions and group conducts while maintaining a safe environment for everyone. It is a convenient and comfortable option of providing and receiving medical services for both doctors and patients.

Why Should You Offer Telemedicine Services?

Telemedicine has been around for quite some time now, but its rate of use has been quadrupled several times these past decades. It is now considered a primary service that all online medical businesses must offer to remain credible and renowned everywhere.

Convenient and Accessible

It is often difficult for patients to receive medical care from a medical business if they are situated far away. Even if they are impressed by your marketing efforts and what you have got to offer by having a look at your medical site, they might not choose your medical services if you are located far away from them.

This is why offering telemedicine medicine services may help you to keep those patients who are far away from you. No one wants to leave the comfort of their homes and drive for hours to receive medical care. A study done a while back showed 74% of patients choose medical businesses with telemedicine services over the medical businesses that don’t.

Offering telemedicine services is the most convenient form of providing medical care as a doctor. Additionally, it also saves the patient from idly sitting in the waiting room of a medical facility and just receive their medical care via their due virtual appointment. By offering telemedicine services you not only make the whole process of providing medical care easier for but also for your patients. It also cancels out the chances of you losing potential patients due to distance issues.

Improves Patient Engagement

Back then, it was quite easy to gain patients and keep them engaged since there weren’t many choices for them to pick from. However, times have changes marginally and patients are more educated than ever, they require the best of your medical services to convince them to pick you as their choice of a medical service provider.

If potential patients come across your medical business but see that you do not offer telemedicine services, they won’t be as impressed by you and may likely consider picking another medical business. Offering telemedicine also plays out in your favor since you can offer your medical services even in case of any natural emergencies that require you to close your medical facility temporarily. This way you don’t lose patients but gain more and keep the existing ones engaged. 

Offers Support To Your Budget

Every business runs into financially tough spots every once in a while. If you are struggling to offer your medical services at your medical facility, offering them through telemedicine may help you keep up your medical business in that financial crunch. Since it requires nothing but just being on the call, you can save a lot of money by avoiding expenses that would naturally come across you if you were seeing patients at your medical facility.

Offering telemedicine services is an aid for your business’s budget and can help you cut down over-employing staff and save some money. It also financially helps the patients as well since they don’t have to drive all the way up to a medical facility to receive medical care. Receiving medical care via telemedicine is a way that a lot of patients prefer.

Keeps Up Your Medical Business During Covid-19

Covid-19 has been the cause of many medical businesses closing down due to social distancing. However, your medical business can stay up and running if it offers telemedicine services. Since offering medical care to patients via telemedicine doesn’t require any physical contact, you are safe to carry out seeing patients and keeping up your medical business. This is one of the biggest solutions to carry on your medical practice and business and not lose any patients along the way due to the pandemic.

Telemedicine Is The New Way Of Online Medical Care

Telemedicine is a service that is being offered by almost every able medical business on the internet. Patients especially seek out and favor medical businesses that offer telemedicine services since it is something that is amiable for both doctors and patients. You should consider offering it too, if you haven’t already to gain new patients, retain the ones you have already and keep them engaged.