24 Jan
As a doctor and a medical business owner, you are probably aware of all the rage about how backlinks benefit your SEO. You may have heard some misconceptions and some difficult techniques about how to acquire them too. But what are they really? Why are they so important? And what are the best ways to acquire them? These are all questions you need to consider when you want to do proper link building to ensure your online medical business reaches the SEO of your dreams.
All fluff aside, backlinks are a defining component of how Google’s algorithm ranks online businesses and websites. But when it comes to the actual number of backlinks required to make your medical site land on the first page of Google results, you’d be surprised. To put it in a simple perspective, to land the 9th or 8th position of a SERP, you’d need over 30,000 backlinks.
So this is why you need to get started with your backlink strategy right away. To increase your page authority, medical content’s relevancy, and your overall medical SEO position, learning the importance, the correct techniques of acquisition and maintaining them can help with those goals.
What Is Link Building?
Link building or back linking is known as the process of acquiring and including external third-party websites links to the medical content available on your medical site. If you ensure to include the links with pages that have high page authority, then that page authority will also be composited to your medical pages. This helps Google’s algorithm decide that your medical site is reputable and thus helps it rank in a high SERP position. They are a definitive component of ranking that can make or break your online medical business.
Is Link Building Really That Important?
It is easy to get overwhelmed by all this daunting talk about link building, but in reality link building is just another important aspect of your medical SEO that you need to pay attention to. In simple words, link building or backlinks can also be considered as external recommendations or referrals from other reputable outside parties. If you have a backlink from a reputable site, that means that what you have on display on your medical site has good value.
If you manage to secure a couple hundred backlinks from high ranking sites with certain areas of expertise, that means you have gotten several votes of confidence for your medical site which can now help Google recognize that medical content has authority in your area of expertise. When done right, you can see a distinct growth in your organic patient traffic rate due to your high rankings.
What Are The Best Practices To Acquire Backlinks?
Link building becomes easy if you learn the right practices to acquire good quality links and stick to them. Here are some of the easiest, safest, and smartest ways you can acquire high-quality backlinks for your medical site:
The Skyscraper Method
Whether you offer dental or optical services, there are always other medical businesses in your field that are “experts”. Search for a medical content topic that is performing well on that medical site. Next, create medical content that is more updated, easy to understand and helpful than the one on those expert medical sites and mentions them in it.
Next, promote your medical content to your medical competitors, show them its value, and ask them to link to your medical content reciprocal gesture. You can also share it with other forums or discussion sites with that same topic and ask them to link it.
Helping Out A Blogger
Online blogs with thousands of following are great pits of backlinks. You can reach out to a medical blogger who is in search of experts on a specific medical topic. These medical bloggers often reach out to experts (medical businesses) for formative statements or medical information for their articles. If you manage to help them out, you can also secure strong backlinks to your medical site.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building or dead link building is a tactic in which you identify a dead or broken link on a site, recreate the medical content on it for you, then inform anyone still linking to that broken or dead page to link to your recreated, active medical content instead. Sites with broken links will happily accept your links since nobody wants dead or useless links on their site as they add to poor user experience.
Publish Heavy Word Counts
You can create medical content such as medical guides or small books about illnesses and diseases with heavy word counts and include a lot of valuable medical information in them. You can be as detailed as you want so that your patients and other readers consider you an authoritative source. Doing this will cause other people writing about your targeted medical topic to link and mention you as well. This contributes to getting high quality, relevant backlinks
What Are The Bad Practices To Avoid When Acquiring Backlinks?
There is a lot of misleading fluff out there that can confuse you with wrong ways to acquire backlinks. Here are some of the most harmful practices you should avoid when acquiring backlinks for your medical site:
Don’t Purchase Backlinks
Buying backlinks is an extremely harmful tactic when it comes to acquiring them. It is easy to fall into the belief that by buying them, you will be able to include hundreds of them on a single page of your medical site. However, purchasing backlinkings does not guarantee that they will be relevant or of good quality for your medical site. This practice can also earn your medical site a penalty and can lower its ranking.
Don’t Comment on Blogs Just For Asking For Backlinks
You want to build your medical business as a source of authority on the internet. Just commenting on blogs and asking for backlinks can take that sense of authority from your medical business’s name. Only by showing people your value, you can get good backlinks.
Avoid Linking Your Homepage
Backlinks relate to relevancy and page authority. To do that, you need backlinks for specific pages of your medical site. By only linking to your medical site’s homepage, Google might believe them to be spam and will toss these backlinks aside when it will rank you eventually.
Stop Recycling Your Medical Content on Different Pages
If you use guest blogging as a way to acquire links, you can easily fall short of getting a penalty from Google for duplicated content. By posting the same medical content that you have on your medical site to your other sites for guest blogging, you can dilute the potential of your medical content. Even if the topic is the same, consider shifting the content a bit so it is not the exact replica of what is on your medical site.
Link Building Matter More Than You Think
It can never be emphasized enough that your medical site needs some external help to reach the top. Link building is a vital part of medical SEO and will show its remarkable worth once you manage to do it right. Not only will it grow your organic patient traffic, but will increase brand authority, and lead your medical business to become the “expert” in its field.
