26 Oct
As a doctor and a medical business owner, you know the importance, necessity, and the significance of SEO in 2021. Being one of the most effective aspects of online medical marketing. SEO holds the distinction of being a marketing space that brings 60% of the entries’ internet traffic to sites and online shops. It is more than just an online medical marketing prospect at this point, but a virtual bridge that connects your patients to your medical services.
As of today, there are an estimate of 3.5 billion searches going on Google with every passing hour. However, among those 3.5 billion searchers, only 0.78% of them bother going on the second page of a search engine result page (SERP) in the quest for their queries. The remaining 4.4 billion searchers? Well, they get what they want from the first page of a SERP. This is why the top five results on a SERP holds an average of 31.7% click-through-rate (CTR).
To get your medical business in front of those 4.4 billion searches, you need good medical SEO to help you climb on the top. But SEO is constantly evolving, along with every search engine algorithm update. This is why medical SEO experts and agencies advise doctors to be aware of what is about to come down the pipeline so. They can prevent from getting fined by Google’s penalties, or a drop in your medical site’s ranking. resulting in low patient traffic.
5 Medical SEO Trends for Doctors and Medical Businesses in 2021
As stated earlier, for your online medical business to rank to higher or maintain its SERP rankings, you need to keep your SEO marketing plan modified with the latest trends provided by Google’ constantly updating algorithm. Below is a simple breakdown of the 5 most recent medical SEO trends for doctors and online medical business to follow in 2021:
1. Updating Your Medical Site’s Core Web Vitals
In the beginning of 2020, Google announced that it would be launching three new metrics that will evaluate a site’s strength. Now SEO in 2021, these new metrics were released to be a site’s Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability, which make up the concept of Core Web Vitals. Like all other updates, these metrics are meant to improve a user’s online experience.
This update correlates to medical SEO, as you will now need to update your medical site’s page speed; how fast does your pages load, how much is it interactive with patients, and how stable are the pages while they are loading for a patient. Try building strong backlinks, healthy URLs, and get your off-page SEO to catch up with your on-page SEO.
Make sure your visuals and infographics don’t glitch and the site’s speed is monitored by a UX person or agency. For instance, if your page has the same relevant medical content as your competitor’s but your page is slow to load, Google will put your competitor’s page first in front of a patient.
2. Google’s BERT for Intent Matches
AI has transformed SEO ever since they both integrated together. This is why Google’s latest BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) makes use of AI “bots” that understand the intent of the searcher better than before. In simple words, Google can now understand the vaguest searches as well.
From a medical SEO perspective, this means that content that is not based on intent-based searches will not be prioritized. As a medical business owner, you now have to come up with medical content that is based on keywords that are more relaxed and human speech-like. To make your medical content and site BERT-friendly, create pages with medical content with relaxed headings and subheadings. This will help Google match these pages to the patient’s search intent better.
3. Stepping Up Your Medical Keyword Research Game
As of 2021, Google announced some SEO-based statistical data that revealed that more than 50% of searches are actually zero-click searches. This means that more than half of a patient’s searches end without browsing and clicking on any result. This is due to Google already providing them GMB information, contact information, and the most popular blog entries of relevant sites before they can even finish typing their query.
This information is strongly related to your medical keywords when it comes to your medical services. These keywords are found in your GMB listing information, medical content, and contact information. You will need to invest in medical keywords that have better search intent and have the highest probability of driving patient traffic to your medical site.
4. Feature in A Featured Snippet
To improve user experience and make it as quick as possible for them to meet their results, Google launched a system update of Featured snippets or Position Zero. These are the pop-up boxes that appear at the top of SERP whenever a patient types a keyword. These snippets help not only the searcher but websites as well. However, unfortunately for you, you cannot select and customize your medical pages so that they are shown the Featured Snippets.
The precise way to land your medical business’s pages is still unclear as Google hasn’t announced that exact method yet. However, several SEO gurus advise medical businesses to create optimized medical content that answers specific patient questions and use bullet points to structure your medical content better. This makes it easy for Google’s bots to pick out your medical site to feature in a Featured Snippet.
5. Employing EAT & Branded Medical SEO in 2021
Google values content when it comes to deciding where a site will rank and in 2021, it is much more focused. This is why you need to focus your medical content and SEO on the EAT principle, which follows the metrics of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Branding is changing how SEO functions.
If your medical branding is strong and authentic. Your medical SEO will perform better and will be more likely to rank on the top SERP positions. Focus on building brand awareness so that it can support your medical SEO strategies. Put up some pages on your medical site with promotional content that focuses on fortifying your medical services’ branding. Your 2021 medical SEO plan must include EAT and branded SEO for your medical business to prosper this year.
Stepping Up Your Medical SEO in 2021
There is no way to tell when the SEO industry will ever stop developing. Each year brings new system updates and algorithm changes. Which are useful when it comes to improving user experience, but often a hindrance for medical businesses to keep their ranking stabilized.
The world of medical SEO is volatile but you have to make sure that your medical site doesn’t share that same trait or else your online position can falter. In order to keep a steady stream of patients in, keeping up medical SEO trends in 2021 is your way to survive.
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