SEO is now a critical marketing tool for the medical sector. It ensures your website, brand and healthcare product or medical device, will rank on search engines. You want to make sure you appear when healthcare professionals are researching treatments and conditions who will be spending time online, building their knowledge and using online resources. To reap the benefits of ranking in a search, your medical device and brand must be visible in the results pages for common search terms, and this helps in controlling your healthcare/medical brand name.
Many healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical device brands often do not focus on harnessing the power of search marketing. This could be due to a lack of understanding of the value of SEO, uncertainty in how to optimise their web presence whilst remaining compliant in a highly regulated industry, or possibly a limited understanding of what SEO actually is.
At Varn we are proud to have a deep knowledge and experience of SEO and technical search marketing, in particular SEO within the compliance heavy medical and healthcare sector. In this blog we share why investing in healthcare SEO for your medical brand can be so useful:
Importance of investing in healthcare SEO for rankings:
Here are just some of the ways we help healthcare companies build or launch a medical device/product/brand online:
Gain market understanding to guide a brand building strategy:
It is vital that you audit the healthcare market from an SEO point of view, analyse web traffic data, identify medical market trends and importantly what the competition is doing. An experienced SEO agency would help make recommendations on changes that can be implemented on your website to help improve Google rankings, search engine page visibility, website traffic and conversion (click through) rates, supporting you in tailoring all of your healthcare brands online activity for maximum impact.
Build brand awareness of your medical product or device:
With health care professionals (HCPs) and the patient increasingly using online resources to research new products, diagnosis, treatments and solutions in healthcare, it is imperative for your brand to gain visibility in a search. You will need to conduct comprehensive keyword research to identify content gaps on your healthcare website, which in turn will allow you to build brand awareness when people search content where you want your medical device or product to appear.
At Varn we look to support our healthcare clients by helping them identify what types of phrases and keywords the HCP and patient will be searching for and what their intent is. We can then support by creating a keyword strategy, ensuring each of the pages on a website are fully optimised for one of these target keywords. You can find out more about how to identify and target the right keywords if you are pharmaceutical or healthcare brand in our blog Is your Pharma site is targeting the right keywords? | Varn Health.
Build brand trust for your medical device:
HCPs want to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily, and if your medical product or device can be found easily and can simply answer the search questions the HCP has, then you start to build brand trust as well as awareness. We always aim to ensure the website not only appears in these searches, but also communicates a brand appropriately, differentiates from the competition and gives the healthcare brand authority in it’s sector, whilst ensuring compliance.
Using backlinks to gain brand visibility:
Backlinks from other websites remain a crucial factor in SEO as they help to generate traffic, increase brand awareness, build trust and improve organic rankings (as they are a key factor in Google’s algorithm). In medical device and healthcare product development, it is particularly important to focus on obtaining links to your site from other high-quality sites by implementing an off-site SEO strategy, (content and communication activity that occurs away from your own website).
Ensuring your website is intuitive & useful:
It is critical to create a clear keyword strategy, as this in turn leads to building a concise website structure. Benefits of a good site structure include better user experience as it will make it easier for HCPs and patients to navigate to the information they require about your medical product/device, and also it is helpful for web crawlers as they crawl and index your site, improving your search page rankings.
A paid search strategy may help:
It is important to understand how ‘paid’ social and search adverts could help drive traffic to your website and build brand awareness for medical brands. It is helpful to target critical key audiences, focusing on the right health care professionals, possibly using platforms such as Google and LinkedIn. You may need support in creating adverts, monitoring return on investment and optimising campaigns. There are multiple regulations involved in the medical sector about what is allowed with paid promotion, and this varies by country. At Varn, we have managed and run campaigns globally for healthcare brands, including those specializing in EMR for podiatry, and we can help support and advise on this topic.
Upskilling in SEO for the long-term:
It can make sense to upskill your healthcare marketing team in the discipline of SEO, as you look to manage your own search marketing programme as part of a long-term marketing strategy for your medical brand/ device. At Varn we really enjoy supporting medical businesses with bespoke training courses to help develop the understanding, knowledge, and skills to make sure their SEO is successful going forwards.
Get in touch to find out more
If you are interested in finding out more healthcare SEO and the value it can bring to your medical brand, contact the experts at Varn.
