Promotion of medical websites

Since 2018, search engine results in the medical segment have changed a lot. Google rolled out an update, which was later called the Medical Update. Under his influence, there were significant changes in the ranking: many sites sank, 41% of which were specifically medical.

Today, it is realistic to promote such a resource to the top if you follow a proven algorithm. Medical sites require a special approach, unlike the classic stages of SEO promotion. And in this article we will analyze the main points that you need to pay attention to.

The target audience

Promotion of medical sites is a long-term work that takes at least six months.

And the first thing to start with is to study the target audience for which the resource will be created. All medical sites are conditionally divided into resources for patients and medical professionals. They can be classified as follows:

• sites that sell healthcare products for people and medical institutions (pharmacies, opticians, sale of medicines, dietary products, dietary supplements, equipment, prostheses and other goods for clinics);
• sites of individual doctors, clinics, traditional healers and aggregator sites, where various offers from medical centers and private doctors are collected;
• information sites on medical topics (information portals, forums, blogs, electronic encyclopedias, where you can find reference materials, documents, reports, legislative framework and other information).

There are also less common types of medical sites. These are, for example, resources of conferences or charity events.

Each type of site on medical topics has its own target audience. Traffic in this niche is consistently high. Treatment questions make up thousands of user requests per month, and searches for information on diseases – tens of thousands! Who is this target audience of medical sites?

If you study the statistics, you can get an average portrait of the user. This study was conducted by Ashmanov and Co., as well as a study from the “Socio-demographic study of paid medical services” Morozova G.A. and Ozina A.M.

I designed the finished results in infographics.

Most often, men and women from 25 to 45 years old (more than 55% of the total audience), married (more than 70%), having children (more than 67%) with an income of 21-75 thousand rubles come to the Internet. per family (more than 65%). The majority live in millionaire cities (38% of users). Women make up 2/3 of the entire target audience – they visit medical sites in 63% of cases.

You need to build a website taking into account the received statistics. Most women are looking for information on the treatment of children – this is important to consider. Many users live in cities from 100 thousand people to 1 million, so sites for a network of clinic branches will be in demand far beyond the capital.

Income is also an important indicator. The audience must be solvent, and the user, when visiting the site, must immediately see the cost of services.

Audience selection will affect:

• Content submission format
• Ability to select content authors for article materials
• The manner of writing articles and commercial blocks
• Understanding the “pains” of the audience in this segment.

Therefore, only after that we work on the following points.

Site structure

Typically, the structure of a clinic site is built around a first-level hierarchy. Each page can have many subsections. But navigation should be simple and clear for the user. The main sections that a medical site that promotes clinic services need may look something like this:

On the main screen of the site, the following information is needed:

• the name of the clinic;
• contact information (address, phone, instant messengers, social networks);
• schedule;
• appointment button.

Сайт: familydoctor.ru

If this is the site of a single specialist, then it is advisable to place his photo on the main screen. If this is a clinic, you can show the user the main services through scrolling or write a slogan, an appeal for the target audience. But it is better not to overload the main screen so that attention is not scattered.

The main information appears when the user starts moving the mouse over the header. In the drop-down menu, he must find the services that interest him. And each item is a separate page. It not only provides answers to questions, but also attracts users from search engines. Here you can turn the entire semantic core into subsections of the site.

Сайт: medlux.net.ua

In the “Cost” or “Services” section, you must definitely quote prices. It is better to make them in the form of a table. Search engines are well aware of this feed. Google even displays tables in rich snippets. You can read about what featured fragments (snippets) are and how to get into them in the next article.

Сайт: semdoc.dp.ua

The medical website must contain information about the doctors of the clinic. Without it, it will rank much worse. You need to provide data about the entire state (photo, names, specialization, etc.). It is better if each doctor has his own page with reviews about him (or a link to his social networks, for example).

Be sure to have all the certificates and licenses that the user can download.

Сайт: mediccity.ru

In the “Blog” (or “Services”) section, you can write in detail about diseases, methods for their diagnosis and treatment.

Here it is important to collect a high-quality semantic core and reveal it through articles on the site.

In the “Services” section, you do not need to make more pages than the price list list so that there is no confusion.

For example, our client and his list of services.

If there are additional services inside the service, expand them along the semantic core

If this is a “Blog”, then you can constantly add new articles to it on various topics.

It is important not to forget about medical micromarking:

• For the main one, do not forget about Medicalorganization
• For the services page, put the markup MedicalProcedure
• We pay attention to COVID-micromarkup.
• For price ranges, markup should be set using priceRange markup in the Physician section.
• IsAcceptingNewPatients allows you to mark whether you are accepting new patients (yes/TRUE by default)
• medicalSpecialty — specify the specialization of the clinic from the list.

Link promotion methods and reputation of doctors

For the ranking of a medical site, reference and reputation factors are of great importance. The organization needs to be added to Google My Business and Yandex Directory. This will allow you to promote the site taking into account geolocation.

For Google My Business, fill in the following information:

• the name and category of the clinic and all its branches, if any;
• add a photo of the clinic and make its description;
• describe the services and add a link to sign up for a consultation.

Yandex Directory is filled in the same way, but there are slight differences. You need to specify the legal data of the clinic and links to social networks. For Yandex, it is obligatory to indicate prices for services. The rating is important – with its help you can get the mark “Good place”. Verification of the site owner occurs through a phone number.

Regarding the Yandex Directory, my colleague Alena Polyukhovich recorded a detailed video.

To promote a medical clinic, it is important to place your links in the directories and directories of the city.

You need to enter queries like “clinic directory OR directory” or “Dentistry Nikolaev Directory OR” into the search engine. You need to save the received links, and then register your clinic using them.

We discussed this method in detail with Petr Savinov at the last webinar.

For this you need:

1. Parse sites for the right queries
2. To save the issue, the script specified in the webinar is suitable
3. Remove directory metrics
4. Then pass the current list of directories for registration

We have collected a ready-made database of catalogs of Ukraine and Russia.

It is also important that there are specialized sites for doctors.

• napopravku.ru
• med.me
• prodoctorov.ru
• rusmed.ru
• vrachi24.ru
• docdoc.ru

To confirm E-A-T, we recommend that you create a Doctors section on your website and place doctors’ profiles on the above sites.

Пример размещения информации о врачах на сайтах врачей.

It is advisable to maintain pages on social networks (especially on Facebook) for the medical institution and each doctor separately.

The reputation of the clinic and its doctors is of paramount importance for the promotion of a medical website.

But the case for promoting the Scholarship strategy proved to be excellent – links from universities significantly increased the organic content of the resource within 3-4 months!

The case is as follows:

• Create a competition for students
• Collect a database of universities
• Send the competition to universities
• Get mentions as links from GOV and EDU portals

The result will not keep you waiting. So, the site that we promoted as a result took the TOP traffic in just a few months.

We reviewed all the strategies in detail in the Yagla webinar on link building.

Content and design in the search engine

There are special requirements for the content of a medical resource. The authors of the articles must be clinic doctors in order for the site to rank well. This inspires user confidence and contributes to successful promotion. Under each article in the blog, the authorship of the doctor should be indicated with a clickable link to his page.

Title and Description tags play a significant role in the promotion of medical sites.

The title must always start with a keyword. You can find out how to choose the right keys in a detailed guide. It is advisable to supplement the Title with the name of the city where the clinic is located, although this does not always increase the CTR.

For decoration, you can use emoji and ASCII characters (but in moderation so as not to fall under clickbait).

• The recommended title length is 60 characters, but many top medical resources neglect this rule, making more voluminous titles.
• The description must also contain a key phrase, preferably without commas.

Anatoly Ulitovsky will tell you in detail about the Title and Description meta tags in a training video with real examples:

Additionally, when designing a medical site, you need to pay attention to reviews and ratings. Their presence in the search engine results noticeably increases the click-through rate (subject to a positive reputation of the clinic). Reviews can be downloaded from other resources, for example, from a Facebook business page using a special plugin.

In the “Questions and Answers” section, it is also important to provide reliable information. This part of the site can become a rich snippet in the search engine, which will increase user confidence in the resource.

Selected fragments, according to the observations of SEOs, do not increase CTR (and sometimes even reduce it), but is it advisable to refuse them? Details about the impact of rich snippets on SEO are presented in the material where Nikolay Shmichkov analyzes the research of SparkToro and Jumpshot.

But having your content in a featured snippet has a dramatic effect on your traffic.

Данный расширенный сниппет удвоил трафик статей и вывел в ТОП все перелинкованные коммерческие страницы

Quick links in the search results also affect the click-through rate. The user immediately sees such elements as “Prices”, “Contacts”, “Record”, “Reception” and can follow them to the desired section of the site. To create such links, it is enough to make a content of 5-6 paragraphs with anchor links, placing it immediately below the heading.

Conclusions

Promotion of a medical site is painstaking work, but it is quite possible to reach the top. The strategy is based on the above theses:

• Medical sites are demanding on content. No third party copywriters
• The structure of medical sites is demanding on service pages
• A blog on a medical site must be verified by your clinic if it was written by a student or young employee
• No black link building. Exchanges can only hurt
• Build links from aggregators of clinics and doctors.
• Pay attention to link methods that are unusual for Runet – social strategies, mentions in specialized publications.
• It is important to install all types of “medical micromarking”

From the general requirements

• mobile version
• Onpage SEO
• Download speed
• Multilingual (if needed)
• Duplicate content and indexing (classic bugs)

You just need to comply with the current requirements of search engines and follow the updates that Google periodically rolls out. In detail, I stopped about Google’s medical updates in my study.

And, of course, turn to specialists if you yourself are not ready to spend time studying all the current trends that never stand still.

Author – Nikolai Shmichkov, head of the Runet direction for website promotion, SEOquick.