You are doing some online medical practices or have a medical website that you want to rank well in search engines. As per Page Quality Rating Guidelines, the medical and health-related websites come under Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages. You will know how to do SEO for medical practices and John Mueller’s view about medical websites.
YMYL Pages – Medical Websites
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages are web pages that include some topics which can impact your life in terms of health, safety, and finance. So medical websites or web pages that include content related to medical practices are YMYL pages.
SEO for Medical Websites
Search engine optimization for medical websites should include all the best practices which are needed for all other types of websites. These may include the following SEO best practices:
- Keyword Research: Doing keyword research to add relevant medical terms that are related to your medical website. Keyword research can be done with tools like Keyword Planner. You can also leverage the AnswerThePublic tool to get key terms that people are asking for in Google search.
- These tools can help you to select the right terms from plenty of related and relevant terms.
- Create Content: Next step is to write content for the most relevant medical and healthcare keywords as found using the above-highlighted tools. Your content should answer the medical questions asked by online users. Your content should include:
- High-Quality Images: Your content should include high-quality medical-related images with new-generation image formats like WebP images.
- Informative Videos: Adding informative videos about medical practices, hospitals or medical treatments to your content will help your users to easily understand your content. Videos help in improving user engagement.
- Infographics: Adding infographics to your content can help to easily show medical-related statistics or the steps of a particular medical practice. Infographics make your content more engaging.
- On-Page SEO: You should do on-page SEO on all your web pages. This includes optimizing title tag, description meta tag, heading tags, canonical tags, adding internal and outbound links.
- Technical SEO: Taking care of the technical SEO helps in better crawling and indexing of your website. Technical SEO include:
- Submitting your website in Google Search Central and Bing Webmaster.
- Regular maintaining and submitting your XML sitemaps in webmasters.
- Page speed test and mobile-friendly test of your website.
- Keep your website secured with HTTPS.
- Create and keep your website responsive.
- Local SEO: Adding your medical practice or hospital information in Google My Business is crucial. As in the medical industry, most people want medical treatments and services in nearby places. So to improve your local SEO performance you should:
- Keep your information updated in your Google My Business account with all contact details and timing details.
- Provide good medical service so that your online reviews in Google search results remain good.
- Off-Page SEO: To become authoritative and trustworthy in your industry like the medical industry you should participate in some communities and Q&A websites. Websites like Quora and Reddit may help you if you provide good answers to various medical-related questions. This will boost your authority as medical experts and more people will refer to you both online and offline.
- You should also leverage social media platforms for more brand awareness and user engagement.
Jonh Mueller’s View on SEO for Medical Practices
In a recent Google SEO Office-hours video when somebody asked a query regarding her medical website. She mentioned despite all efforts to bring traffic to her medical website the traffic is not there. So what can be done to bring traffic from search engines and enhance the visibility of a medical website?
John replied to this query and highlighted some things to consider when the website or content is related to the medical industry. Things to consider are:
1. Quality Raters Guidelines
John Mueller recommends considering Quality Raters Guidelines to know how your website is perceived by quality raters. Especially when your website comes under Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages like health and safety, finance, government, and law. Medical websites come under health and safety.
2. Keep in mind E-A-T
Always remember to consider E-A-T for medical websites. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthy. As the content which is related to medical industry must consider E-A-T as these are three factors which Google considers to measure the trust on a medical website or brand.
3. Legitimate Business
In case of medical websites or content Google considers the brand or business should be legitimate. As Google don’t want to compromise on the content provided to it’s users. Medical related content should have trustworthy sources.
4. Content by Legitimate Doctors
Creating high-quality content is not enough in medical websites. The medical-related content must be written by doctors and medical professionals who are legitimate in their fields. As Google prefers to rank trustworthy content for its users.
Summary
If you are doing search engine optimization for your medical website then you should consider all the SEO best practices. But additionally, you have to consider content from legitimate medical professionals and doctors. This builds trust and makes your medical-related content authentic to rank well in search engines.
Here you can see the Google SEO Office-hours video where John Mueller talks about SEO for medical topics for your reference.