25 PRO Tips to Improve Your Medical SEO

If you work in a clinic or are the owner of an Internet pharmacy, it will be useful for you to know some interesting aspects of website promotion from this industry. In this article we will talk about the peculiarities of medical website optimization. 

Very frequently healthcare sites are optimized for the quality criteria of the site from Google. And such sites may have good indicators of behavioral factors, link profile, but the positions in Google would still not grow.

The point is that Google’s policy is to reject misleading or harmful people’s lives or health content. Medical websites contain that kind of information and fall into the category of a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) theme. Therefore, E-A-T factors (stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness)  are very important for them. 

Expertise. It means the expertise of the author of the content in the relevant issues.

Authoritativeness. It indicates the degree of authority of an expert in the relevant area.

Trustworthiness. It represents that the content should not contain misleading information.

Each of the three areas is pumped through in the framework of YMYL, but in completely various ways, and affect the evaluation of the site differently.

In this article, I’ll tell you

How you can improve the E-A-T of your site on your own

Almost all of the following improvements you can implement on the site immediately, as the business owners already have this information. In addition to optimizing the E-A-T signals on the site, it also increases user confidence in the company and leads to attraction of new clients.

1. Contacts

Information about contacts should be placed in a prominent place that is easy to find. This can be the “Contacts” section in the top menu, or some contact block in the footer of the site.

2. About us

This section is a must-have on the site, and it should be filled with detailed information about the company’s history, mission, and values.

3. Useful and important information for the client

You should tell about all the ways of contacting the company, working schedule, guarantees on goods or the result of work, conditions and ways of returning the goods or paying for services, etc. As well as information about the termination of the contract, the application form for returning the goods—all of it must be present on the site.

5. Responsible party for the site 

Information about those responsible for the site and content: company info, details of the legal entity.

6. Markup 

Website markup is the markup of a website with special tags and attributes in HTML code for structuring the information. Here is a list of basic schema.org options you can use:

• Images (ImageObject)
• Video (VideoObject)
• Breadcrumb
• Article
• Blog
• Event
• Service
• Organization
• Medical Organization

7. Textual content

Articles on the site should contain up-to-date, scientifically confirmed facts and be supported by references to reliable and authoritative sources.

They should not be based on unproven opinions and should not contradict the foundations of official medicine.

8. Outgoing references

Links in texts should lead only to authoritative sources. You can link to popular scientific websites, encyclopedias, and doctors known in their field. Such links will be useful not only to users, but also to the reputation of your site. 

9. Terms

All specialized terms should be explained and understood. You can open a special section of the website called the Glossary where you can group all the obscure terms alphabetically with their transcripts and provide a link to them, if necessary. 

10. Comments

There should be no off-topic comments or spam on the site pages. Questions in the comments on the articles should be answered by subject-matter experts.

11. Industry experts 

YMYL sites should have an expert to write the content. In medicine, these are doctors with appropriate education and experience, with publications or mentions in authoritative sources, as well as public personal pages on third-party resources.

Positive mentions of the expert or company in reviews, news articles, scientific publications, industry websites, etc. are necessary.

It is the names of experts that you will sign articles on your site, which will ensure their love and respect from the Google search engine. 

12. Licenses and certifications 

Medical licenses, sanitary and epidemiological certificates of the organization must be posted on the medical sites.

13. Information about specialists

Website should contain information about specialists and management, as well as about supervising organizations. 

To improve the E-A-T factors, the following content is recommended on specialist and physician pages:

• information about medical education;
• data on passing courses and advanced training (scans of diplomas and certificates, licenses);
• work experience in the medical field;
• link to the doctor/expert’s profile on social networks;
• proof of expertise (publications, participation in seminars, forums, symposia—anything that will show that the physician understands his or her area of expertise);
• rating and reviews of the physician, including on third-party resources;
• links to third-party resources with reviews;
• the ability to contact the physician personally;
• links to the doctor’s expert publications on the blog pages.

14. Services

For full description of services, it is recommended to place the following content on the page:

• price list;
• description:
• general information about the procedure;
• information about preparing for the procedure;
• indications and contraindications;
• information about actions after the procedure;
• materials illustrating the result of the service (if it is aesthetic medicine);
• specialists providing the given medical service;
• address of the service provided;
• what equipment is used in providing the service;
• appointment form.

15. Customer reviews on peer review sites

Positive reviews on third-party review sites like Trustpilot or SiteJabber.

Ordinary people use these sites to do a review of your site or company. Review sites should be topical that people in your industry trust. Reviews should build up regularly.

16. Reviews on aggregators

Reviews on third-party healthcare aggregator platforms will be useful both for attracting customers and for generally improving the presentation of your medical site in search. 

17. FAQ

The site should have a detailed “Q&A” section with a breakdown of questions related to your topic. .

18. Commendations & Recommendations

These include diplomas for participation in professional competitions and ratings, certificates and acknowledgements for speeches at conferences and participation in industry events, recommendations from famous organizations and public people. They can refer to the company itself, as well as to an employee, director or founder. In this case using schema markup also will give positive results and show Google your credibility and expertise.

19. Wikipedia page

There must be a page on the Wiki or at least a mention of the expert in the Wikipedia article.

20. Photo and video reports

It is desirable to post photo and/or video content for each service provided, participation in the event, conferences, etc.

21. YouTube channel

Having your own videos on YouTube increases your recognition and credibility.

22. Case studies 

For example, in a before/after format. This is one way to show the real results and benefits of your products and services.

23. News

Regularly updated information about the life of the company, new products, services, discounts, promotions, etc.

24. Publications

You will need high-quality medical texts for successful promotion. 

Search engines have long given preference to useful pages. Place yourself in the shoes of the user—what kind of information do you want to get when you enter that query.

Look at your competitors and add to the text what they are missing. Involve doctors to write your text assignment or even to write your content. Specialists are able to cover the topic better by using their expertise.

Even 5 years ago, it was important not to overload medical texts for websites with professional terminology, so that the information is clear to the user. Now search engines evaluate the expertness of medical content based on the presence of terms in it.

It is essential not to overdo and not to write text that looks like material for a reference book. Use terms only where they are really necessary and natural in the context of your material.

25. Link Promotion

The donor sites in healthcare will be mainly other medical resources, which should also be of higher quality. Our experience shows that Google understands which links need to be taken into account when ranking, so when building a strategy for the medical link building it is better to focus on high-quality donors.

The classic approach of link building works here too: placing links on thematic and peri-thematic sites with high scores, such as Domain Rating from Ahrefs. But for more effective growth in search results, it is recommended to pay attention to all the same factors E-A-T for selected donors. Search engines will value the sites with confirmed expertise of the content authors: information on work experience, education, scans of certificates confirming expertise.

Conclusion

Improving the E-A-T of a website is quite a time-consuming job, but it’s worth it. Some improvements you can implement on your own or together with your marketer, while others require the help of an SEO specialist.

But before you start working on the E-A-T, you need to take a look at the points on which your site is lagging.