In a world where people use online searches to find everything they need from food to clothes, to healthcare, you want people to be able to find your holistic medicine practice. Maybe you are just starting out with a new practice, or you are a seasoned professional. Either way, SEO is an ongoing necessity to show up in search results for your potential patients.
Here’s a checklist of the things the team at Functional Medicine SEO follows as part of our strategies.
1. NAP Consistency Across The Web
NAP stands for name, address, phone number. As a local business, it’s very important for you to have a consistent NAP across the web. That means that everywhere your name, address, and phone number are displayed, it should be the same. If you’ve moved offices, updated your phone number, or changed the name of your practice, you will want to make sure it is updated across all directories and social media outlets.
The more your NAP appears online, the better it will be for your SEO. That’s why we subscribe to directory services for our holistic healthcare practitioners. These directories allow us to increase the number of pages your NAP appears.
2. Optimize Your Google My Business Page
Whether you set up a Google My Business page or not, one may have been created for you by Google. You will want to make sure you have claimed your listing and have control over it. Part of our strategy includes optimizing this listing so that it drives traffic to your website and increases your number of phone calls. These days, this listing is as important as your website to capture new patients.
3. Develop a Keyword Strategy
Many practitioners are familiar with keywords, but they don’t understand how to incorporate them into their website to increase traffic. There are a few things to understand about an effective keyword strategy:
- Determining user intent – the user intent is what types of search results a user expects to find when they do a search. To determine the user intent of a keyword, run a search using the phrase, and see if similar content to your’s comes up. If it doesn’t, then you will want to target a different phrase.
- Deciding on relevant terms – oftentimes, patients are not familiar with procedure names or treatment options. Therefore, relevant keywords usually include something related to the symptoms they are experiencing. We do extensive keyword research to determine what words are being searched in your related practice.
- Optimizing the right pages on your site – after the relevant keywords are chosen, they must be married up with the right pages on your website. You will want to match the phrases to content that best suits it.
- Using different keywords for every page – one of the common misconceptions about keywords is that you should use the same ones across your website. Actually, this can cause your pages to be in competition with each other. Instead, you should choose different main keywords for every page on your site.
4. Writing New Content Every Month
The more content you add to your website, the more chances you have to rank for organic keywords. Organic keywords are those phrases that bring traffic to your site that you didn’t try to target. Every month, you should aim to add 2-4 new pieces of content to your website. This can be in the form of blog posts or service pages.
5. Monitor Site Speeds
Every month, you should check to see if your site is loading at the recommended speed. Pages that are loading slower than 3 seconds need attention. We hook all websites that we manage into the Google Search Console in order to monitor overall site health. The Google Search Console will alert you to pages with slow load times and give suggestions of how to increase the speed.
These are a few of the things that we use as part of our SEO strategy.
Contact us Today For SEO Services
The experts here at Functional Medicine SEO love to help our holistic medicine clinics increase their organic traffic. We have a proven strategy that has helped many of our practitioners see an increase in calls and inquiries.
We’d love to provide you with a free SEO audit to review your website and give you feedback. If you’re interested in having one of our experts review your site, please fill out this form and we’ll get back to you within 24-48 hours. We look forward to hearing from you!
