The role of SEO is crucial to any functional medicine business. However, it can often feel overwhelming as you try to navigate the best techniques for your practice. We’ve put together some tips and best practices to help you increase your online presence and drive more traffic your way.
Understanding SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO can seem complex when you’re not sure where to begin. SEO simply means taking pieces of content or even an entire website and increasing its online visibility with Google. This usually includes using relevant keywords, images, links, and unique page titles. If you want your business to rank higher in the search engines, implementing specific practices can help boost your visibility online.
Best Practices for SEO in Functional Medicine Businesses
If you want to generate more traffic for your functional medicine business, it’s helpful to start with a few best practices to grow your online presence.
Choose the Right Keywords
Keywords are essential for SEO and a valuable asset for your target audience. When potential patients are searching for answers to their health issues, you want your practice to appear first in the search results. Targeting the right keywords can make that happen. You can use free or low-cost keyword research tools like Google Search Console to help you with your research.
Including Links
Adding internal links in your content can improve your search rankings and help you gain more traffic to your website. Links can help the search engine assess the content on your site and improve low-performing pages. You can link to past blog posts that add more information for your readers.
Keep A Healthy Website
If you’ve ever clicked on a slow-loading website, you know how frustrating it is to navigate. You can avoid a slow website by optimizing your website’s loading speed, refreshing old content, and optimizing website performance. Tools like Google Analytics can provide insights on which pages require more optimization.
Tips for Implementing SEO Strategies in Functional Medicine Businesses
Prioritize Keyword Research
When you’re using an online keyword tool, you can type words that relate to your services. You can type in examples like, “functional medicine” and see what appears. Using these tools can give you more ideas on what keywords to include in your content. Including these words in your meta description, headlines, and titles is a priority for optimization.
Create Valuable Content
Valuable content is something that is helpful to your target audience. Using relatable keywords and phrases in your content can increase your online rankings even more. Write content that addresses current health issues that people search for online. This is where keyword research helps you with your content. Blog posts and service pages can gain a lot of traffic on your website when you optimize your content with keywords and helpful information.
Use Quality Descriptions
Every page on your website contains tags and descriptions to help the search engine rank your content and help readers find information. Meta descriptions and titles are essential for research. You should include your target keyword in both tags to help match the intent of the search.
Build Backlinks
Building backlinks is an important part of SEO and can help increase authority in your field. Linking to other sites in your content and having other sites link back to yours will improve your visibility. You can do this by submitting your website to online directions, guest posting for other functional medicine websites, or speaking on podcasts.
Let’s Grow Your Business
The team at Functional Medicine SEO is ready to help you grow your functional medicine business. We specialize in a variety of strategies that improve your online rankings so you can help more patients. Contact us today for a free strategy session to get started.