The Executive Suite: Have You Conducted an SEO Analysis of Your Healthcare Practice Website?

Every website is vying for the coveted top spot on a google search page, so how can you make your practice’s website stand above the rest? Follow these tips to assess your site's SEO rankings and improve on any weaknesses you may find.

In a competitive digital world where every website is vying for a Google page one ranking of the most valuable keywords, it takes a professional search engine optimized website to achieve top rankings.

Website Architecture

A comprehensive SEO analysis should be performed periodically to ensure that your website is performing well on all parameters. This can help ensure sustainable high visibility for your website in targeted search results. The overall structure of your website should be logical and efficient. To analyze your site architecture, make an assessment of how many clicks it typically takes to navigate from the home page to important landing pages. Check out whether the web pages are linking to each other are appropriate in the site hierarchy, and accord priority to the most important pages in the architecture.

Site Download Speed

Navigational elements such as JavaScript or Flash can undermine architecture because they can be inaccessible to search engine crawlers. It is best to avoid these elements in your site architecture.Online readers are spoiled for choice and are typically impatient with a short attention span. If your medical web pages are cumbersome and take too long to download, many of the visitors may leave. Even the search engine crawlers will evaluate faster loading sites more comprehensively and consistently compared to the slower ones.

Sitemap Protocol

Search Result Evaluation

You can make use of Google PageSpeed Insights service to evaluate the performance of your website. Employ the best practices recommended by Google PageSpeed for best results on Google.Search engine crawlers will use your website’s XML sitemap to identify various web pages. Check whether your website has a well-formed XML sitemap and whether it follows the appropriate sitemap protocol. Make sure that the sitemap has been submitted to Google via their webmaster tools. Keep the sitemap regularly updated so that every new web page appears on it.One of the simple ways to check the search engine rankings of your website is to search for your practice or brand name in Google search. If your website shows up at the top of search results your site has been indexed properly and everything is clear.

Assessing the Ranking Factors

However, if the site is missing from the results or showing way down in the list of results it is important to investigate the causes. Low rankings for all or most of the important localized keywords will also indicate that your website is not correctly optimized for SEO, and thus needs a revamp.For each web page, you should first check whether the URL is short, reader-friendly and includes relevant keywords. Secondly, the SEO tags for each page should describe the page accurately and include appropriate keywords. The third and most important part of this analysis is content.

Check whether each of the web pages includes updated, accurate and substantive content. It should include targeted and localized keywords, but keyword cannibalization should be avoided. This means that each page should contain its own unique and relevant keywords to the specific content on that page.

Copied, spammy, or repetitive content must be removed by an employee, or yourself, in charge of the web site. This has nothing to do with the readers, this is because Google can detect if the content has been added just to manipulate its searches, and not with the intent to provide value to readers.

It is also important to analyze the quality of the inbound links to your website. Links from dubious sources will undermine the value of your site from an SEO viewpoint.

Perform an objective site analysis for all these parameters periodically to ensure your website continues to rank high in search results for the most important keywords your clients may search for online.