For startups and growing businesses, an online specialist can develop a digital marketing plan like the following, can help your business achieve extraordinary growth:

Medical search engine optimisation is something that many companies working within the industry pay large amounts of money for over the years because in the modern era, it is impossible to attain success without a web presence that works for you. However, medical SEO is a dense, complex issue to tackle and one in which there are plenty of grey areas.

Understanding these can go a long way to helping your business make better use of the web to win new clients and retain existing customers. But the reality is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution and so you will often need bespoke aid when planning a medical marketing strategy that is sympathetic to SEO.

The first point to consider in relation to medical SEO is that whilst other industries may find it simple to stick to the ‘content is king’ rule, the publication of relevant copy on your site may prove to be a little more taxing. Given the complexity of the topics, the sensitivity of the intended audience and the costs involved in creating a medical site that will rise to the top of natural search rankings, you might feel that you are faced with a mammoth marketing task. This is why any sensible medical SEO marketing strategy will take a multifaceted approach to the problem that does not put all of its eggs in one basket.

The second thing to appreciate is that whilst search engines are undeniably important in driving traffic to your site, they have the potential to be a little less stable in their ability to do so than you might imagine. Big search engines are constantly adapting the ways in which they filter sites and rank them using algorithms, which means a small change could drastically impact your position, for better or worse. These kinds of tectonic shifts are problematic only if you rely solely on natural search success to harvest visitors and so a potent medical search engine optimisation process will have a broader focus which analyses how competition and cooperation can be leveraged to your advantage.

By applying the fundamentals of medical SEO to your marketing strategy you should be seeking to find friendly faces in the digital wasteland with which you can initiate a mutually beneficial partnership. You need to find potential allies that are complementary to your company without being obvious rivals and work out a system of providing reciprocal links that flow naturally out of the content on each of your sites.

Such links can be a far more reliable source of visitors than natural search results and if you are not willing to pay search engines to promote your site, this is the best alternative. Of course, given that most search engines take into account the number of respected sites that are linking to your pages when formulating their rankings, this approach is doubly beneficial. Hopefully, it should be clear by this point that medical SEO is not just about bending to the will of the search engines, but about working on multiple strands of marketing to help increase traffic on your own terms.

Where companies in the medical industry need to be particularly careful is getting the balance between how well optimised their site is and how adequately it is equipped to convert those new visitors into loyal customers. If you have long-term experience heading up a real-world operation and are just getting used to marketing on the web, the sea change in conversions can be daunting. Statistics show that the companies that rise to the top of search rankings for their target keywords are often experiencing conversion rates of as low as two per cent. This suggests that either the search engines are sending irrelevant traffic their way or, most likely, the sites users land on are simply not up to the task of making sales once they have drawn them in due to high search rankings.

Experts suggest that ego can play a large part in how much emphasis a business will place on search ranking. Just because you are not in the number one spot for your target keywords does not necessarily mean that the competition ranked above you is also making many more sales. In fact, the figures prove that the opposite could well be true. This is why medical SEO in particular must be mindful of the necessarily holistic approach to any marketing campaign. Striving for first place can do more harm than good because you ultimately want to get clients through the digital door and then send them away clutching a virtual receipt.

The long and the short of it is that you need to be sensitive to the inevitable dynamism of any medical SEO process as well as recognising that the diverse tools of SEO which digital marketing agencies can help you to employ are essential to the growth and prosperity of any company in the current age, regardless of its industry or size. The analysis of web traffic statistics and your site’s search rank can be complex, but it is governed by a few comprehensible rules.

Firstly, a drop in traffic as a result of medical SEO does not necessarily mean that sales will also drop. In fact, in many cases you can improve conversion rates via SEO, which makes sure that you are reaching an audience to which your site is more likely to be relevant. This can mean that regardless of how a visitor has come to browse your site the content and ease of use is immediately more important. Secondly, focusing your marketing solely on the acquisition of a higher search rank that puts you above the competition is not always the best strategy even if it may be the right approach for some. Dealing with extra traffic is expensive and it can mean that you are investing more in the medical search engines than you are able to extract. This is why you should seek out an SEO company that is sympathetic to your needs, knowledgeable about your specialized industry and experienced in delivering results.

When you search your specialty do you come up? What about the ailments you treat? You should be on the first page for illnesses, specialties and treatments not just one or another. At every moment of every day someone is searching one of these things and if you’re not there, those people are finding another healthcare professional instead of you.

SEO does not have to cost a fortune. Many physicians have 90% of what they need to be successful but are just missing one or two areas of their optimization to be found on the first page. While Medical SEO can be time consuming is should not costs you two or three thousand dollars a month like so many companies charge.

Here are 5 things to avoid when searching for an affordable SEO company:

1. Insisting on a one size fits all approach:

Does the SEO company insist that you need every single service no matter what your site is telling them. When an SEO expert looks over your site they can see very quickly what’s missing. 30% of the sites that I have worked on need nothing more than on site optimization and they have more search terms than they could imagine. Look for a company with a free website analysis that includes recommendations on how much SEO you need.

2. Bad Guy Optimization

There are lots of optimization companies that practice bad guy optimization. This is a very bad thing for you in the long run. bad guy optimization is any SEO that does not conform to the intent of what Google is looking for. If it’s a neat trick it won’t last. In April of 2012 Google implemented the penguin update. This update has a MAJOR punishment for sites using two separate but up to that point common bad guy techniques. Many many sites lost 1st pages in a way that will be very difficult for them to get them back any time soon. Those people are losing business right now because they went for the short term answer instead of the long term solution.

3. Talking to a salesman who won’t be doing the SEO work himself.

Make sure the person you are speaking to is the person who will be doing the work. The last thing you want to get into is having been told one thing by the salesman and learning a completely different story from the person actually doing the SEO.

4. Focusing on a just few keywords

You need lots of keywords, many SEO companies only focus on the peacock phrases because they think you will be happy being able to say I am on “general search term” Don’t get me wrong these are important terms too, but to focus 100% on those and ignore the search terms where the person searching is searching for exactly what you do is a bad idea. You will convert on those phrases at an incredibly high rate. Not only are you missing out on good patients, you are hurting yourself in the long run by not building a foundation of long term success online.

5. Don’t assume you know what people search.

You know what they should search but that in no way means that your potential patients know what they should search. I have seen a lot of so called “SEO experts” who don’t even know how to do decent keyword research. If they don’t ask you questions like what type of patients are you most looking for, patients with what ailments help your practice grow the most? They don’t know their job.

One thing I hope you do is hire a Company who specializes in medical SEO.

Just like your training and expertise makes you the best person to call for an illness a medical SEO specialist who focuses on health care will have the experience in finding patients. They will know what won’t work and what will work. They will be able to provide advice based on tried and tested methods that have helped other practices grow through internet marketing.