SEO for Plastic Surgeons
How to Reach More Patients Online with Plastic Surgery SEO Services
Marketing your plastic surgery practice online is essential if you want to reach potential patients in today’s market. More often than not, people turn to search engines when looking for a plastic surgeon, and you want to do all you can to drive your practice to the top of the results.
Why Do Plastic Surgeons Need SEO for Their Practice?
Plastic surgery is highly specialized and made up of many niches, meaning you have a specific audience to which you want to market your services. SEO for plastic surgeons is the key to targeting the people searching for what you offer. Whether they’re looking for reconstructive or cosmetic surgery, appearance is a strong driver in the search. They want to make sure they find a surgeon with the best qualifications and the experience necessary to successfully perform the desired procedure. A targeted SEO strategy speaks to these patients and shows them why they should choose your plastic surgery practice over others in the area or even throughout the country.
Today’s plastic surgery candidates aren’t looking in the phone book or flipping through brochures to try to find a doctor to take their cases. They’re turning to search giants like Google and Bing to locate practices with good reputations and a history of satisfied patients. Your SEO strategy must be crafted to build authority in your niche and establish a positive reputation. This combination not only places your website higher in search results but also attracts the attention of patients seeking someone with skill and knowledge to handle their cosmetic concerns. Smart SEO practices bring these people to your website and encourage them to give you a call and set up a consultation.
What Are the Best Practices for Plastic Surgery SEO?
Successful SEO starts with knowing who your ideal patients are, understanding their needs and becoming familiar with their search habits. Performing an SEO audit to look at the strategies you’re already using and determine the strengths and weaknesses of your current approach gives you a foundation on which to build as you work to reach the target niche of your practice.
Optimizing Your Website
To understand how your ideal patients look for plastic surgery practices, consider the main concerns behind their searches. Do you specialize in a specific procedure, such as rhinoplasty or otoplasty? Is your practice dedicated to reconstructive surgery? Prospective patients will use keywords and phrases relating to your niche to find surgeons, so you need to incorporate these words into every aspect of your website, including page titles, image tags and meta descriptions. However, this is a fairly common practice and should be accompanied by structured data markup to drive your site higher in search results.
Structured data markup “tells” search engines what each page on your website is about, helping them to better match your site with users’ search terms. Schema is one popular type of structured data created to promote a “shared vocabulary” and make it easier for webmasters to take advantage of the benefits of data markup. Made up of types, properties and enumerations, schema data can be combined in an impressive number of ways to enhance your site’s appearance in search results with images, detailed practice information and more.
Hitting the Local Search Traffic
Unless you’re a nationally known practice with a reputation for being the best of the best at a particular type of plastic surgery, the majority of your patients are likely to come from the city where your practice is located and the surrounding areas. This requires a focus on local SEO for plastic surgeons. In addition to the keywords relating to your niche, you also need to optimize for local words and phrases. This is still important even if you serve a wide area or cater to patients coming to you from a distance. Optimizing for local keywords makes your practice relevant to a particular area in the eyes of search engines and can increase your ranking in both local and mobile search results.
Listing your practice on Google My Business, Yelp and similar directories supports your local SEO strategy by increasing the number of references to your business across the web. Known as citations, these listings not only provide more places for potential patients to find your information but also show search engines your practice is well-established and legitimate.
Mastering the Art of Link Building
There was a time when webmasters could “trick” search engines’ ranking mechanisms by stuffing page tags with keywords and trading links with as many sites as possible regardless of quality or relevancy. Changes in search algorithms now penalize these practices and favor sites with legitimate collections of backlinks from trusted sources. For a link strategy to work in your favor, you need to seek out influential content creators in your niche and other areas directly related to the focus of your plastic surgery practice.
These sites not only need to be popular but also must be seen as trustworthy. Make sure the sites you consider requesting links from consistently put out quality content, maintain high search rankings and generate significant social engagement. Compile a list of your top choices for link building, and start interacting with the content creators. Read their blogs, comment on their videos and follow them on social media before reaching out to propose writing a guest post for their site or asking if they would be willing to feature a piece of your content in their feeds.
Creating Quality Content
Content shows prospective patients what your practice is all about. Whether they click through from a guest post or come directly to your site from a search engine, you want to show them your authority as a plastic surgeon. Consider the questions and fears patients have when thinking about undergoing the types of procedures in which your practice specializes. Each one of these concerns can become the subject for a blog post or video featured on your site and promoted on social media. The more engagement each piece of content gets, the better its potential for showing up in search results.
Quality and consistency are the keys to this SEO strategy. Every piece of content must be well-written, engaging, informative and valuable. By showing website visitors your commitment to providing useful, high-quality content to answer their questions, you give them an idea of the kind of care they can expect when they come to you as patients. They begin to get a picture of the story and personality of your practice, and by the time they’re ready to make an appointment, they feel confident they’re making the right choice.
Ready to Get Started with a Plastic Surgery SEO Strategy?
Building and maintaining a strong SEO strategy requires an ongoing and consistent effort. From the initial audit of your current approach to the continual process of creating content and making sure it gets out to your intended audience, someone needs to stay on top of the SEO for your practice so that your site continues to enjoy high visibility in search results.
SEO Direct handles everything you need to drive traffic to your practice, maintain authority within your niche and turn curious visitors into satisfied patients. Using meticulous and detailed methods, SEO Direct digs deep into every part of your website to identify what’s working and what needs to be fixed to make sure you’re noticed by search engines and potential patients can find the information they’re seeking. By adding the right markup and looking into what competitors are doing with their own SEO, SEO Direct can optimize your website to dominate search results. Get in touch today to discuss your strategy, and see how SEO Direct can transform the way patients find your practice online.