Do You Have An SEO Strategy for Your Practice?

Some people love their privacy, but for those of us in public-facing professions (e.g. doctors, dentists, politicians, etc…) we need visibility and our careers depend on it. In the last week, two different people complimented me on my online presence and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Both of them asked me how they could enhance their Internet presence. I thought about what I learned over the last two years working in technology and came up with the following list of my favorite SEO strategy tips.

• Take advantage of social network SEO: If you didn’t know this by now, social networks optimize their search engine visibility on purpose to gain more users. For this reason, it’s valuable for you to realize which networks matter to your industry and to create profile pages. Here are my favorite social networks:
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Doximity
  • Angelist
  • Clarity.fm
• Update your social media pages regularly. The more you check and update your pages, the more they will show up on search. Also, it may be common sense, but what is the point of being visible online if the content of the page is out of date? It’s a bit of a pain, but it does pay off in the end to set up pages with accurate and up-to-date content.
• Take advantage of video website SEO. When people search Google for videos under your name, you definitely want to be the person who shows up. Youtube and Vimeo are two great places to syndicate your knowledge to the world, and both have great SEO. If you don’t have any videos online, now is the time to consider making one that showcases your knowledge and expertise. If you speak at a conference, make sure to get the video online. It takes persistence, but you want your online visibility to be more than just text.
• Develop your namesake website. This seems pretty self explanatory, but if you want to be visible online, create a website such as mollymaloofmd.com.
  This way you will have control over your own domain and the content you put in it. For a short-cut you can always create an www.about.me page. One of the nice things about having your own site is that you can develop inbound and outbound links to and from your social media and video pages. This will increase your SEO rankings for both.
• Blog on your website and SEO your blog posts. To write effective blog posts, you should make sure to include outbound links with title tags (the phrase a persons sees when they hover over a link). You can set this up by
• Creating a hyperlink by highlighting the text and clicking the paper clip icon.
• The first box allows you to insert the link and the second the title tag.
  
• It's also important to take advantage of innate wordpress SEO. Make sure your focus keyword is found in the article heading, page title, page URL, article content, and meta description.
  
• Optimize your images for better search rankings. This article provides plenty of explanation on how to optimize the images you post online for better SEO and includes where to look for photos. Other sites that may show up in a search under your name are Instagram and Pinterest. Most professionals use these for personal use. It's in your best interest to reduce SEO for these by disabling their public visibility in the website settings.
• Regularly request reviews from your patients. It's important for you to have ratings online that reflect your actual performance. Right now, websites like HealthGrades and Vitals.com are making it way too easy for random people to evaluate your practice. And, these sites can easily be manipulated. And, unfortunately, these sites have great SEO. Worst of all, anyone can sign into these websites with different email addresses and rate you multiple times. Practice marketing platforms help you get more reviews from your actual patients and post them to your website or syndicate to sites like Google and Yelp.
• By the end of this article you might be feeling two things. Either your relieved that SEO isn't actually that hard or you are totally overwhelmed at the amount of work that this appears to be. Rest assured, you don't need to do all of these things overnight. It took me two years of plugging away at this to figure it out. Slow and steady wins the race.
  
  For more tips on how to manage your online reputation, download this helpful guide.