SEO for Healthcare: Why Should Your Organization Use SEO?

Imagine this scenario: you're the head of a hospital that specializes in knee surgery. Whenever people type searches into the four major search engines with "[your location] knee surgery," they are directed to your cross-town rivals' websites.

Do you sell medical supplies? Are you an individual in private practice? Do you publish healthcare literature or information? The same may apply to you: your closest rivals beat you to the top of the search results for the terms most important to your business. Or, even worse, you can't even make the first page of those search results - or, gasp! - crack into the first 10 pages.

How do people find your healthcare website? According to a recent poll by Forrester Research, people are not using health search engines to find health information. What are they using? Google! A recent New York Times article quoted Monique Levy, a Jupiter analyst, as saying, "Google is the entry point for most health search, and that is a huge advantage." If you rank highly enough for the right keywords, it will be your website that is visited by those searchers.

Still not convinced?

"The number of U.S. adults who use the Internet as a source of medical information is almost equal to the number that would consult their personal physicians," according to a recent Harris Interactive poll, reported in Computerworld.

Put another way, a great many people search for health information online. In fact, according to the same study, 70% of all adults use the Internet as a primary source for health information, and 76% of adults older than 55 use the Internet to help diagnose and better understand medical conditions.

If all these people are looking for health information online, wouldn't it be advantageous for your website to be among those consulted? After all, more unique visitors = more chances for conversions.

Let's connect the dots with SEO for healthcare:

• People look for health information online.
• People primarily use Google to begin searching for health information online.

Conclusion: You want your healthcare website to be the one they find at the top of those rankings. Getting to the top is partly a matter of luck, but it's also a matter of having a website optimized to rank well in the search engine results. Can you be found there? Are you drawing the traffic?

Fathom SEO can guide you with your healthcare website optimization. We'll show you that SEO for healthcare can succeed. We have a wealth of healthcare partners who can confirm the success of our SEO efforts.

Read to take the next step? Contact us today.

View our recently released Guide, "The 6 Best Free Online Healthcare Tools".