What Did I Learn About Medical SEO?

It has been quite a while that I did not get a chance to update my blog about SEO learnings, during the past few months I have been quite busy studying and practicing medical SEO, this is probably one of the most challenging and exciting experiences that I have ever had during all my SEO careers since most medical & finance websites are often categorized as YMYL web site, usually, Google often put more weights on this type of web site since the sites will cause direct impacts to people’s lives, the difficulty in term of learning and experimenting plus the COVID-19’s impacts on organic searching patterns, which did had lead me some troubles at the beginning because of global’s unpredictable volatility on SERP, lacking accurate data plus the May Algorithm update have somehow misled my sense of direction, but I am glad that I have finally breakthrough some difficulties and had some successes, so let’s debunk some fundamentals how do we master medical SEO through my own case studies.

For simplicity, I will use an example from one of the medical sites that I work with as demonstration

Understand What Are YMYL sites

Before I start, it is very important for you to understand the concept of YMYL web sites. Generally speaking, YMYL is the abbreviation for “Your money your life”, just as the title mentioned, these websites are the site people search for ultimately making their health, finance, safety decisions, so medical, insurance or anything financial, are considered as YMYL web sites, the reason why Google is setting their bar so high as ranking factors, it’s just because Google needs to make sure that such sites will only benefit to people’s lives and well-being.

For instance, when you are sick and you are looking for intent queries such as “where can I find Doctor for xxxx? or How do I treat xxxx?”, most of the time, you will most likely to get your answer accurately after typed in on Google search, and also, it’s nearly impossible for you to get troll results such as “drinking tide pod to cure a cold” types of questions, thanks to Google, which they are very serious about this because they know that the SERP will directly affect people’s lives, and this is pretty much the core concept why YMYL is harder to rank than others simply because by applying a stricter EAT rules. 

What is EAT ?

To avoid any confusion, it is important to know that ETA does not ONLY apply to YMYL web sites, it pretty much applies to everything how Google defines what quality content is, in the medical SEO world, but these rules are also much more prominent because the content is much harder to construct, by taking all the considerations of medical jargons, technical terms, and a mass amount of expert knowledge required.

• E Stands for expertise
• A stands for authority
• T stands for trustworthiness

So basically what here trying to say is, your content needs to be “like a boss”!  If you are ranking medical web sites and you are still hiring ghostwriters with $15/articles without any medical background or pre-industry knowledge, then chances are your site will never rank up even you have already compiled 1000 articles. Why? Because of the quality of content matters, just like how black matters.

How Do We Compile Medical SEO Content Like a PRO?

There are two important aspects that I think are crucial for medical SEO content, here are the following: 

1. -You will need to prominent your every page that can sharpen your authoritative & expertise status to Google
2. -You will need to conduct an intensive research about all the medical terms, jargons and procedures information in order to become a PRO

How to Do Medical SEO Keyword Research

Being as an SEO strategist, it is always a difficult question of how can I conduct medical SEO keyword research and the tough part, how do I get the content done without having a medical background. To answer this, it is highly recommended you to get experienced writers who have prior medical backgrounds, you are basically in a field that you will need to have lots of knowledge about the jargons and procedures, and you definitely don’t want to sound like a noob to others, and if you don’t, then chances are you will really need to conduct lots of researches, I meant, LOTS of studies to make sure that you understand the jargon before you assigned the content briefs to your writers.

Step 1 How to Acquire Core Medical Keyword

In my opinion, the best way for me to acquire the info is using ahref’s organic keyword tools and just scrap down all your competitor’s web sites organic keywords and dump to the keyword pool from a spreadsheet, with some complex excel queries functions, you will be able to trim down 20k keywords to 500 and this is where you start to see the pattern what kind of terms that you wanna build content with..etc

Step 2 How to Categorize Keyword Patterns & Adding Keyword Variation?

Note: For some keyword such as “breast augmentation”, people often using another term such as “breast enhancement”, “boob job”..etc, you can use tool such as keyword surfer to get your variation keywords inside your content, this will help you to avoid keyword stuffing and get your more chance to rank up on the SERP.

Step 3 Use Ahref to Acquire Competitors With Their Top Performed Pages

After you acquired the core keywords then you can just run a bulk analysis from ahref, one of the strong features about this tool is you will be able to scrap down your competitor’s domain top performed URLs so then you export back to your Google sheet and voila, you will pretty much get your content topic , referral links, keyword volume, and difficulty. With a clear analysis of what topics or pages that you should build to leverage the maximum exposure, your life will start to be much easier from now on! 

Perfecting Your About the Dr. Pages

Having a doctor profile page completed is the most important thing for the medical web sites, especially for doctors who perform treatments or procedures, having the doctor pages with their all their credential, education, expertise as well as the years of experience will simply prove that the doctor is the real expert in the field and since most doctors do have their medical publications, researches & studies or even own Wikipedia pages, by connecting all of these puzzles all together into your Dr pages and procedure pages, this will greatly enhance your site authority.

Standardize All Your Procedure Pages

Having holistic procedure page structures are crucial to medical sites’ success, generally, a doctor or a medical clinic will need to cover all symptom as well as solution as treatments, which we will include all of these pieces of information refer as procedure page, the same logic can be applied to treatments or prescription, however, the idea is pretty much the same, by taking medical industry lead head’s web site such as “Mayo clinic”, “Healthline” and WebMD”, we can pretty much conclude the format how an excellent procedure page formatting as follows:

1. What is the symptom? 
2. Why is the cause of the symptom?
3. How to treat the symptom?
4. How much cost it is?
5. Who is the candidate for the surgery?
6. What are the benefits and risks?
7. What is the recovery time period 
8. Why choose “your place” for the “symptom? 
9. Before and After Images 
10. Testimonials

By taking an example, feel free to check the web site that I am currently working to get a better idea

Of course, as long as you are making your content matching audience’s search queries as much as you can with the proper solution, with a structural hierarchy within the web site, you are basically just sending signals to Google that you are an industry expert and you will be likely to rank up easily depend on competition, however, building such massive content requires patience and lots of expertise, you will not have chance to get rank up by simply having 10 pages, this is pretty much pain in the ass since you are building a gigantic spider web where all the details need to be connected properly.

For a site like mayo clinique or Healthline, thousands of thousand pages with unique high-quality content have been built from time to time, that is why you can search everything within the web sites and get a quick proper answer from Drs, this is pretty much how the magic of ETA works for medical SEO. 

How to Sharpen Your Site’s Authority

Without other people to refer you, you won’t be an expert even you come with superior content, and this is the part where outer linking plays an important role. Consider an example that, your friends are telling to the public that you are an expert in SEO compare to the John Mueller tells the public that you are good at SEO, which one will be more trustworthy? Here come the tips on how to improve your site authority!

1. -Having anchor links from authoritative web sites in your content (For example, mayo clinic, healthline, WebMD..etc)
2. -Building a Doctor profile page on the bottom of pages with LinkedIn, social media, reviews like realself (Dr review sites) and medical associations such as “American Society of Plastic Surgeons”..etc as bottom float banner which applies as a footer as a connector to each procedure pages
3. -Having common FAQ questions from SERP snippets and list it to your procedure pages
4. -Adding supplementary resources that can prove the Dr’s authorities such as interviews, youtube videos, demonstrations and medical researches, google scholar publications on the web site
5. -Adding schema markup such as “medical clinique” markup, “operation” and “doctor” markup on target sites
6. – Having a perfect CRO funnel, such as adding “schedule a consultation” or “make an appointment” pages or even adding physical address & telephone with URLs so customers can directly convert to the site, in this case, conversion can either means to fill out the form or to call 
7. Having a footer banner with all info such as related association, reviews, Linkedin, Wikipedia profile or other hospital profiles..etc to increase authority

Refine Your technical SEO

Like other web sites, having a perfect content & architecture does not mean that you will rank up 100%, last but not the least, you will need to make sure that common problems in the following are running properly, and you will always need to monitor the status to make sure everything is running smoothly

1. -Mobile-friendliness (Use GTMatrix or WebDev to exam it) 
2. -Site speed
3. -Wp rocket
4. -Short Pixel
5. -Or tiny png to compress your images
6. -Use webp
7. -Canonical
8. -Herflang
9. -H1 /H2 head tags
10. -Meta tags
11. -Image alt
12. -4xx 5xx status 
13. -Link structure 
14. -permanent links
15. -Link trail
16. -Sitemap
17. -Robot.txt

What about Medical localization SEO ?

Sometimes situations can occur when you are building medical services for people who came from different cities, there are several SEO tactics you can do as follow: 

1. Building a list of localization URLs with core keywords plus geographical terms
   For example  /Rhinoplasty-in-Montreal
   For example: /Rhinoplasty-in-Ontario
   For example: /Rhinoplasty-in-Vancouver
2. Build Head tags with Geo-targeting Keyword H1 / meta tags
3. Having GMB with different Store codes
4. Create a city pillar page with all cities listed
5. Install cities plugin

How to do Medical SEO Schema Mark Up

This is probably the part that most medical web site or hospitals that do not do well, the reason are simple, there isn’t really a lot of examples how to do it and since you will need a bit coding experience how to adding markup through JASON-LD or javascript..etc, lot of web site only has the basic schema which is created from sites like WordPress & Shopify, however, usually the default schema is not really useful since it does not provide much info to Google.

For medical schema, I recommend the following schema markups that we can use

1. Schema markup for Doctor
2. Schema markup for medical clinic
3. Schema markup for operation
4. Schema markup for medicine
5. Schema markup with COVID-19 related (event)