When it comes to SEO for your medical practice’s website, not all hosting platforms are created equal — here’s why WordPress outshines the rest.
Many medical practices think that simply building out a website and pushing it live is enough to guarantee solid online visibility and a steady stream of high-quality traffic — if only it were that simple…
In reality, your site’s visibility largely depends on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. In order to improve your ranking in Google’s search results, you’ll need to optimize your content accordingly — something that any SEO professional will tell you is, in and of itself, a full-time job.
The good news is that some Content Management Systems (CMS) make optimizing your content for search a piece of cake — at least relatively speaking. We typically recommend WordPress to our clients, as it comes with a number of incredibly helpful built-in features that help you adhere to SEO best practices without placing undue strain on your time or resources.
Lucy Barret recently wrote a great article for Search Engine Watch that outlines a number of WordPress’ key advantages when it comes to SEO — here are a few that every medical marketer should know about.
When it comes to improving search rankings, your pages’ title tags play a vital role. In addition to serving as an indicator of quality and relevancy for search bots, the title tags are the text that users actually see on the results pages — in other words, this is your opportunity to convince prospective patients to actually visit your site.
With WordPress’ All in One SEO Pack plugin, you can customize your title tags to make them more SEO-friendly. Try to add the most relevant keywords at the beginning, as search engines tend to focus heavily on the first one to three words — moreover, it will make it much easier for users to quickly determine the contents of your page, thereby increasing your click-through-rate (CTR) with more qualified traffic.
Meta descriptions are essentially a short abstract that appear on search result pages. They provide readers and web crawlers with a brief summary of your post in order to help them determine the contents and relevancy of a given page.
WordPress allows users to customize their own meta descriptions, or utilize a variety of plugins, such as the Yoast SEO plugin or the All in One SEO Pack, to auto-generate optimized meta descriptions for onsite content.
Think of categories and tags as your site’s table of contents — by grouping blog posts and landing pages under these umbrella terms, your visitors will be able to navigate your site and locate the information they’re looking quickly and easily. When leveraged correctly, categories and tags can help boost your search rankings as well.
Change Your Default Permalink Structure
Permalinks are the permanent URLs that form the basis of all of the various types of content on your site. In other words, this is the base address that ultimately links to all of your blog posts, landing pages, FAQ sections, etc. The default permalink structure typically looks like this:
This actually makes it difficult for web crawlers to read and index your site pages.
Conveniently, WordPress allows users to change the default permalink structure to include relevant keywords and/or categories, which in turn will make it more algorithm- and patient-friendly. For example, a custom permalink structure might look something like this:
On a more fundamental level, WordPress itself is designed with search crawlers in mind. The underlying code is clean and simple, making it much easier for bots to quickly and easily index your content.
As the level of competition in the local search market continues to increase, medical practices need to make sure they’re capitalizing on every digital resource at their disposal. WordPress effectively comes with a built-in leg up for bolstering your visibility in search and improving the user experience — in other words, by going with “the other guy” you may be placing yourself at a serious disadvantage.