SEO For Healthcare and Hospitals

Just like any other business or institution, hospitals and healthcare clinics can benefit from greater visibility in search results. More online traffic to an institution’s website often means more treatment enquiries and consultations.

Health-related questions are among the most regularly asked on Google, with the most googled health problems being ‘what causes high blood pressure’ and ‘how to stop snoring’, along with many sexual health and pregnancy queries. According to research by Benenden Health, people used Google when looking for information around health issues around 50 million times in 2022. While the nature of these search queries will change over time, it’s clear that organic search has the potential to be a highly effective marketing channel for hospitals and healthcare institutions.

What do we mean by SEO for medical and healthcare institutions?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving the rankings of a website or specific website pages in search engine results pages (SERPs). Where paid channels such as PPC or social media advertising can build reach for your healthcare institution, improving performance in the organic search results puts your business in front of potential customers who are actively searching for the services that you offer.

Healthcare SEO differs from regular SEO because established strategies must be adapted to the niche. Many of the keywords and terms used in the medical sector are either highly specific or extremely competitive. As a result, many healthcare SEO campaigns must stick to a narrow set of keywords that align with the products and services offered by the institution. At the same time, the goal must still be to build credibility and trust among patients.

The benefits of SEO for hospitals and healthcare institutions

• Reduced patient patient acquisition costs

Almost every marketing manager attached to a healthcare institution faces the challenge of reducing patient acquisition costs. An effective healthcare SEO campaign will generate more website enquiries over time, resulting in a lower cost per patient acquisition in relation to the investment.

Furthermore, having an online presence will help you convert patients passively. Past research shows that 72% of people view online reviews when choosing a new medical provider. With organic SEO doing the initial heavy lifting, you have more of your budget to spend on other digital marketing channels.

• High Return on Investment (ROI)

Implementing SEO is a long-term marketing strategy. This is just as true for healthcare as it is for any other industry. You may not see the same immediate results you would expect from paid channels, instead healthcare SEO strategies will improve website traffic over time.

Ultimately, a well-researched and executed SEO campaign can provide the foundation for digital success moving forward. In the long run, organic SEO therefore has a higher ROI compared to other channels.

• Increases intent-driven traffic to the website

When it comes to medical issues, people are usually searching for specific answers and information. It could be because they have a symptom they want to investigate, a condition to learn more about, or to check procedure prices. Even if they’re not ready to use your service right now, they’re more likely to in the future or recommend your services to someone else off the back of this interaction.

Whereas paid channels such as PPC or social media advertising can build reach for your healthcare institution, improving performance in the organic search results is essential for building trust among people who could be in need of your services.

Challenges faced in SEO campaigns for hospitals

When healthcare facilities look to implement digital marketing campaigns, there are various snags that they can come across which aren’t present when marketing other industries. Broadly, this is due to privacy regulations, compliance requirements, communicating complex ideas, and tone of voice. Let’s break down these challenges in greater detail.

• Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) & EEAT

The acronym EEAT is one you might be familiar with, meaning Experience Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness. These factors make up the central components of Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG), which it uses to judge content and websites. Ultimately, any content which is deemed to be helpful and reliable for its target audience will be prioritised by the search engine.

Google’s document for creating helpful content provides valuable information which medical publishers can use to self-assess their content. While this advice will be slightly different depending on the industry or geographical location, the best strategy is to follow a people-first approach. This means creating content that provides useful information and recommendations supported by real-world expertise. The content should also be created with a focus on user experience (UX).

While EEAT qualities are ones that affect all the content crawled on Google, YMYL applies to content that is judged to have the potential to cause a significant impact on someone’s life. Common examples of sites with YMYL content are financial, legal, and medical sites. The impact of YMYL on SEO can be significant, as Google recognises any inaccuracies within this type of content has the potential to cause harm. Due to this, sites and pages on YMYL topics must meet higher standards.

• Changes to the Google Algorithm

The landscape of online search is constantly shifting. Google is constantly taking steps to improve user experience through algorithm updates. In the early days of the search engine in the 2000s, Google only made a handful of changes. Nowadays, there are estimated to be thousands of changes to the way Google’s search engine functions each year.

Oftentimes, it’s simply too much for non-SEO professionals to keep on top of every Google algorithm change as and when it happens. It is however expected that SEO experts at least keep on top of algorithm updates to understand how it might impact their client’s website rankings. As healthcare websites typically contain highly technical information, it’s often more difficult to adapt when changes occur. Therefore, SEO strategies face the challenge of maintaining consistent rankings in the face of frequent algorithm changes.

In the past, one of the most impactful updates was focused on Site Reputation Abuse (SRA) in November 2024. Having revised its policy regarding site reputation abuse earlier in the year, Google rolled out updates to its algorithm to help identify parasite SEO tactics. This had massive implications for any site using affiliate marketing content, with smaller publishers being especially badly hit. The lack of clarity on enforcement standards left many publishers and marketers confused.

• High authority competition

If you’re building your online presence in the healthcare space from scratch, it might take a while to see an increase in rankings. Aside from all the well-established private healthcare brands, if you’re a UK business you also have to compete with highly authoritative NHS content.

The challenge is that high authority competitors command a greater share of search visibility. David Feinberg, VP of Google Health, has gone on record stating that as much as 7% of the billions of searches that take place every day on Google are health-related, equating to roughly 70,000 searches a minute.

Given the sheer volume of health-related searches that take place on a daily basis, it should come as little surprise that competition for keyword visibility for these terms can be very stiff.

Also, due to the YMYL nature of medical-related search queries, Google is more likely to favour high authority websites that have proven EEAT in the field. All the while, healthcare websites must comply with strict guidelines from official bodies, such as those outlined by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP). This guidance takes into account any recent rulings impacting the marketing and advertising of medical procedures and services. Although this also extends to:

• Health conditions
• Medical devices
• Remedies, medicines, and therapies
• Cosmetic surgeries and procedures
• Beauty, grooming, and hygiene products
• Weight and slimming

The Power of Local SEO for Hospitals

Location is an important factor for people who are searching for operations or in-person treatments, as they might not want to travel far or they might not be physically able to travel. This is seen most clearly in Walk In centres that can see people at very short notice, although many facilities will offer these kinds of services. Marketing for healthcare clinics should therefore focus on improving local search visibility, as patients want to avoid travelling across the country for an operation.

Local SEO works to improve search visibility in a specified area around the hospital. The goal is to appeal to those making ‘blood tests near me’ or ‘blood test services Liverpool’ searches, as an example. Optimising your keyword strategy to include local terms and place names is a great way to appeal to those in the surrounding area, as well as regularly updating the Google business profile.

Local SEO strategies for Healthcare

• Reviews

A major factor in the success of a healthcare business is its overall reputation. Maintaining a positive reputation is important as it gives prospective patients confidence that your institution can deliver a high quality of care. People need to trust their healthcare provider more than other services they use because healthcare providers have a direct impact on their physical wellbeing. This often leads users to investigate the experiences of past patients and visitors. More so than most other business types, healthcare businesses tend to attract repeat customers and generate referrals from a good reputation.

Another aspect of reviews are local map rankings, which take into account the number and overall rating of reviews left on your GBP profile. Positive reviews not only convince people that you provide high-quality services, it can also help improve the visibility of your business on Google.

It’s recommended you have a review acquisition strategy in place to prompt happy customers to review your institution. One simple way to do this is to include a link to your GBP profile in any pre or post-treatment emails.

Next, you should always respond to reviews, even the negative ones, as it shows you value your patients, their concerns, and their feedback.

• Google Business Profile (GBP) optimisation

The information featured on a hospital’s GBP account must be accurate and up-to-date to be helpful to potential patients. This is where your reviews will sit, as well as other important information such as directions. See example below.

Everything that’s on your healthcare clinic’s GBP profile should be consistent with the information on its website. This includes any citations you’ve built.

• Google posts

Another aspect of the GBP profile are Google posts. These essentially function as news articles that allow hospitals and clinics to display important updates, announcements, and offers.

Your GBP will display the most recent posts first, so be careful that you aren’t pushing current news out of the spotlight by posting too frequently. It’s also important to note that GBP posts older than 6 months are automatically archived, so you should have a schedule in place to ensure regular GBP posting.

Whilst creating posts doesn’t influence your ranking, they do add extra value to your GBP and enrich your profile with content that could attract new patients.

Content strategies for healthcare SEO

Landing pages targeting specific search terms

To compete with the NHS and other health websites, private institutions create landing pages designed expressly for target search terms. By undertaking keyword research you should be able to identify the variations of search terms that your website has the best chances of ranking for.

Once you’ve gathered the list of keywords and terms for each page, you’ll need to create in-depth content detailing the surgeries and treatments offered by the institution. Focus on the facts while providing additional useful information to patients.

If you’re looking for inspiration, you can assess your competitor’s content to see how it’s laid out. It can also be beneficial to leverage your staff knowledge to provide the best information.

Featured Snippet optimisation

Featured snippets display a simple answer to a query. These are typically generated for commonly-searched questions, with the information being pulled from page content. Featured Snippets used to be the first thing users would see for query-based searches, although this has long since been superseded by paid ads and AI generated answers. See example below.

Although featured snippets might seem less impactful due to these factors, many users recognise that AI compiled answers can be unreliable and so seek out the featured snippet to find singular web sources. On the other hand, the AI overview answers do display the sources that have been pulled from, so if your website can feature here it might contribute some authority.

Writing succinct and information-dense content based around specific queries could see your hospital claim the featured snippet from competitors. Using search tools such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Google Search Console, can help to identify queries which are likely to generate featured snippets.

Pro tip: Highlight the importance of the content to Google by wrapping the question in a header tag.

Testimonials

One aspect of marketing that will always hold true is that people like to trust other people. When we see that someone else has had a good experience with something, whether it’s a restaurant or an activity, we’re more likely to be swayed by the recommendation. Research has shown there is a clear link between online customer testimonials and building brand trust.

This is also the case when it comes to healthcare marketing. Those who are considering a particular treatment will want to know if it has worked for other people and what their experience was like. Ideally, you’ll have service-specific testimonials on each landing page. For example, someone searching for CT scan services can quickly discover what kind of experiences were had by patients at that facility.

Review content from a medical standpoint

Due to EEAT and YMYL requirements, all content on healthcare websites must be factually correct. The best way to do this is to have SEO content medically reviewed by an industry expert.

If you have a working relationship with your SEO agency or provider, this should be easier than you might think. Once you’ve established a regular schedule for reviewing content, the next step is to record who has reviewed the content on each and when. This helps reassure the reader that the information they’re reading is relevant, up-to-date, and has been approved for publication by a medical professional, rather than solely coming from someone involved in marketing.

Author bios and accreditations

Another way to meet YMYL standards is to emphasise the healthcare credentials of those who have written the content on the website. This can be done by creating individual bios for contributors, an about page, and by listing clearly any accreditations/recognitions your institution has acquired.

It’s probably the case that the experts you have to review your content are specialists in a certain medical field. Listing each of their qualifications, education, and experience will further demonstrate that your website can be trusted for certain topics and treatments.

FAQs

Oftentimes, people will scroll straight to the ‘frequently asked questions’ to find the answers they’re looking for. By identifying the main questions on your customers’ minds, you can build trust and create more visibility for your healthcare website.

There will be a unique set of FAQs which correlates to each of the treatments and services your institution offers, so you can make sure there isn’t any overlap. Investigating the ‘People Also Ask’ section on the SERP is a good way to find relevant FAQs.

Crafting FAQs tailored to your service pages can also help obtain a featured snippet. Questions that often come up regarding medical services are around cost. For instance, ‘how much does **** surgery cost in the UK?’.

Mark up your FAQs with FAQschema to enable rich results and show your FAQs in an accordion on the search result page.

Need a Healthcare SEO strategy from a professional agency?

Websites for hospitals and other healthcare institutions tend to be large and unwieldy. In other words, they don’t make for a good user experience. On top of this, by trying to cover all the treatments and potential patient symptoms, the website becomes unoptimised from an SEO standpoint as well.

What you need is a purpose-built healthcare SEO strategy that considers every aspect of your website. This includes addressing underlying technical issues, seasonal changes, medical content reviews, on-page optimisations, and more.

During our 15+ years of experience, we’ve successfully claimed hundreds of top 10 page and keyword rankings for clients in the medical niche including Fairfield Independent Hospital.

Our Liverpool SEO team has experience creating SEO strategies for businesses across the world, and understand the importance of keeping up to date with the latest changes in the industry. We also write in-depth articles to help specific sectors level up their SEO efforts, such as our ultimate guide to Franchise SEO.

As a leading Liverpool digital marketing agency we know how important it is to back up strategy with sound research and analysis. We take an analytical approach to our work using the best industry tools to respond to the ever-changing search landscape.

Get in touch with us to discuss how best to execute your SEO strategy and find out where your website’s opportunities are hiding. Free consultations available!

Hospital and Healthcare SEO Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)