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Web design, hosting, branding, writing and coding are all part of building a successful healthcare website. But search engine optimization (SEO) is also crucial to that success. It's what helps search engines—and patients—find your site. More than that, it helps you create an online experience that meets their needs.

4 reasons healthcare SEO is important

There are many reasons to include SEO in your healthcare marketing budget.

Here are four of them.

1. SEO reaches consumers at the right moment. Organic search is the top source of traffic for most of the hospitals, health systems and health plans Coffey works with.
   
   We find that clients who haven't done SEO get nearly all of their organic search traffic from searches that include the organization's name. That means that only people who already know they're looking for you can find your information.
   
   SEO can help connect you to people who are actively looking for healthcare—but who aren't yet looking at your organization. Ranking for these types of searches can raise overall brand awareness. It also puts your content in front of people at the moment they are looking to make a healthcare decision.
2. SEO helps you stand out. Search is constantly changing. Today, people often find the information they're looking for in the form of snippets, map packs or featured business profiles. The result: In 2024, less than half of organic searches result in a click.
   
   SEO helps you stand out in organic rankings, but it also helps search engines understand the information you're offering—and feature it properly in rich search results. This means that even people who don't click can still connect with your organization.
3. SEO helps you show return on investment (ROI). You don't have to do SEO to track ROI for your website, but the tracking that's done as part of the SEO process can shed light on the site as a whole and help inspire tracking in other areas.
4. SEO makes all of your healthcare marketing better. Doing SEO right isn't about gaming the system—it's about understanding what your audience is actually searching for. The keyword research you do will help uncover what kinds of words people in your community use when looking for healthcare services and what kind of information they're hoping to find on your site. That insight can help inform your other marketing efforts and help you connect to your community using their own language.
   
   SEO also involves making sure your website offers a great experience as a whole by loading quickly, working well on mobile and being easy to navigate. These things will help you rank better, but they'll also benefit everyone who visits your site, regardless of how they found you.

Categories: Digital