We are all guilty of it at times — judging a book by its cover. While vibrant colors, jazzy graphics, catchy videos may dazzle your website visitor, if not developed properly, your site’s underlying technical “chops” may have a dramatic impact on its performance, or not, in search.
Understanding what these common issues are and how to avoid them will help you to be fully informed when it’s time to redevelop your healthcare website.
Poor Site Structure
Optimizing a website starts with a solid site structure. Site architecture is the way information is organized on your website. Think of it as organizing documents into folders, then folders in a cabinet. Visitors quickly and efficiently get to what they are looking for by understanding how things are organized, adding the right visual queues for them to take action.
Many healthcare sites lack proper site architecture. Without this foundational step, your website can’t achieve the organic results you’re aiming for.
Lack of Relevant and Unique Content
Shallow boilerplate content is another common reason that can negatively impact your search performance. Google is looking for content that is unique and authoritative. Users are looking for information that is relevant and informative.
Developing unique, relevant, and authoritative content for topics you want to be found for is key. For example, if you are a specialty practice, adding blog posts that answer a specific question you hear all the time or developing landing pages that discuss treatment options, what to expect, or how to prepare keeps things relevant to the user. With enough of the right content on your site, search engines may consider your site as trustworthy and reward it with a better rank.
Finally, be sure to check your website stats, Google Trends, and Google Search Console, and consider improving or pruning underperforming content. Don’t let your content become stale.
Shallow Provider Profiles
Often one of the most heavily visited areas of a healthcare site is its provider profiles. When well optimized, these profile pages have a strong possibility of indexing well in search engines and converting visitors.
Profiles that do not include detailed credentials inclusive of focus areas, training, publications, videos, proper schema, and the ability to request an appointment can make you lose out on potential traffic.
Slow Page Speed
Patients and search engines alike want fast websites, especially when using mobile devices. However, many healthcare sites have slow page speeds. This means that the content on the page loads (or “paints”) slowly. Unfortunately, slow page speeds can negatively affect your visitor’s experience and your site’s performance in search.
Today, page speed is a ranking factor on Google. A faster page speed can help your site rank more favorably in search engines.
Curious to know how your website page speed stacks up? Test your site on our audit tool.
Poor user experience
New this summer, “Page Experience” signal will be a Google ranking factor. According to Google, “loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability of page content, and combined are the foundation of the 2020 Core Web Vitals.”
Improvements to a user’s experience can make a site less frustrating for visitors. Search engines recognize that and will reward you for it.
Medical Related Schema
Finally, one of the most common technical SEO issues with healthcare sites is the lack of medical schema or structured markup. This markup is added to the HTML code of a website page to provide additional information to search engines about the context of that page. Schema can be added to your home and location pages, provider profiles, condition and treatment pages.
Proper schema allows search engines to show more informative results, populate rich snippets and knowledge graphs in search results. Rich snippets have shown to attract users’ attention and increase click-throughs to your site.
How does your site compare?
If you are looking for some help evaluating your site’s technical performance, Practis can help! Contact us today to learn more.
