Being in the medical website design business, we talk to A LOT of different doctors and health care providers across a wide range of specialties.  It’s actually quite fascinating on multiple levels.  You see, in addition to fulfilling a need, a big part of our job entails problem solving.  And in order to effectively help doctors solve their problems and meet their online needs, we end up asking a ton of questions and listening to the various issues they face within their specific specialty.  Interestingly enough, across the board (and regardless of medical specialty or subset specialty), we hear one common grievance again and again: patients are often diagnosing themselves and forming conclusions based on their internet research.  Most of the doctors that have voiced this frustration to us feel like they are competing with Google when it comes to their patient’s education.  And as one doctor recently said to us: “A lot of the information and ‘education’ on the internet isn’t even accurate or is outdated and just freaks my patients out.  So by the time they come in to see me for a follow-up, they’re convinced that they’re in a disease state much worse than the reality.”  And the thing is…we get it.  Most of us are probably guilty of researching a random condition or symptom at some point or reading a blog and taking it for fact.  Let’s face it: Google has the uncanny ability of making even the most normal human into a raving hypochondriac.  You can see where health care providers would get frustrated and perhaps not a little annoyed.

At Medical Site Solutions, we pride ourselves on offering our doctor and physician clients access to some of the best patient education resources available.  Our website packages can come with the inclusion of a health library specific to your medical specialty, patient education videos, and even waiting room TV videos.  You may also choose to provide your own education by writing original content.  Many health care providers choose this route because they want their patients to get descriptions of disease states and practice specific surgery (or procedure) information directly from the horse’s mouth.  You, the doctor are able to educate your patients based on YOUR practice and knowledge.  And bonus: because you are creating original and unique content when you go this route, you’re giving your website’s SEO a boost!!  A total WIN WIN if we do say so ourselves!

Unfortunately, no health care provider can definitively stop their patients for researching medical issues on the internet.  However, by providing as much of your own patient education via your medical website, you can help circumvent much of the misinformation and outdated “education” that patients are embracing these days.  Directing patients specifically to your website for patient education resources (whether it be a Health Library, online Videos, or your original content) could save you a ton of time, energy, and frustration.  Think about every time you hear this at a patient appointment: “But I read on the internet that…”  That inevitably leads to a lengthy discussion where you, the doctor, must disprove or debate already formulated conclusions formed by your patient.  This leads to longer appointment times spent with patients, patients who are convinced they know more about the situation than they actually do, and a frustrated physician who has tight schedule as it is.  And let’s face it, time is money.  The great news is we’re here to help.  Let us help you efficiently and effectively provide streamlined education to your patients.  Contact us today to find out how we can help you enhance your online patient education.

Every doctor wants to have a beautiful, highly effective website and online presence.  But having an effective medical website doesn’t mean having one that’s simply visually stunning.  In a perfect world your website would not only be beautifully designed and user friendly, but also extremely SEO friendly so that your website is capable of higher search rankings.  So how does original and/or recently added content specific to YOUR practice and area of expertise help with SEO?  Well, the reason is this: Google (the proverbial king of search engines) will rank your medical practice’s website higher in the search results if your website contains unique and/or recently added content.  As we stated in our last blog, Google ranking is all about relevance, authority and trust.  Google loves websites that contain pages full of high quality, rich content that is new, relevant, and original.

Here at Medical Site Solutions, we provide websites that come conveniently turn-key with specialty specific content and images.  This means that all of our websites come with the option of using our prewritten content.  We offer prewritten content for the most common services and procedures within each specialty as well as specialty specific photos.  We provide this preloaded content as a baseline or a foundation from which physicians may add-to or create their own content.  Doctors have the option to use or modify our preloaded content as they see fit.  Or they can easily create their own 100% original content using our online editor.
Here are several tips and options for increasing SEO with original content:
♦You can choose to use our already written, preloaded specialty specific content (i.e. general descriptions of the most common procedures within your specialty and relevant photos), but in doing so, make the content uniquely your own. That means, using parts of what we have and tweaking our content so that it is more specific to the services, procedures, and protocol specific to YOUR practice.  Implementing this option simply means that doctors may use our preloaded content as a baseline or foundation from which to create their own content.
♦Adding a weekly or monthly blog article (original content) on your website can dramatically increase your SEO. Each time you create a new post you are adding a new page to your website. Search engines love seeing FRESH, original content.
♦Adding original videos and/or images to your website also has an enormous effect on your SEO. Important note: make sure all videos and images added are SEO optimized to get the full benefit.
♦You can also opt to use NONE of our content, but just use the website design/layout. At Medical Site Solutions, you have the ability and option to create 100% original content on your website.  This could involve creating your own links, website headers, website categories, website page names, procedure and service descriptions, using your own photos, and the list goes on and on.  It’s may be more work for you in the beginning, but in the end, you’d have a website that has 100% original content.  And here again, our preloaded content can help by giving you a jumping off point to form your own content ideas…to get the creative juices flowing, as they say!
You could purchase a website from us and simply insert your practice name and contact information and nothing else.  You’d still have a user-friendly website, rich in content and truly stunning in design that is SEO friendly.  If you’d like to further strengthen your website SEO to attract more patients (i.e. increase traffic to your site), you should include as much original content as possible.  After all, Google tends to reward medical websites for doctors that are authoritative, original, and unique in content.  All of our website designs give our clients the capability to be as original as they’d like with their content creation.
A ton of the bigger medical website design companies (the ones that charge thousands of dollars for medical websites for doctors) like to slam the smaller guys like us by convincing doctors that buying gorgeous and affordable websites like ours is a big no-no.  They see that we are providing viable, effective, user-friendly, highly functional websites at a fraction of what they charge, and quite frankly, they don’t like the fact that they are losing business to companies like ours.  Their main argument is that by offering preloaded content, doctors may have the same content as others, thus offering little SEO success.  Original content is just one of many factors search engines use to determine page ranking.  A medical website could actually have 100% original content but rank lower than a website that has duplicate content.  In fact, Google’s Andrey Lipattsev (Search Quality Senior Strategist) has adamantly stated that Google does NOT have a duplicate content penalty.
The bottom-line is that Medical Site Solutions offers an affordable way to create an incredibly beautiful website with original content that is both SEO friendly and effective.  Contact us today at (888) 993-1992 for more information on how we can help you create a unique and gorgeous new website for your medical practice!

Have you ever wondered why some websites rank higher than others on a search results page?  Or why some websites show up on page one versus page two of the results?  Have you ever noticed that sometimes a small business with relevant information can rank higher than the Wikipedia page with the same related content?  In this blog, we’ll take a look at Google’s top ranking factors and how you can help YOUR medical practice obtain a higher ranking than your competitors.
If you read our last SEO blog (Search Engine Optimization: An Introduction) you may recall the various definitions we mentioned for Search Engine Optimization.  But just as a refresher, SEO is defined by one source as a “methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine” (Webopedia).  A search engine, for instance, like Google.  The former CEO of Google once reported that Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine which sites rank higher in the search engine. That’s right…OVER 200!!!  Here’s the thing: the process of SEO and search engine ranking within Google revolves around three main principles:  Relevance, Authority, and Trust.
Google employs complex mathematical algorithms that rely on over 200 clues or signals to determine the relevancy of a website.  These determine how your medical website will rank in online searches.  Yes, these algorithms are complex, but the great news is, as long as you remember those three principals stated above (i.e. relevance, authority, and trust), you can help your medical practice push its way to the proverbial front of the classroom in search results. 

These three principals are the focus and core of Google’s algorithms and can be used to your advantage in obtaining higher rankings:

1. Relevance: Google looks at the content on your site to determine relevancy. The search engine likes to see a website that contains valuable, content rich information.  It’s important to think like a patient when considering relevance, and not like a doctor.  What will your patients type into the search box?  What information will they try to obtain?  Google will only return results relevant or valuable to the searcher’s query, and then will rank those results according to the popularity of the website providing this information.  Relevancy and popularity are gained by providing content rich pages built for your patients (and not for the search engines), building links from relevant sites, and other various SEO techniques that can be read about here.
   
2. Authority: Authority refers to your medical practice’s online strength within your market or field. What it basically boils down to: a numbers game.  For instance, if your practice has 900 backlinks and 900 social media followers while your main competitors have 100 backlinks and 100 social media followers…well….you’re probably going to rank higher than Dr. Competitor on the other side of town.
   
3. Trust: Google’s focus and mission is to keep untrustworthy, crappy quality websites OUT of the search results. In fact, the “trust” principal has been the central motivator behind some extremely crucial Google changes and updates over the past several years.  Your practice’s medical website should contain high-quality content and backlinks (i.e. inbound links from other reputable websites that point back to your website) in order to be considered a trustworthy source by Google.

Ok, and now we get to the fun part people!!  With those three guiding principles in mind, let’s get down to the meat and potatoes of this bad boy.  So what ARE Google’s top ranking factors?  While Google never reveals its algorithm details or exact ranking factors, SEO industry leaders (with lots of study and testing) have been able extract some of the strongest factors that can influence higher search rankings. 
These include:

• Relevant Keywords on the Page
  

              ◊  A keyword is a word or group of words that you would like your site to rank for in Google.

• Keyword in Internal Links

              ◊  These are the keywords within the internal links on your website. Internal links are used for navigation within your medical website…they go from one                             page on a domain to another page on the same domain.

• User Signals

              ◊  These can be viewed on Google Analytics and include signals such as bounce-rate, time on the website, click thru rate, etc.

• Domain Visibility

              ◊  This refers to how strong the domain is in terms of authority and links.

• Search Volume of Domain Name
  
• Total Number of Backlinks and Referring Domains
  
• Google Plus and Facebook Activity

The bottom line is this:  If Dr. Competitor on the other side of town has more of the above factors featured on his website than you do, his website is more likely to rank higher than yours.  We will be discussing each of these above ranking factors in depth within future blogs, so stay tuned!  Also, Medical Site Solutions offers various tiers of SEO packages for ALL our medical website designs.  Contact us today for more information on how we can help your medical practice achieve your online goals for 2017!

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For more information visit Medical Site Solutions at medicalsitesolutions.com/website-design/nutritionist or call (888) 993-1992.