If you are searching curious about starting plastic surgeon SEO, you likely care about the end result. Ranking on Google and getting free patients finding your practice. Then patients inevitably inquire about procedures. They show up to their initial consultation and then boom, you are booking procedures. But there is a long road to that
elusive page one ranking. There are no shortcuts that will give you longevity with your rankings.
The goal of this post is for any plastic surgery practice who has recently purchased a new domain and starting their SEO from scratch. SEO is a critical pillar of plastic surgeon marketing. Perhaps you have rebranded, just purchased a new domain, or just launched your first practice. Maybe you’ve just always had a website and never did any plastic surgery practice SEO and need a starting point. If you fall into any of those examples above, this post will be of great value to you.
Believe it or not, this post will mainly revolve around website development tasks. This isn’t the sexiest topic to write about because it isn’t what moves the needle. However, it is vital information. For instance, if you have a competitor that followed none of these best practices and you followed these best practices, you’ll rank far easier than they would with the same amount of work. Without a proper foundation, you’ll likely be spinning your wheels in terms of trying to get your website to rank well. This post serves as creating that rock solid foundation which will allow you to grow your practice’s visibility. The more steps that are ultimately followed, the better.
Step 1 to Starting Plastic Surgeon SEO – SSL Security
Having a secured website is advantageous in this day and age. Especially when dealing with patient information. It makes patients feel safer when you look at the URL bar and you see a “lock” icon. Google will favor a website with SSL security installed as opposed to one that doesn’t, all else things equal. Things you can easily control that contribute to positive signals should always be used. This is Step #1 because if you haven’t launched your website yet, you will not have to change your URLs. However, if you already have a website launched and indexed in Google, after installing a SSL, you’ll need to create 301 redirects. *Consult with an expert prior to doing so because you may lose your rankings*.
The Key Take Away: SSL security is a great and easy way to show everyone you take security and their privacy very seriously. However, if you already have an established website you must weigh the pros and cons to moving to a SSL secure website.
Step 2 – Site Speed
Site speed has been a confirmed ranking factor. Besides, who likes to wait 10+ seconds for a website to load? The last time that happened to you, you probably smashed that back button and headed over to a competitor. Let’s face it. In this day and age you are competing for people’s attention. A slow loading website can wreak havoc on your data and most importantly, your plastic surgeon SEO.
There is a tool which is owned by Google where you can view your score along with what needs to be done to improve it. Check your score out by heading over to the Google Page Speed Insights Tool. It will allow you to get a great idea on the items to fix which will have the largest impact and improvement.
The Key Take Away: Website speed is incredibly important. If your website is currently getting developed, tell your developer that you want your score to be over 80 prior to pushing the website live. We’ve seen website rankings increase just from optimizing site speed.
Step 3 – Confirming Crawlability & Indexability
Ensure that your website is crawlable & indexable. Ensuring your website can be crawled allows Google and other search engines to view the content that you have created for your readers. You can have the best content in your industry but if robots cannot crawl your webpage, it will never get found. Crawling ultimately allows search engines to index your website. Indexing your website means it can be found in the search results.
The Key Take Away: If your website has robots blocked, no search engine will be able to crawl your website. The very first thing you should do is to sign up for Google Webmasters and run a robots.txt checker as well as submit a sitemap (once you are done completing all the steps). Make sure there are no errors with regards to crawlability and indexability. Bonus Tip: While it has no direct SEO value, you should also have Google Analytics installed.
Step 4 – Website Architecture
The website architecture is the structure of your website and where your URLs are housed. There are important aspects with how you plan how your website’s information will be structured.
For instance, having APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com you will want to have sub-folders that house more in-depth information about certain topics. For instance, if you have a multi-location practice in South Florida, it would be wise to create your website architecture as follows:
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/south-florida-plastic-surgeon/
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/south-florida-plastic-surgeon/plastic-surgeon-boca-raton/
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/south-florida-plastic-surgeon/plastic-surgeon-miami/
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/south-florida-plastic-surgeon/plastic-surgeon-fort-lauderadle/
In the above example, each sub-folder would house content revolving around that page. So, APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/south-florida-plastic-surgeon/ this page would have content purely revolving around South Florida plastic surgeon based keywords. You would indicate a brief summary of your specific locations. How long you have been serving South Florida. Your practice history. The number of Physicians on your staff. Etc. You would then do the same but apply it to the specific cities that you actually have locations in. If you only have one practice, that is OK. This same logic can be applied to actual procedures.
As an example: If you are a plastic surgery practice located in Miami, FL.
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com <–Home Page
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/plastic-surgeon-miami/
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/plastic-surgeon-miami/rhinoplasty-miami/
- APlasticSurgeonPracticeExample.com/plastic-surgeon-miami/facelift-miami/
Each page would specifically talk about exactly what the URL indicates just like in the multi-practice plastic surgery SEO example above. However, not any content will do which brings us to our 3rd step.
The Key Take Away: Website architecture is often overlooked and sort of thrown together at random with zero strategic planning. This can harm a website in the long-term especially if the aspiration is to become the go-to plastic surgery practice in your market. It is a very strategic move that will pay dividends later on.
Step 5 – Ensuring Your Website has Ample Content
Ensuring your website has ample content is critical to SEO. The very purpose of starting plastic surgeon SEO is to optimize your website for both search engines but more importantly your visitors. Search engines exist to offer its users the best information possible when they are searching. There are no shortcuts to take. Be the plastic surgery practice that is offering the most in-depth information about the procedures you specialize in. Be the authority. You can ensure long-term success if you always think to yourself, does this help provide the best possible value to my readers?
What does that mean? Write as much information as you can, in as much detail as you can that is truly helpful to the user. Don’t include fluff just to hit a word count. But you should try to hit at least 1,000 words in any given piece of content. Again, it seems like a waste of time but it will certainly pay off. Plastic surgeon SEO is more competitive than ever so doing every little part right is absolutely critical if you want to dominate your market. Providing insane value with your content is also a sure-fire way to get links to your content which is very important for SEO in competitive industries.
Content is so important that we’ll save how to optimize each page of content for another post.
The Key Take Away: Invest the time to write content that blows your competitors content out of the water. Even if it takes 7 days to create an epic post, that is OK. It is an investment into starting plastic surgeon SEO that will pay dividends. Bonus Tip: Do not be repetitive and launch 3 pages that all talk about rhinoplasty Miami (or whatever topic), this will actually hurt your website as each page will compete with each other.
Step 6 – Blog Section
You’ve heard the buzz words but blogging only works when done right. It isn’t an exercise that one is to just rush and expect the results to be amazing. Creating a blog that offers tremendous value as well as the latest information is very important in competitive markets. Have you ever been to a website and found no up-to-date information? Imagine if surgical websites never talked about minimally invasive surgery and still had images of more traditional surgeries.
Ensure your website has a WordPress blog attached. There are several benefits to a WordPress blog and most importantly, it is built to be SEO friendly out of the box. There are also plugins and it is amongst the most widely used blog platforms today. Similar to content optimization, blogging deserves its own post but for foundational SEO sake, please install a blog.
The Key Take Away: Having a blog on your website is important for SEO purposes. Some of the most popular websites draw a majority of their traffic from their blog. There are several blog posts from 2016 in our industry that are still ranking. Imagine if you wrote a blog post 4 years ago and to this day, it was still generating traffic, leads, and patient consultations. Quite the investment of time, huh? 🙂
Wrapping it Up
Follow the above steps and you’ll be several steps ahead of most competitors. Again, if you are ultimately going to pay an SEO company thousands of dollars per month or utilize a Pay Per Consultation™ marketing campaign where SEO is done at $0.00 each month, you’ll want to make sure your foundational basics are complete to see results come sooner rather than later.
Keep in mind that all else equal, one website that has completed these foundational plastic surgeon SEO campaign activities will certainly do better than a competitor that has not completed these activities. They are simply the best practices for starting plastic surgeon SEO campaigns.
