Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important for GP Practices because your website is the primary source of information (and therefore bookings) for patients. Most Australians use Google (93% of search engine use is Google), so it’s worth thinking about how and where your practice appears in the results.
SEO is essentially the ‘best practice’ for controlling where you rank for particular search terms. It’s a big field, with specialists who have spent careers working on SEO, but there are some simple top tips that can have a big impact.
What’s your ‘front door’?
Clinics that depend primarily on a directory provider for SEO and use their directory listing as their ‘front door’ are vulnerable to high arbitrary service costs and risk patients being exposed to competitors with earlier available bookings. This is because the directory provider often uses these listings to promote both your practice and also competitors – which is not something any clinic wants to see!
Spending money on a Directory provider is not a sustainable cost because it promotes their business over yours, which, over time, ensures an uneven business partnership and impacted patient outcomes.
Improving your SEO
Clinics can spend thousands of dollars on improving SEO; however, there are simple steps that can be taken in a few days, at no or little cost, that can have a big impact on your clinic.
HotDoc wants to help Practice Managers promote their own clinics, so that clinics can have direct ownership of their patients. Ultimately, we understand a sustainable and visible GP Practice website is good for patients, good for Practice Managers and good for our partnership.
1) Update Doctor Summaries
Task:
Make sure your HotDoc profile has unique biographies for each doctor summary
Time:
This can take 5-10 minutes per doctor
Benefit:
Google treats unique content as more valuable, which helps boost your clinic website, as well as your unique HotDoc listing (which will never show another practice’s information). HotDoc is set up so that we share ‘SEO juice’ to your website, so the work our specialists (and you) do to improve our SEO also helps your website’s rankings!
Examples:
Cost:
$0
2) Have an appropriate URL (website address)
Task:
Have your IT person update your clinic’s searchable website URL so it displays the full clinic name.
Time:
30 minutes for an IT person
Benefit:
www.ech.io won’t rank as high or get as many click throughs as www.exampleclinic.com.au will. Google also knows that ‘.au’ addresses are Australian websites, so it is better to use a ‘.au’ domain than something like ‘.info’. The higher ranking and therefore more click throughs your URL gets, the more new patients you’ll get through the front door.
Example:
If your practice was called “ACME Medical”, you should use a website URL like www.acmemedical.com.au, not www.acmemed.com.au or www.224FakeStreetMed.com.au.
Cost:
$0 (or your IT provider’s fee)
3) Pay for Google Adwords
Task:
Google Adwords start at about $5 a day and you can sign up here.
Time:
Setting up Google Adwords can take a few hours, and Google have put together a step-by-step help guide here.
Benefit:
Google Adwords allow you to artificially place your website at the top of specific google searches (e.g searches for your clinic’s name or for searches for your suburb + “GP appointment” etc.). If you type in your clinic’s name (or your suburb) into Google and see another service/website appearing at the top of your search page labelled as an ad, then that company is paying Google to compete for and capture your patients.
You can spend as much or as little as you want with AdWords, so you can easily test it with a low budget of (say) $100 and see how it goes – that’s the advantage of this kind of advertising compared to newspaper ads!
Note: advertising only artificially places your website at the top. It doesn’t have a long-lasting effect (unless you keep paying for ads), nor does it change your organic (non-paid) ranking. So this is just a good way to bump yourself up if your clinic is not ranking well while you perform other SEO activities!
Example:
Cost:
Starting at $5 per day. You can commit to short advertising campaigns and set any campaign limit to build towards competitive sustainable.
Note: Some Directory providers ‘sell’ Google Adwords Packages; often these sales incur significant commissions, even though you might be encouraging patients to visit another clinic! It’s usually best to manage AdWords with Google directly to get maximum bang for buck, and if possible use your own website or a page that doesn’t list any competitors.
4) Have other websites link to your website and back
Task:
If you haven’t already, add the link to your website on HotDoc, and add a link on your website linking to your clinic’s booking page on HotDoc
Time:
10 – 30min
Benefit:
Google prioritises ‘connected’ websites, which will boost your ranking, especially if visitors click those links between websites.
Example:
Cost:
$0 (or your IT contact’s fee)
5) Publish New and Unique Content
Task:
Create a blog or news section on your website and regularly write new unique posts.
Time:
Writing a blog can take 20 minutes to 1 hour. Feel free to visit our blog for inspiration.
Benefit:
Setting up and maintaining a practice blog is a great way to connect with your patients and community. Self-made blog posts are perfect for sharing on Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic back to your website.
Cost:
$0 if you do it yourself. Some clinics speak to their local university and hire a marketing student to write blogs and manage their Facebook page for a couple hours a month: it’s a great way to save staff time and contribute to your community. You can also hire a marketing agency or copywriter to do it for you, but that usually costs a bit more (although the quality can be better!).
6) Have dedicated pages per doctor / clinic
Task:
Make a different web page for each doctor or clinic
Time:
About 30 minutes per doctor
Benefit:
Patients that search in Google for “dr mary getwell” will have a higher chance of finding your dedicated doctor page for “Dr Mary Getwell”. This is particularly the case if the URL is something like www.acmemedicalpractice.com.au/dr-mary-getwell/. Listing all your doctors on the same page lowers the uniqueness of your website and means the pages won’t rank as well. The same thing applies if your have several clinic locations – have a page for each location.
Example:
Cost:
$0
Have any other SEO or Google results related questions?
If you’d like, you can speak with our team for a free search engine optimisation review – we will have a look at your website and how it ranks to provide some quick recommendations for you to improve.
Use the form below to get in touch!
