Table of Contents
Take Your Medical Spa SEO To The Next Level
Consumers are tightening their belts in the current economic client, and splash cash is getting scarcer. With the competition being already as fierce as is, and with client frugality on the rise, improving your medical spa SEO to move higher toward the top of search results of search engines should become a high priority.
For those new to the world of digital marketing, let’s examine the definition of SEO first before explaining how vital it is to your client acquisition efforts.
Medical Spa SEO | What is it & Why it's Important?
What is Medical Spa SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process used to improve organic web traffic to your business. In short, it entails tools and strategies to improve the ranking of your website so that it can appear higher up on the results pages of search engines.
Why is Medical Spa SEO important?
According to recent studies, 92% of people do not go to page two of search engine results. Only 6% would go to page two, and only 2% would go past page two. These stats speak for themselves, and it is clear why your medical spa website should appear as high as possible on the search results.
SEO, especially Medical SEO, is not easy to master. As you can imagine, there is a desperate stampede of companies trying to get higher up the rankings. And because SEO is such a technical and intricate field, juxtaposed with the increased demand for climbing orders, there is an ever-increasing need for SEO experts.
The basic foundation of SEO is the website itself. Web design plays a significant role in the rankings, and functionality is one of the primary building blocks of this foundation. Should your website’s functionality falter, it will be penalized by the search engine algorithms.
We did an in-depth article about website design for medical spas that are well worth reading. In this article, we discuss, in-depth, how to create an effective website to grow your medical spa, the essential elements of website design, the costs associated with a good SEO website, and the benefits of getting professionals in to do the job.
But here, we will continue to focus solely on SEO.
Medical Spa SEO | Elements of SEO
The must-know elements of SEO
There are different elements of SEO to consider. As we mentioned earlier, it is a field that takes years to master and demands continuous learning as the algorithms of search engines change all the time.
For now, we will focus on the most essential elements of SEO.
- On-page SEO
On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO, refers to optimizing certain elements of a website to improve rankings. It refers to the HTML code of the website as well as the content hosted in it.
Besides assisting search engines in interpreting page content, on-page SEO helps users get the best value from their search queries. That means that search engines try to deliver the best quality content related to the specific keywords entered by the user.
- Meta tags
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the code used for writing websites. Part of the code includes meta tags or meta description tags. The function of meta tags is to give users a general idea of the content of a specific web page and how relative it is to their search.
These meta tags should be very descriptive, and compelling ad copy will help increase the click-through rate. Although meta tags should be as descriptive as possible, it is best to keep them between 50 to 160 characters long. Also, try to include keyword phrases in your title and description.
- Images
Often, users rely on image search results to take them to the right page. Images help improve your rankings. Upload good quality images but make sure that their file sizes aren’t too big as this will influence web page loading speed and affect the functionality and ranking.
Images also have meta tags, and part of the code includes alt tags. This is a part of the code where a descriptive sentence can be entered to improve searchability and ranking. Keep the alt tags short, to the point, and keyword-rich.
- Keywords
We spoke about keywords a few times before. In short, keywords are the terms or phrases that people type in search engines. Using the correct keywords is essential to directing the right traffic to your website.
Keywords tell the search engines what you have on your website, which is then crawled and indexed by the search engines and matched with the search queries. Blogs have become an extremely useful tool for creating keyword-rich content that can be sniffed out by search engine crawlers with ease.
It is, therefore important that you do the proper keyword research and see that you use them sufficiently. Let’s say you offer laser hair removal, for instance, and you want to improve your rankings. Keyword research would reveal that more people type in ‘laser hair treatment’, or ‘removing hair with lasers’ instead of ‘laser hair removal. You can then include these keywords in your content to improve your rankings.
- Sitemaps
Sitemaps are files that contain a list of the pages of your website that you want search engines to know about. Submitting a sitemap to Google (Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) helps the bots to index your website more effectively.
Submitting the sitemap will help Google’s crawlers to index your website better, improve crawling speed, and therefore adds to enhancing your ranking.
- Webpage speed
We mentioned that image sizes influence the speed of loading a web page, and so do sitemaps. But there are numerous other tricks and tactics to consider in your SEO strategy to improve the speed of your web pages and ultimately improve search results rankings.
Using compression software to reduce the size of rendered HTML and other code such as CSS and JavaScript can help speed things up. Optimizing server response time, using content distribution networks, leveraging browser caching, etc., are just some of the tools to harness to increase speed.
After reading the last paragraph, you probably understand better now why we said that SEO is a technical and intricate field. That is why it is wise to consider getting experts on board to really get the best out of your medical spa SEO.
On-Page & Off-Page elements of Medical SPA SEO
- Off-page SEO and Local SEO
- Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO, also known as off-site SEO, refers to actions outside of your website that will influence your rankings. It basically refers to fingers and paths pointing back to your website and entails the relevance and credibility of your site and brand.
- Local SEO
You could have a direct influence on these external elements through elements such as your social media platforms or Google My Business, but you could also have no control as other websites could use internal linking to direct traffic to your site without you even being aware. Of course, Google Analytics can tell you about it when it happens and who did it, but more about Google Analytics later.
Local SEO can help your business grow because you become more visible when users do local searches.
- Google My Business
Google My Business (GMB) is an intuitive tool for managing your online presence and improving medical spa SEO through Google and Google Maps, and best of all, it is free.
GMB provides an easily accessible window into your medical spa and your services. It gives prospective patients the opportunity to see who you are, where you are, how to contact you, and, more importantly, it helps improve your rankings.
SEO is improved due to traffic driven to your site and social proof obtained through reviews posted. In short, it helps with the three things Google states high priority in local searches. These are relevance, distance, and prominence.
- Optimizing for local SEO
Google revealed local SEO ranking factors, and this gives us an indication of where to focus our resources when it comes to improving our local SEO strategy.
Google gave the factors a score out of ten to highlight their importance. On top of the list, with a score of 7.4, is Google My Business, which we discussed in the previous section.
Second on the list is Google Reviews, with a score of 6.5. You can improve your ranking by encouraging clients to leave reviews online and replying to reviews. It will not only help improve your SEO but will increase credibility and consumer perception, which could lead to driving more people to your medical spa.
Third, with a score of 6.4, was proximity to the business. The only thing you can do here to improve is to physically move your business. From a digital perspective, there isn’t much you can do.
Number four on the list is the consistency of citations scoring 5.6 out of 10. You can improve rankings by making sure your medical spa is listed on directories, aggregates, and other platforms, but we will discuss this in more detail in the following section.
On-page SEO comes in at number six with a score of 5.5 out of 10. For more information on how to improve this factor, please refer to the previous section of this article, where we discussed on-page SEO in detail.
- Citations and links