Important questions to consider when selecting service keywords
Why are keywords important to my online performance?
Search Engine Optimized keywords are an integral part of your website content for helping both patients and search engines find you. On your Practice Growth website, each SEO keyword you select will have a dedicated service page with information about your patients’ symptoms, conditions, or needs. Patients searching for these keywords, related keywords, or questions that contain those keywords, (such as “What is a Colectomy?”) are more likely to be driven to your practice website, and therefore are more likely to choose you as a provider.
What services and conditions do I want to market?
When choosing your service keywords, it is important to consider the following factors:
- The services your practice currently performs and conditions you treat. It is not recommended to market any services you do not actually provide to patients.
- What services are most requested by your patients?
- What services are most profitable for your business?
- What services do you want to be known for?
Would patients search for these service keywords?
The keywords you select should be “patient-friendly,” and should be terms that the average consumer would search for in Google or other search engines. Patients may not know the clinical term and thus may default to the colloquial term.
For example, a patient may search for “high blood pressure” instead of “hypertension,” or “painful swallowing” instead of “odynophagia.”
On the other hand, patients who already know their condition do often search for specific services such as a “Sculpsure laser” or “Invisalign.” It is okay to have specific keywords if your target patient base is familiar with these terms.
Your service keywords should fit the following syntactic formats (fill in the blank):
- I do/perform _______
- I provide _______ service(s)
- I treat _______ symptom(s)