How to promote a medical website in the search. Case

SEO-promotion of medical sites is one of the most difficult tasks faced by Internet companies. It does not matter what commercial direction the project is – services or an online store – the optimization of any site on the topic “Medicine” is associated with the satisfaction of a mass of search engine criteria, such as YMYL, EAT, and so on.

The Internet company “walba-dynamics.com” received the website of a small clinic of endocrinology from “Diamed” The client had a negative experience with previous SEO contractors. For 6 months of working with them, the site did not receive any “boost” in traffic or positions. Accordingly, it was not possible to get a single client from search promotion. Inmaco specialists developed a plan  for promoting the company on the Internet  and implemented it, achieving good results.

Stages of work on optimizing a medical website

The structured plan of work on the site of the company “Diamed” is presented below.

Stage 1 – redesign

The redesign of the site was initiated by the customer in order to completely change its color scheme. It had to match the corporate identity of the clinic.

What were the main works on changing the design of the site:

• a complete change in the main color of the site from red to blue. Accordingly, all infographics were redrawn to the desired shades and all colors were replaced in css/html;
• rewriting and changing the structure of the main horizontal menu;
• adjustment of service page layouts (redistribution of current blocks, addition of new ones);
• adding new layout elements for the entire site (extended footer, breadcrumbs, feedback forms);
• and so on.

With the help of close communication with the customer on the issue of website design, we managed to satisfy the needs of the business and set the optimization vector for the Google and Yandex search engines.

Stage 2 – collection of SA, clustering and expanding the range of services

Many optimizers underestimate the importance of collecting the semantic core, performing its clustering and compiling the correct site structure based on this work.

Initially, the project had 5-10 pages with basic services. SEO-specialists of  “walba-dynamics.com”  have collected a complete SA in the profile direction of the clinic – endocrinology. We also added related services and those areas that were not listed on the site before the start of work.

During the collection of search queries for service pages:

• weeded out all requests with an “exact” frequency per year ⩽1;
• removed all information requests, the degree of commercialization of which for the Pixel Tools service was less than 25%;
• removed GEO (geo-independent) requests, excluding those where the city of presence of the business was indicated – Ufa;
• made a scoring of the remaining requests in order to understand which of them should be promoted first of all in order to quickly get TOPs.

The resulting query stack was clustered and fine-tuned by hand. As a result, groups of promoted requests were obtained. They were divided into current pages and made up the terms of reference for the formation of new service pages. Based on the work done, we received the following menu structure for the “Services” section.

Stage 3 – technical optimization and setting text relevance

Working with the technical component of the site for its correct indexing by search engines is an important stage of work. If the site is not correctly indexed by the search, then any other manipulations on it do not make any sense.

As part of the work on the technical optimization of the site, the following was done:

• getting rid of links to 30X and 40X pages;
• adjusting the robots.txt file so that “garbage” pages do not get into the index;
• creation of automatic html and XML sitemaps;
• edits on hierarchical headings h in layout elements;
• improving site loading speed according to Google Page Speed ​​Test;
• and so on.

This is not the whole range of technical work.

The next optimization step was to set the textual relevance of service pages to the collected search queries. These works were carried out on the basis of work with text analysis tools from Artur Latypov (SEO Intellect) and Alexey Chekushin (Just-Magic).

To optimize the site for the BM25 text relevance formula, the following work was carried out:

• title tags are correctly written;
• with great emphasis on increasing the CTR of the snippet in the search results, description meta tags are written;
• Terms of reference were drawn up and texts were written for the service pages that were fact-checked by the customer’s employee, a specialist in the provision of clinic services.

The first 3 stages of work brought results in improving the position of the site and increasing search traffic from Yandex and Google within 3-4 months.

Stage 4 – work with EAT and YMYL factors

These abbreviations hide a set of ranking factors (officially announced only for Google, but also work in Yandex), which are designed to analyze the trust of the search, and ultimately the user, to the site.

What has been done to increase search trust in the promoted site:

• an extensive page “About the clinic” was developed and laid out, which included all the necessary information about the activities of a medical institution in Ufa;
• page “Doctors” was developed and made up, which contains photos of all clinic specialists with full names, descriptions of specializations and links to detailed pages;
• the page “Schedule” was developed and laid out  , which contains information on the time of appointment of specialists and the general schedule of the clinic;
• developed and created a separate page “Licenses” with all legal documents permitting the operation of the clinic and confirming the specialization of doctors;
• for each page of services, blocks with photographs of the process of providing the service, with a description of the responsible specialist, price gradation in tabular execution, have been added;
• and so on.

It should be noted that the effectiveness of work in this area was achieved due to good communication and constant assistance from the customer: providing photo and video content, checking texts for factual errors, and so on.

Stage 5 – localization

In the vast majority of cases, the business of providing medical services is local and is designed for clients from a particular region. In order to strengthen the connection of the site with a specific region (Ufa city), the following works were carried out:

• creation and complete filling of company cards in the main Google My Business directories;
• creation of company cards in industry catalogs, for example, on the PRODOctorov website;
• creation of company cards in large catalogs. For example: ZOON, 2GIS and so on;
• site registration in local business directories (this stage was also carried out as part of the basic link strategy).

With the help of these works, the site of the Diamed clinic was given the correct georeference.

Stage 6 – work with external links

Inmako was faced with the task of promoting the site in Yandex and Google, so the development and implementation of a link strategy was immediately included in the site work plan.

As part of the optimization, it was possible to achieve a natural link mass growth curve.

At the stage of working with links, the hypothesis about the efficiency of this optimization method for a niche using rental links was tested. During the analysis, it turned out that for this niche, links are needed:

• natural links were obtained by posting in business directories, specialized sites, job sites, etc.;
• SEO links were purchased in the format of crowd marketing (non-anchor component, more than 70% of the total) and article placement (anchor component).

For this project, the links were not decisive in ranking, so they were purchased to finish off some queries in the TOP and raise the overall authority of the resource in the eyes of the search.

SEO results

As part of the work on SEO-promotion of the website of the endocrinological clinic in Ufa, very good results were achieved under Google and slightly more modest under Yandex.

Growth of monthly Google search traffic from 360 to 38448 people (peak month)

Search engine rankings for collected query clusters also improved well in both search engines.

Growth of search positions in the “Dietetics” cluster in the Google search engine. The average position in the cluster increased from 49.25 to 19.58

The growth of search positions in the UVT cluster in the Yandex search engine. The average position in the cluster increased from 49 to 38. 7

conclusions

Promotion of medical sites has its own characteristics and “pitfalls”. The well-coordinated work of the specialists of the walba-dynamics.com Internet company and the client made it possible to achieve excellent results in 1.5 years of website promotion.

The business received new customers from the SEO channel, expanded its awareness in the city, and also learned how to work with reputation on the Internet.