Medical SEO - How to decide which keywords to target?

Medical SEO is all about targeting the right keywords. It’s what will get your medical website to its rightful place - right at the top of Google search engine. Identifying and then targeting the right keywords is crucial to make SEO work the way it’s supposed to. For example, if you’re an urgent care center in Miami, should you focus on “urgent care Miami” or “urgent care center Miami” or “Miami urgent care” or any of the other hundreds of options? How - as a medical provider - can you decide which keywords to target?

Here are 3 simple strategies to select highly effective SEO keywords you can apply today:

1) Be specific and avoid generalisation

Selecting the SEO keywords is the first step on your online marketing journey. When coming up with keywords/phrases, you need to think about two main things: 1) your target audience (potential referrals) and 2) your competition. If, for example, you are an orthopedic surgeon, it would be a brave move to go head-to-head against all other orthopedic surgeons in the USA (and world!) by choosing the keyword “orthopedic surgeon”. It’s a better idea to reduce your competition and only target your target market, so for example “orthopedic surgeon Palm Beach County”. For less competition still (but still patient search volume), you may want to consider other keyword combinations like “knee surgeon West Palm Beach”. This way the outcome will be much better - not only your medical website will rank higher BUT you will also target specific audience that is likely to need your services.

2) Google Wonder Wheel

According to Michael Mothner, Founder and CEO of CEO, Google Wonder Wheel is a great, although underestimated tool to generate the right keywords. Using Wonder Wheel, you get a representation of the way that Google groups together keywords typing in a single phrase1. This tool will be of great help at the very first stages of your research - it will help you get the general idea of keywords you need to target to get the best possible outcome for your medical website’s SEO strategy. Find out more about Wonder Wheel here.