Healthcare SEO Case Study

Do you know what it takes to rank a website in the search engines?

While many SEO companies avoid giving clients their recipes, I believe that complete transparency would allow you to get more educated in this process, understand its main principles and be able to achieve more success with your medical websites.

I have prepared 3 medical SEO Case Studies to show you how we rank websites in different stages of development and distinct niches.

We have right now:

• an existing medical website that we have worked on for years, which needs a re-focus on their keywords because of the COVID-19 pandemic;
• a brand new medical website that needs to rank locally for their niche keywords;
• a brand new medical portal that won\’t need to rank locally, but nationally for disease related keywords.

To make it even more interesting, our domain registration approach is also different:

• the first website doesn\’t need a domain name, as it\’s already active (a brand name domain),
• the second website starts on a new domain name with the state and main keyword in it,
• the last one gets a premium domain name that doesn\’t have the main keyword in it, but has some backlinks and a bit of Domain Authority (19).

Healthcare SEO Case Study – Week by Week

As this is a project that will span for months, I\’ll try to give you weekly updates (as much as possible) and prepare secondary articles for all the main strategies (how I install websites, design them, do competitor analysis, content planning etc.)

This will allow you to easily follow my progress and have all the tutorials in once place.

Hence we\’ll have articles on:

• How to Start a Website (as in the 2 case studies we work with brand new websites),
• How to Install WordPress (as it\’s our CMS – Content Management System – of choice),
• How to Do a SEO Audit (for the existing website),
• How to Scan a Website Using Screaming Frog etc.

Main Steps for Ranking Our Healthcare Website

• Revenue planning
• Initial keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Domain name registration
• Hosting provider selection
• Website platform selection
• WordPress installation
• WordPress theme design
• Plugin installation
• Keyword research and assignment
• Content planning
• Content writing and promotion
• SEO audits and site scans, SEO strategy tweaking

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Healthcare SEO Case Study – WEEK 1

The client wants to create a medical portal on AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES. We don\’t need to rank locally, as they will serve a wider audience and together we choose to work on a premium medical domain name that we have secured for them. In the following months we\’ll put together a medical website, promote it and start monetizing.

The first week of our work is dedicated to planning and the initial strategies.

We discuss their revenue model, we agree on the domain name choice, platform to use and then I\’ll start doing my initial keyword research, competitor analysis and put together their medical website.

Revenue Planning

As detailed in our How to Start a Website Guide, I always ask my clients about their revenue plan. We don\’t start a website just for the sake of it. OK, I do start my own pet projects to play with new strategies, even if I do try to monetize them as well.

Yet, a client who invests money in a medical website created from scratch (premium domain name, web design services and monthly SEO plans) needs to consider monetization sooner than later.

For our current website the revenue plan is advertising / sponsored placement and not appointments (as it would be for a medical practice that relies on patient bookings). We\’ll start with an existing premium domain name and aggressive content strategy and link building to start earning money after 6 months.

As the website is brand new and the medical niche extremely competitive, we don\’t give clients false hopes, so they are prepared to earn little to no income in the first year. Afterwards, as the website gets more traction, the income will follow the upward trend.

Initial Keyword Research

Proper keyword research is MANDATORY of you want to ever rank your website. We do this when choosing a niche, when looking at a clients\’ competitor, when doing our main content planning and every time we publish pages or articles on their website.

The client told us they are interested in creating a website dealing with AUTOIMMUNE DISORDERS / AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES, so our initial keyword research is done based on these 2 main keywords and also the disorders themselves (Lupus, Psoriasis, Fibromyalgia etc.).

We list ALL the autoimmune disorders, as we\’ll need to develop separate pages for EACH of them and subsequent articles on long-tail keywords.

I do my keyword research on SEMrush. There are other keyword tools, but this is the one I like to use. After a while, as soon as we have some rankings, I can look into the Google Console panel and see what positions we have, how many impressions (how many people are searching for a certain keyword and our listing appears on that page), how many clicks we have.

If a keyword has many impressions (even if our website is not yet ranking well), it means people are searching for it and, if it\’s not in our initial keyword set, I\’ll add it afterwards and optimize. If a keyword gets us a good position, we keep our rankings up and look for others as well.

But we\’ll talk about these strategies in few weeks, as soon as we get some results. Now we\’re doing my initial keyword research, as mentioned, on SEMrush.

AUTOIMMUNE DISORDERS

As you can see from the search query, the keyword difficulty is through the roof, so it will be very hard to rank no.1.

The good news for our client is that they don\’t need to rank no.1 for such a difficult keyword per se, as they can rank well for long tail keywords and others related to the diseases themselves or long-tail keywords for these diseases.

We need to grow their website to a decent traffic and rankings, so that they can earn money from advertising.

While they will never outrank wikipedia or webmd, they can still get at least 30K visitors/month to warrant a decent advertising revenue.

AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE

As these are synonyms, we have the same data:

• Keyword difficulty – 90% (very hard)
• Volume – 201 K US searches (357.2K worldwide)
• CPC – $0.05
• Competition – 0.15

What do these mean and how do they affect our keyword planning?

When we try to rank client websites, we look at keywords with decent SEARCH VOLUMES. And this is one of the main reasons why many clients don\’t rank, because the keywords that rank for are worthless in terms of searches.

A quick example: client ranks for a keyword that has 50 searches/month. If the client ranked no.1 for said keywords the maximum number of websites visits would be 50/month (less than 2/day). A Click-Through-Rate of 100% is mainly a dream, but, let\’s say that we live in a dream world and we\’d turn ALL searches into visitors.

What if we could get the client to a no.1 position for a keyword that has 1,000 searches? Provided it is relevant for the visitor, we\’d get them more targeted leads and probably help them get more paying clients.

So, as I do keyword research or look at existing keywords my client ranks for, I look at this metric first and then do some more research, I try to uncover keywords that are more searched for, so that we increase the client\’s website traffic and get them more potential leads.

A quick story to prove this:

KEYWORD DIFFICULTY

You noticed there\’s a mention about this on each of my searches. This means how difficult it would be for a new website to rank on first page in Google for that keyword. It\’s a number from 1 to 100, the smallest percentage means easier rankings, higher ones require more optimization.

It\’s the reason why we started the client\’s website on a premium domain, that has some history and backlinks already, to make it easier for us to rank it. As the competition is insane for this niche, it\’s an exciting case study for us all.

Competition is another metric I look at. It\’s a number from 0 to 1, again, the biggest the hardest. In this case we look at how competitive the keyword is in terms of Google Ads. The bigger the number, the more people are bidding and competing for this keyword.

Vanity Metrics VS What Really Matters

Another short detour – what metrics really matter?

For this question we have many answers: traffic is important, facebook likes, real rankings, no. of leads, number of subscribers etc.

So?

Does it matter to have one million Instagram fans? Does it matter to get 30,000 visitors every day on your medical website? Does it matter to have thousands of email subscribers?

Nothing matters, if you cannot monetize.

Let me explain.

I\’ve worked with clients from all niches and the entire world. Worked with clients who had 10 visits/day on their website and clients who had 30,000 visits on their websites. Clients who dominated the search engine results and clients who didn\’t rank at all. Clients with huge Facebook followings and clients with absolutely no social media activity.

The conclusion?

Only the metrics that make you earn money matter.

I worked with clients who had HUGE website traffic and maybe earned few hundred bucks/month. Not enough to pay for their hosting account, almost. On the opposite side were clients with maybe 300 visitors every month who earned a living from their \’puny\’ website, because almost ALL the traffic converted into clients.

When I rank websites for local practices, I focus on helping them rank for their main services and get them patient bookings. That\’s what matters. I could care less about their Facebook fans or anything that doesn\’t translate into immediate earnings.

In this case, as we delve into a crazy difficult niche, the client is already aware that ranking for LUPUS, TYPE 1 DIABETES or PSORIASIS is almost impossible without a huge advertising budget. But we\’ll be happy to rank for secondary keywords and location based doctor specialties, as we\’ll promote the doctors who work in these respective specialties.

Not to mention that, getting to a decent traffic / DA will allow them to sell advertising and sponsored placements.

So, before you let yourself swept away by all kinds of metrics, we get back to 3 main questions:

• HOW EXACTLY WILL YOU MAKE MONEY?
• What metric will help you achieve that goal?
• What is the minimum acceptable metric that will start earning you money?

Now that we have our initial plan in place: main niche and what we really want to achieve, let\’s actually do some SEO 🙂

Competitor Analysis

No matter what niche you are in, there is always someone who\’s established a business in it. If there\’s no competition, chances are the niche itself is \’dead\’. So, my next move is to single out the main competitors.

How many? At least 1, of course. Usually about 5-7. I had clients who had even 20 competitors, but between 3 and 7 is a healthy number.

How to I do competitor analysis?

Looking at the main competitors allows us to get A LOT of ideas, see they flaws and allow my client to find their place in the market. Here is what I look at:

• the competitors\’ websites – what platform are they using? Do they use a custom design? Not?
• competitors\’ websites code – I\’m that crazy SEO lady who will look at your source and see if it\’s clean or not. Why? Because code cleanness helps rank and I want my clients to have the upper hand in this as well. As most rely on us for their web design, our custom themes and clean code gives them an edge in the search engines
• content – does the competitor write a blog? How do they do their content marketing?
• keywords – this is what most SEO companies look at only, but as I usually tell my clients, SEO is not just counting the keywords or snatching some back links. That\’s why I look at how the website is built, how fast it loads etc. OK, when it comes to keywords, we\’ll do a separate search for EACH website

For a local based medical website the competitor analysis is easier – see our dental SEO case study.

In this case the low hanging fruit would be to delve into webmd, healthline etc. But these websites don\’t focus just on AUTOIMMUNE DISORDERS and I\’d get tens of thousands irrelevant keywords.

So, to get some better keyword ideas to serve our exact niche, I\’ll look for specialty websites.

As this task will be repeated tens of times in the following months (as there are more than a hundred autoimmune disorders), I\’ll show you a single example: nationalmssociety.org is the website study for Multiple Sclerosis.

Let\’s read my SEMrush findings together:

• Authority Score: 72. Super-high. It\’s a very reputable website. Our healthcare website has an Authority Score of 15 (premium domain name with some backlinks).
• Organic Search Traffic: through the roof for the competitor, none for us. As we\’ll grow it, we\’ll have bigger numbers
• Paid Search Traffic – we don\’t pay for advertising, so we\’ll remain at zero in the following months.
• Backlinks – we have something already, the competitor has an insane amount of backlinks. What we\’ll do with this data? See who is linking towards them and if we can replicate some of their backlinks.

Let\’s see what more data I can gather from this page

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Before we end this week\’s work and leave you to enjoy this huge wall of text, let\’s do 2 more tasks: see the organic keywords and the ones the competitor is paying for:

ORGANIC KEYWORDS – what the competitor is ranking for (a small screenshot, there are thousands of keywords I\’ll study):

As you notice already, there are relevant keywords for this niche and others that have no use for someone who wants to know more about MS. I personally don\’t care for illinois lottery and other similar keywords, but multiple sclerosis and ms are indeed valuable.

You probably remember that I commented on the paid keywords: if a competitor is willing to pay for them, I want to rank organically as much as possible.

So, in my initial competitor analysis I also looked for the paid keywords:

PAID KEYWORDS – what keywords the competitor is paying for (again, a small screenshot, there are many more).

In this case you\’ll notice there are mostly relevant keywords.

This is in short my work BEFORE we even look for a domain name or design a website. What you see here, even if it already \’cost\’ me 2 thousand words, is just a sneak peek into a very extensive research that usually takes days.

After this we set up the main keyword that we\’ll use for the domain name: if we look for an EMD – Exact Match Domain Name, say Orthodontic-Braces.com. This website will use a branded domain name (no keywords in it), but I need the main keyword for the HOMEPAGE optimization.

If you want to find out when we update the guide, subscribe to our newsletter and I\’ll announce any new content.

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Healthcare SEO Case Study – WEEK 2

What we have now:

1. main keyword – have researched it and started creating the main spreadsheet where I track ALL pages and keywords.
2. domain name – the client uses a premium domain name. It\’s registrered in their name and ready to roll.
3. web hosting account – we set them up on our cPanel powered server.
4. WordPress installed – the website is set up and we can start adding some content.
5. added the tracking codes – Google Analytics and Google Console

Custom Website Design

As the client wants to build a reputable medical portal on Autoimmune Diseases, using free wordpress themes won\’t cut it. Right now we are designing them a custom WordPress theme. As this usually takes about 2-3 weeks (logo design, mockup design, coding, theme testing etc.),

I don\’t like to waste time though, as I do the main design, we can start writing content, installing all the plugins and getting some keywords to rank. As soon as we finish all this initial work, I\’ll give you monthly updates and stats.

But now, let\’s get back to our initial data.

My AID project (AutoImmune Disorders) has a pretty blank dashboard on SEMrush so far. I won\’t use all the features, but here are the most valuable to me:

• Site Audit – I always scan a website with Screaming Frog (I get a huge spreadsheet with ALL pages, errors, meta tags, loading times, bounce rate, positions etc.), but, in this case, as it\’s a new one, I don\’t get relevant data. And I like to cross-check with SEMrush as well.
• Position Tracking – as soon as we have Google Console data (up to position 200), I\’ll get a lot of keywords that we rank for, even the ones I don\’t care about. Here I\’ll add only the ones we\’re intentionally ranking for.
• On Page SEO Checker – More SEO insights from the tool itself. Word counting, keyword diversity etc.

As we build some traffic / backlinks, we\’ll use other features: Backlink Audit and Link Building to manage our links and also do outreach, Organic Traffic Insights (as it\’s tied to the Analytics and Console data, will show us some interesting results), PPC Tool and Ad Builder, should the client wish to pursue paid ads in the future.

As soon as I installed our WordPress site, I added it to all the platforms that will aid me to rank it faster and also view the progress.