WordPress is an excellent platform for physicians to use when building their own website. It’s SEO friendly and is very flexible to use.
Below are five local SEO tips for physician WordPress websites that will help you outrank your local competition.
1). Create Great Content and Optimize Existing Content
When it comes to succeeding in marketing yourself online as a physician, content is by far the most important factor.
No amount of technical SEO can overcome poor content and a negative patient experience.
If you’re just getting started, you’ll want to determine the right blogging frequency and create solid poststhat benefit patients and answers their questions.
For those doctors who already have an established website, it’s important to review your existing content and update if it can be improved upon. Sometimes, pruning content can also be helpful.
2). Speed Up Your Site
The speed of your physician website is one of the most important technical SEO ranking factors. In fact, it’s a major focus of the Google Core Web Vitals update.
If you want to beat out competing local doctors, speeding up your WordPress site will help.
Here are few things to focus on to improve site speed:
- Compressing large images
- Delete themes you’re not using
- Install a server caching plugin
- Don’t install too many plugins
- Use a fast hosting provider such as WP Engine
3). Use a Responsive WordPress Theme
For many years now, Google has been indexing and ranking websites based upon the mobile experience. Why? More people use their mobile devices over their desktop/laptop to search and browse the web.
How a physician WordPress site displays and functions on a phone is a significant SEO factor to Google.
The most straightforward implementation is to use a responsive WordPress theme. A responsive theme automatically adjusts the content views based upon the size of the device a user is visiting from.
But, buyer beware; not all responsive themes work equally well. Many of them are very bloated and will slow down your site. Make sure you perform due diligence upfront when choosing a responsive theme.
4). Integrate Google My Business
Google My Business (GMB) is one of the best local SEO tools available. GMB bundles together several important factors used for local SEO such as:
- Physical proximity
- Practice and specialty descriptions
- Categories and services provided
- Patient reviews
You want to make sure you add your WordPress site to your GMB listing. In addition to this, you can also install a plugin such as Google Places Review, which will take patient reviews and put them directly on your website.
Adding an interactive map to your website can also be beneficial to local SEO.
5). Include Location In Your URLs
With local SEO, including location keywords in your URL can be helpful in the way of improving the patient experience, especially if you have multiple practice locations.
You don’t need to do this with every page, but it might be helpful if you have multiple pages to contact each location.
Just make sure if you are changing an existing URL to assign the proper redirects.
Implementing these five local SEO tips for your physician WordPress site can help you outrank your local competition, including the major health systems.
This is a very worthwhile area to invest some time and effort in.