SEO for healthcare and wellness business: (Ultimate Guide)

Raja Hamza Asghar Updated

SEO can help drive more patients and customers online. For the last 10+ years, I have worked in SEO and ranked many sites, which gained traffic, clients, and sales from search engines regularly. 

So if you have a medical lab, hospital, or pharmacy, this guide will help you to drive traffic to your site from search engines like Google and Bing. With a step-by-step guide, here I am sharing with you a case study of my latest job that I have done in the healthcare sector. 

SEO for healthcare and wellness business

Why SEO Is Important for Healthcare & Wellness Business

SEO is important for you because many people search on Google before buying services. For example, someone might search for ‘Dental near me’, ‘Lab test near me’, and ‘Pharmacy near me’.

At that time, if you don’t have a website or GMB, you will easily lose this traffic, which gives more sales and customers to your competitors.

That’s why your online presence gives you more opportunities to be available for those who search for services. 

Step-by-Step Process That You Need to Follow

Here are the steps that you need to follow: 

  1. Set Up GMB
  2. Build Your Site
  3. Find Keywords 
  4. Onpage 
  5. Technical
  6. Offpage
  7. Content Marketing (If Possible)

1. Set Up GMB (Google Business Profile)

The full form of GMB is Google My Business. Google now calls it Google Business Profile. It’s a tool provided by Google where you list your business on Google Maps and business listings.

That’s why if you want to set up your healthcare business online, then GMB is the most important part that you need to consider in your SEO plan, because on GMB you will list your business for local customers.

What is GMB

These business listings show for the local areas of clients. For example, you have a business in Gulberg, Lahore and you set up GMB. Then someone searches for something related to your business near Gulberg.

The chances are high for your business to come up among these listings, which increases the chances of getting more clients and customers online from search engines.

So if you have a plan to set up your business and grow with SEO, then GMB is the first step that you need to take. 

2. Set Up Your Website

After setting up GMB, the next step that you need is to build your business website. I have seen many healthcare businesses that don’t have a proper online presence like social media pages and websites.

Websites easily rank on search engines (Google & Bing), and search engines are the best source of traffic for your business. So if you plan to set up your business online to get more reach and traffic, build your site.

Your site will help users find you on search engines (Google, Bing).

3. Find Keywords Relevant to Your Sector

Keywords are an important part of SEO, so you need to dedicate more time to finding profitable keywords for your business. Keywords are those words or phrases which someone uses to find results from search engines. 

An image of keywords

Profitable keywords make your website visible to those who search for them. There are a lot of tools that you can use to find keywords, like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest.

But if you want to rank on Google easily without too much effort, then I recommend you learn about my AIW strategy. By using this technique, I found a lot of keywords that I ranked on Google easily with just onpage optimization and quality content. 

How AIW Strategy Helps Me to Rank in Highly Competitive Niches

There are three components in AIW:

  1. A = Allintitle
  2. I = Inverted Comma
  3. W = Weak Sites

This strategy helps me to rank on untapped keywords. In this strategy, we are focused on finding those keywords that are new and people are searching for them. 

According to Google, 15% of searches come from new keywords. So that means the chances are high that Google doesn’t have much information about those keywords, and with this strategy, we will find these keywords. 

I tested this strategy a lot of times, and the success rate of this strategy is more than 90%. I highly recommend you target keywords using this strategy. 

4. Onpage SEO Optimization

After finding the keywords, the next step is to do onpage SEO for your website. In onpage SEO, you need to fix all the issues and optimize your site with the keywords that you found. 

Steps for Onpage SEO:

  1. Optimize meta ( Title, URL & Descriptions )
  2. Mobile-friendly optimization 
  3. Optimize Tags
  4. Optimize images with Alts 
  5. Use WebP Format for images
  6. Focus on Color Combination
  7. Write quality content for your site

5. Technical SEO

With onpage SEO, you need to understand your site’s technical issues and fix them. There are a lot of technical things that will be essential for our site. For example, sitemaps, robots.txt files, core web vitals, etc. 

Steps for Technical:

  1. Speed Optimization 
  2. Generate Sitemap
  3. Robots.txt file optimization 
  4. Set up Google Search Console
  5. Set up Google Analytics
  6. Optimize core web vitals
  7. Fix Server & Coding errors

6. Offpage SEO

In offpage, you need to build the reputation of your business online. There are a lot of things that come with offpage SEO, like backlinks, branding, content marketing, etc. 

Steps for Offpage: 

  1. Build backlinks
  2. Branding 
  3. Social Signals
  4. Branded Traffic 
  5. Influencer marketing

7. Content Creation & Marketing

Content creation will help you sustain your business and gain leads, patients, and clients regularly. Like me, I make content about SEO and digital marketing on social media like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. 

Through content creation, my channels gained a lot of views and subscribers and some of them were converted into clients and students, which I gained free of cost.

Also, when you create content on social media, some of it will pay you back in different ways. So in short, I encourage you to start content creation as soon as possible. 

Case Study of My Healthcare Project

Now I am sharing a step-by-step method that I followed to implement SEO for the last job I did for “Shadab Lab”. 

Shadab Lab is a medical lab based in Kotla ( Gujrat, Pakistan ) that provides quality tests to patients and doctors. 

When they gave me a project to set up their business online, first I immediately set up the GMB page and did SEO for it, which ranks at the top of Google’s business listings for our local keywords like “Lab in Kotla”, “lab near me” etc. 

Shadab Lab gmb listing view in Google my searching keywords like lab in kotla

GMB setup helps Shadab Lab to gain more clients and customers. As per the stats, in December 94 people were attracted to the Shadab Lab GMB. The best part is that Shadab Lab received 21 calls from the GMB listing. 

Stats of Shadab Lab gmb which show the 96 interaction and 26 calls

The second step was to make a website for Shadab Lab, which is optimized for keywords that are beneficial for us, like “lab in Kotla” and “Laboratory in Kotla”. 

This is the image of Shadab Lab website home page

Along with GMB, the website of Shadab Lab is ranked for the keywords that I already mentioned. These keywords have low competition, so this site is ranked for them. 

If you want to check the ranking of the lab, search for lab in Kotla. You will find the website of Shadab Lab that I ranked in the top positions. 

For now, I have only done these things, but in the future, the founder of Shadab Lab will make content related to the lab and tests, and I will optimize that with SEO, which will help us to build the brand and authority of Shadab Lab.