SEO for Health Website

SEO for health websites: check out SEO for health websites is focused on advanced on-page optimizations, particularly the EAT attributes (expertise, authority, and reliability) of the company and its main authors. This area is included in the so-called YMYL content, a definition by Google that provides greater rigor in ranking pages.

Over the years, Google has been improving the infrastructure of its search engine and its indexing, ranking, and ranking mechanisms.

In addition to improving the search engine and arming the algorithm against improper optimization practices, the company has also made efforts to increase the quality of websites and content.

Its objective remains the same: to deliver the best information available to the user. This mission becomes even more important when we think of pages capable of influencing personal life, finances, and, above all, people’s well-being.

This is one of the main points to work on in an SEO strategy for health websites, and, in this article, we bring this and several other tips for you to do better and better in searches. We will talk about the following topics:

What are the regulations foreseen for the dissemination of health content?

What are the basic practices of an optimization strategy?

How does Google “see” health websites and content?

How to do SEO for health websites? 10 tips to rank better!

Stay with us to check out obligations, concepts, techniques, and 10 valuable SEO tips to take your health website to the top search rankings results!

What are the regulations foreseen for the dissemination of health content?

An SEO strategy for health websites involves actions to increase domain authority, creation of institutional pages, availability of informative channels, and basic and advanced on-page SEO practices.

The result of this work is an attractive website optimized and easily found in searches.

However, before discussing best practices in Healthcare Digital Marketing Agency, we need to inform ourselves about the regulations provided for this type of venture.

Health websites deal with relatively sensitive issues, which are usually related to disseminating products or organizations in the area and having professionals participating in the production of content.

The Medical Publicity Manual, based on CFM resolution nº 1.974/11 and made available by the Federal Council of Medicine, establishes a series of rules for the creation and publication of health-related articles, as well as for the conduct of physicians when providing information, give interviews and publish articles in different media, including the internet.

Let’s look at some important parts of this document.

Types of content prohibited by the Federal Council of Medicine

The Code of Medical Ethics clarifies that advertising in medicine must be socially responsible and truthful. In this context, the following practices are prohibited:

• selfies in workplaces;
• equipment promotion;
• adjective expressions, such as “the best,” “the only one,” or “guaranteed result”;
• sharing unproven information without a scientific basis.

Standards for publications involving professionals

Regarding the publication of articles and advertising materials or the creation of websites for professionals or clinics, centers, and other health organizations, the following information is required:

• name of the physician, liberal or technical director;
• area of ​​activity registered with the Regional Council of Medicine (CRM);
• registration in CRM;
• an expert qualification record number (RQE).

Attention: This information is just a summary of some topics presented in the material provided by CFM. Although its guidelines are given as a reference in this type of disclosure, they are very focused on the conduct of physicians.

Health websites may also feature publications from other professionals, such as nutritionists, pharmacists, and biochemists.

Thus, it is essential that those involved in creating and maintaining this type of content, including marketing professionals, are aware of the rules laid down by each profession’s bodies and official councils.

What are the basic practices of an optimization strategy?

We won’t go into basic SEO settings and techniques in this article, but we need to point out that these are the cornerstones of good optimization.

Therefore, to ensure that the tips presented in the next topics bring the expected results, we have prepared a basic SEO checklist with the items that cannot be missing in your strategy:

• Create a blog: blogs are essential to generate traffic and start a relationship with your audience;
• HTTPS: the SSL protocol guarantees that the information provided on your website is encrypted and is a ranking criterion by Google;
• Friendly URLs: Your website addresses need to be intuitive and standardized;
• Sitemap: your site needs a sitemap to optimize the indexing of search engines;
• Google Search Console: Google’s platform helps to identify errors and monitor an SEO strategy;
• Meta descriptions: while not a strong ranking factor, meta descriptions complement titles and help attract visitors;
• Image optimization: your images must be light and have the “alt text” attribute;
• Mobile SEO: your website must be responsive and in line with Mobile Friendly and Mobile-First Index rules;
• Optimizations for speed: compressing data, fixing redirects, and other actions to speed up page loading.

Content marketing for healthcare: understand how to do how does Google “see” health websites and content?

Google adopts this classification to increase the rigor in evaluating sites that work with sensitive content.

In general, what the big search engine expects from these sites is that they are reliable and capable of conveying security to users.

In this sense, the EAT attributes (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust, or expertise, authority, and credibility), evaluation guidelines published by Google specialists to rank better, should be our horizon in all stages of SEO work on health websites.

Google does not cite details about how this “audit” is performed by its algorithm. Therefore, it is common to have different opinions among marketers, although they all point in the same direction.

However, we can understand these attributes by analyzing the characteristics and performance of today’s main health portals as follows.

How to work SEO on health websites? 10 tips to rank better!

No single SEO practice offers stand-alone solutions. In the following guidelines, you will notice that each technique is related and works as a complement to others; therefore, every detail is essential. Check out 10 SEO tips for health websites now!

Talk about your organization (website EAT)

Health websites need to make it clear to users and search engines that they are real and trusted organizations. Therefore, your website must present:

• Registrations and credentials: CNPJ and main activity of the company, or training, registration, and function of the responsible professional (in the footer or on an institutional page);
• Contact information: address, email, and telephone (in the footer or on the “Contact” page);
• Clarification of the functioning of the site: if you work with registrations, subscriptions, or other functions;
• Institutional page: “About Us”, “The Company”, “Biography” etc.

Institutional pages are those whose focus is you, in the case of a personal website or your company. Take advantage of this space to talk about your career, your company’s history, values, achievements, etc.

Create profiles for your authors (authors’ EAT)

Continuing with the EAT attributes, we have optimizations aimed at site authors, especially professionals or specialists.

The author’s credentials must be displayed on the page, preferably at the top, so that users immediately realize that they are reading material created by a competent personality.

Please note that Google’s guidelines meet the guidelines of the Medical Advertising Handbook.

In addition to presenting information about the authors in their articles, it is interesting that they have a profile with detailed information about their career and their area of ​​expertise and a list of the posts they have written.

In WordPress, you will find themes that allow you to work with the CMS user structure without making many adjustments.

There are also plugins with different blog options and styles, possibly inserting links to personal websites and social networks. About Author and Simple Author, Box is among the top-rated solutions in this category.

Create a content hierarchy

Your blog should have a hierarchical structure of content so that search engines can understand your proposal and users can easily find information.

The famous Topic Clusters suggested by Healthcare Marketing Agency are a great reference for this type of organization. According to this strategy, your content production needs to deliver:

• Cluster (additional content): complementary materials that contribute to the user experience (clarifying terms, contextualizing topics, or presenting related tips, for example).

The main content can be related to several additional contents. The ideal, however, is not to limit yourself to the quantity. Still, to the frequency of publications — the pace must be reasonable to avoid compromising the quality of the productions.

You can also group your pages into subjects or themes, which doesn’t require you to create categories and tags on your blog. It’s instead, it’s the internal links that deserve your attention.

Organize your internal links

For search engines to fully understand the hierarchy of your content, you must reproduce it in your internal link structure.

Considering that your visitors and, above all, the search engine robots “scour” your site through addresses and hyperlinks, we need to create logical paths to lead visitors.

Get referenced (citations and backlinks)

At this stage of the link-building strategy, one of the most important ranking factors is backlinks, the links from other sites that point to your pages. When respected sites use your content to reference, Google gives your domain authority.

In this sense, there are three ways to get these external indications:

• Guest posts: in this type of partnership, you or one of your authors publishes on another company’s blog and vice versa;
• Advertising: sponsored publications in newspapers, magazines, and portals, generally used to promote brands, services, or products.

Links are very important, but we can’t forget about EAT attributes. Some specialist companies suggest that Google analyzes web citations to estimate the reputation of websites and their authors.

However, take care: this does not mean that you should circumnavigate creating pages on Wikipedia and making commercial partnerships indiscriminately. This may even infringe on the advertising rules laid down for your professional category.

To obtain results in this aspect, it is necessary to invest in social actions, participate in events, and, if necessary, integrate your Content Marketing with a Press Office.

Align your pages to the Quality Raters’ Guidelines (QRG)

One of the main advice concerns the presentation of pages and websites: they must have a clear purpose or benefit.

Under this and other principles, the QRG lists the characteristics of a high-quality page:

• high level of EAT, whether on the site, whether in the authors, in the articles, and the information present on the pages;
• a considerable number of high-quality core content;
• detailed information about the person responsible for the website or customer service, in case the main page includes financial transactions;
• Site responsible for the main content with a good reputation on the web.
• Low-quality main content: texts that are too short, with little depth, and without coherence;
• Neutral pages: layout, organization, and data that do not clarify their purpose;
• Excessive advertising: Ads distract the reader and make it difficult to read.

Deliver specific solutions (Long Tail keywords)

Long-tail keywords have the highest number of words and deal with specific subjects. Therefore, they are an excellent guide for content production, especially for websites just starting. After all, although they have a lower search volume, their competition in the SERPs is much lower.

Thinking about an SEO strategy for health websites, we have the following search examples:

• Head tail (short tail): immune system;
• Middle tail: strengthen the immune system;
• Long tail: foods to strengthen the immune system.

Ideally, your content production should encompass keywords of all types. But keep in mind that when done well, long tails can be a powerful source of qualified traffic.

Produce content eligible for featured snippets

These results are a great reference for content production, as they tell us what the search engine expects. In addition, once conquered, they give your brand enormous visibility and authority.

Regarding the content structure, an article eligible for a featured snippet must:

• Answer the main question or clarify the keyword early on;
• Gradually deepening through contextualization and possible doubts;
• Bring comments, discussions, or examples.

As for structure, a SEMrush study identified the following patterns in this type of result:

• Paragraphs have 44 to 108 words, with a maximum of 691 characters
• The tables have 3 to 4 lines and 3 to 7 columns, approximately;
• Images are typically 159 to 600 pixels tall and 231 to 800 pixels wide.

Improve user experience (menus, searches, and filters)

People access health websites to find tips on nutrition, quality of life, and prevention, mainly to learn about symptoms and possible conditions or diseases.

• General and topic menus;
• Search fields;
• Indexes, in case the site is a great aggregator of information;
• Areas that bring together highly sought after topics, such as symptoms, well-being, and emergencies;

You see a page with a rich navigation structure in the example below.

Note, however, that these features are not essential, and each one carries a “cost” in page load time. Therefore, you should only enter those useful to users who will be used.

Don’t forget that mobile is the main way to access the internet, so page speed should be a priority.

Configure the structured data of your pages

The biggest advantage of applying these settings is that the structured data elevates your site to the so-called Enhanced Search. In addition, rich snippets, the supplemental information in search results, are based on this structuring.

The ideal is to use plugins to generate these tags to avoid errors. Yoast SEO, for example, provides the structuring of the main data of your website.

But for the process to be effective, it is necessary to present all the information requested in the initial configuration. Then, you can use the Schema App Structured Data plugin to make finer adjustments.

This and all the recommendations covered in the article are very important but don’t forget that the quality of the content should be the priority.

In addition to monitoring results and doing good keyword research, always try to put yourself in the audience’s shoes. Only then will you be able to stay relevant.10 fundamental practices to rank at the top of Google!

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