Updated June 19th, 2023
Search engine optimization (SEO) is especially important when you start your medical blog. Starting a blog and writing about things you are an expert in and are passionate about can be fun and inspiring. However, as a writer you want your content to be read, and that is where SEO comes in. You will only have readers if people find your content through search engines like Google. But what is SEO and why is it important? For me, learning and understanding SEO has been both challenging and rewarding. Getting my first articles ranked on page one of Google was a great feeling that additionally came with increasing traffic. You can and should also use SEO tools to rank your medical blog. Therefore, in this article, I will give a detailed overview of SEO for medical writing.
Also see: How to start a medical blog and How to write a medical blog article.
What is SEO and why is it important?
You can write the best article in the world with the most thoughtful structure, strong images, and valuable content. If you neglect SEO, no one may see or read it. Some of my first articles, such as How to Write a Scientific Paper in Radiology, took me several days to research, structure, and write. I was reall happy with the result. However, I did not get any traffic for weeks, even though it was indexed by Google.
It was at this time that I started to look into SEO for medical blogging to find out what I was missing/doing wrong – and boy, it was a lot. Without SEO, you wont rank (be visible) in search engines such as Google. Without ranking, you will not get anyone to read your article (if you do not share your link directly). Therefore, as a blogging medical professional, you will have to deal with this topic. So in the following paragraphs, I want to share my experiences and put together some specific information about SEO for medical writing.
Do Medical Blogs Have a Good Chance Ranking on Google?
Google prioritizes credible and authentic Health related blogs and ranks them high in the search engine, if they use White Hat SEO Techniques. Therefore, if you are a medical professional, that provides real value, you have good chances in ranking if you optimize your blog posts and articles.
SEO for medical blogging plays a crucial role to help readers, healthcare organizations, and medical professionals meet the right targeted audience. It increases the visibility and traffic for potential readers if done correctly.
How to Start with SEO as a Medical Blogger?
Search Engine Optimization; SEO is the central part that starts with the beginning when you research your specific blogging niche or medical field. It refers to
Optimizing your website content, improving its visibility, and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO involves various techniques and strategies to increase organic (searching topics naturally by searching on) traffic from search engines globally, mainly Google. Hence, with the defined parameters of Google, SEO is categorized into
- White Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO
- Gray Hat SEO
Categories of SEO according to Google
Google has grouped SEO into three categories:
- White Hat SEO
It is the preferred kind of SEO for every blog that uses different strategies and functions to meet the requirements of your targeted audience. This is applied by optimizing the ON-Page and Off-Page of your blogging website (will be discussed in the following blog).
- Black Hat SEO
The black hat SEO technique involves fast ranking of your website by violating the search engine terms and conditions, more like dodging Google. This later leads to penalties with the search engine crawlers and immediate de-ranking of the website.
- Gray Hat SEO
It combines White and Black hat SEO, i.e., creating optimized content according to the White hat technique and creating backlinks using Black hat techniques. You may get your website ranked quickly, but eventually, it will get a penalty from Google.
In a nutshell, the only SEO technique for medical writing, I can recommend, is White Hat SEO. As well as using AI tools that may get you de-indexed by search engines, you want to publish honest content with optimized structures without any dirty tricks to rank. This will make you and your site credible and authentic.
Understanding SEO for Medical Writing
SEO is more like a gateway to the information available on the internet. The search engine giants like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, etc., use complex algorithms that based on different factors like
- Content relevance
- Authority
- High-quality, and
- User experience
Hence, medical writers must tailor their content to meet the criteria of high-quality content and its visibility. While understanding SEO for Medical Writing, you should keep three aspects in mind.
- Keyword research and its placement
- On-page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
How Can a Medical Blogger Apply SEO?
The precise answer is through content, keywords, links, and structure. In medical research, you might have seen keywords written separately under which a specific topic can be searched. You know that you need key words, when you want to submit a scientific manuscript to a journal. Your content must be relevant to the searched query and targeted audience. That is what key words are for. They connect the intent of the searching person to the result (your paper or your blog article).
The Importance of Keywords in SEO for Medical Writing?
They are the terms that your reader searches on the search engine. It holds a specific search volume that helps to find your blog only if it is relevant. By incorporating relevant keyword strategies within their content, medical writers can increase their visibility in the search engine. If you found this article on Google while searching for “SEO for medical writing“, I may have chosen the right key word to attract you to my article.
What is the Best Practice for Keywords?
- Searching keywords with low competition
- Using Long-tail keywords (multipe words, such as “how to …”)
- Right use of Focus Keyword (main keyword)
- Relevant Primary (according to focus keywords) and secondary (related) keywords
- Using keywords naturally like they must be used in a flow
- The keyword density (the number of times a keyword is used) must be appropriate
What not to do?
- Keyword stuffing (unwanted use of keywords in the content)
- Irrelevant keywords added to the content
- Using the same key words for different articles
Role of Keywords and their usage in content creation
A keyword with low competition allows a high chance of ranking your blog with prominent visibility in the search engine. You must stick to the topic without deviating and add related and relevant keywords with the proper density. Secondly, use primary and related keywords as necessary as focusing on the topic.
For instance, you have written an article on the keyword “Diabetes”, so your topic should revolve around a complete informative guide and completely cover the diseases. It should include
- Diabetes
- Types of Diabetes
- Symptoms
- Treatment
- Diet and exercises for diabetic patients
- Tips and FAQs for diabetic patients
And each topic must use related keywords for the mentioned headings, and you can search your related topic by performing keyword research.
However, if you use a longer and more specific keyword, such as “the best food for diabetic patients“, you can add more specific information. Therefore, you have a higher chance to rank as your competition is lower.
On-Page SEO for Medical Blogging
On-Page SEO is a non-technical technique of the optimization of the elements of each page to improve the visibility of a webpage. This includes optimizing techniques like
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Heading tags
- URL structure
- Images
- Alt tags
- Internal linking
1. Title Tags
Title tags for the topic must include a focus keyword and not be too long. However, you have to make sure that it must be eye-catching. For example, if you are writing about diabetes, the title could look like
Simple and easy tips for people struggling with Diabetes. (with sensational words “simple and easy”)
or
DiaBeat-it, Simple Tricks to Harmonize Diabetes.
See, this way; the search engine algorithm can understand what your page is about. Or anything that tells an informative insight about the page.
2. Meta Description
The next element of non-technical page optimization is a meta description which is a short summary of 160 characters of what your page is about. Ideally, the best meta description to rank your page must accurately represent your article. The meta description can be seen on the results bage on search enginges and gives the reader (and the search enginge) a short and concise overview on what to expect when clicking on your article.
For instance, meta description for diabetes:
Explore effective diabetes management strategies with expert insights, practical tips, and cutting-edge research.
This little information can tell that your page is informative and has every information that represents your relevance.
Heading tags are the font style that represents and distinguishes different headings. According to Google guidelines, you need to follow the following Heading styles.
H1: The title of your content must be H1, and there must be no other heading marked as H1, as it may create confusion for the algorithm to understand the page’s topic.
H2: The headings should be marked as H2. For instance,
if you are describing the Symptoms of Diabetes, you have to make this heading H2.
H3: When your heading has a subheading, it must be H3. For instance, when writing about the types of diabetes, it should be marked as H3.
Now, the flow is like this.
H1: Title: Diabetes, Symptoms, and Treatments
H2 Heading: Types of Diabetes
H3 Sub Heading: Type I and Type II
4. URL Structure
The URL is the link to your page, and the structure describes the title of your page and its content in a few words. A common mistake that new bloggers (myself included) make. They write a creative title for the topic, which sometimes is not a clear depiction of the page. And that fancy title has the same title as it is, which hinders the page ranking.
What you have to do is always customize your URL that represents your page as well must as contain your focus keyword. This way, whenever someone searches a related query for diabetes, your article will appear in the search engine.
For instance, for an article on the symptoms of diabetes it could look like this: https://www.domainname.com/diabetes-symptoms/.
Here its important to mentioned, that you should avoid to change your URL once the article is published and ranking. Doing so will not only lower (and potentiall nullify) the chance of being found. In addition, all your internal links (and backlinks) will not work anymore.
5. Images
User experience and page optimization is what Google gives priority to. Only text may look lengthy and boring to the reader, and they might leave your website without reading it, leading to an increased bounce rate. People leaving your page without reading through it will then result in a negative feedback to the search engine and may result in your article ranking lower and lower.
The best practice is to make your web page attractive by adding visual aids like related images. If you´re just starting a blog, there are plenty of copyright free medical image resources out there such as Pexels, Pixabay and Unsplash.
6. Alt Tags
Alt tags or Alternative tags are used for images and describe what the image is about. The images you use on your web page should include the image alt tags. Also, you have to ensure your images are relevant to your article. If possible, include relevant key words to show the connection and relevance between the images and the content of your article.
Sometimes you have images on your page that are not displaying to the user and appear as blank space to the user, or sometimes Google crawlers cannot read the image. I these cases, alt tags also help them to understand the image and its content.
7. Internal linking
Internal linking is linking your blog page to the other relevant pages of your website. This positively impacts your website’s visibility, creating a network of related content. However, you have to do it strategically. For example, you are reading an article on SEO for medical blogging. As I also have an article on how to start a medical blog, it may be a good idea to link this article here.
This will help the search engine crawler understand the structure of your website and strategically improve your website navigation. Again, you must keep the contextual relevance in mind to create a logical flow of information.
For instance, if you have different pages on diabetes-like symptoms, treatments, diets, etc., all are written separately, you have to link them to one Diabetes topic.
Off-Page Optimization Techniques for Medical Writing
Another part of optimizing your medical blog is to focus on Off-Page SEO techniques. This includes activities that use different link-building strategies like high authority backlinks, outreach, guest posting, managing online directories, and engaging social media marketing.
All these strategies help to establish your blog and increase organic traffic on your website. Here are a few terms to which you need to get familiar with.
- Crawl and crawler: Crawlers are automated search engine bots that fetch and understand data from your webpage. Whereas crawling is the process by which these bots crawl your web page.
- Indexing: You can consider it an archive or a store of a search engine that saves the crawled pages with location and URLs. This tells whether or not your page is appearing in the search engine.
- Backlink: this is a method to rank your blog by placing links from one page to another.
- SERP: the abbreviation for Search Engine Result Page helps to rank your pages to display in response to the user’s queries.
- Outreach: this process calls out other websites with authorities to hold your product and services.
- Guest Posting: This process involves requesting other high-authority websites to publish your content with your link.
The best practice is to build niche-specific links, i.e., links related to high-authority health-related websites. We will discuss Off-page SEO for medical blogging in an separate article.
Website Technical Optimization
Technical optimization for a website involves the user experience and search engine rankings. Every blogging niche, including medical writing, must have
- A fast-loading website
- A well-working caching technique
This applies to desktop viewing and it must be mobile optimized so that individuals reaching from their smartphones can access your website easily. If you are using services such as Squarespace, WordPress or Blogger, you will need to think less about these aspects. This is because they are well optimized for speed, caching and cross-platform optimization.
XML sitemaps and robots.txt files
XML sitemaps serve as a roadmap for search engines, guiding them to discover and index the web pages on a website. Medical writers should create and submit XML sitemaps to search engines, ensuring all relevant content is crawled and indexed.
Canonical tags and duplicate content issues
Duplicate content can negatively impact search engine rankings. Medical writers can use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a web page when identical or similar content exists.
Canonical tags help search engines understand which version to rank, mitigating any potential negative impact from duplicate content.
Monitoring and analytics
Monitoring your website performance and rankings is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of SEO efforts. This can be done using tools like Google Analytics and other SEO analytics platforms to track key metrics like website traffic, user engagement, bounce rates, and conversion rates.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Google Analytics is free and it provides in-depth insights into website traffic sources, user behavior, and demographic data. Additionally, Google Search Console offers valuable data on website visibility in search results, indexation issues, and keyword performance.
Every blogger and therefore also health bloggers should leverage these tools to gain actionable insights and optimize their content and website accordingly.
Ethical Consideration in SEO-optimized Medical Writing
This is the final and most crucial point that you, as a medical writer, must not neglect. Medical writers must prioritize ethical considerations when implementing SEO strategies.
It is essential to adhere to ethical guidelines and regulations established by medical organizations, such as maintaining patient confidentiality and privacy, avoiding false claims or misleading information, and respecting patient rights. As a medical health care, you must be responsible for what you are writing and not be misleading and false claims.
You must state proper references with the facts other than that; as a healthcare professional, maintain and respect your patient’s privacy, ensuring confidentiality. You have to obtain proper consent before disclosing any information related to the patient. Further information on this topic can also be found in our article on how to use social media as a medical professional.
Conclusion | SEO for Medical Writing
In summary, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a critical (if not the most critical) role in increasing the visibility and reach of medical writing.
Through effective SEO strategies, you as a medical writer can ensure that your content is discoverable by search engines. That way you can attract a larger audience and increase the chances of reaching your target readers.
Creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content that meets the target audience’s needs is key, especially for medical-related topics. By prioritizing SEO in medical blogging, professionals can establish their expertise, promote healthcare knowledge, and contribute to disseminating accurate medical information.
