7 SEO Mistakes To Avoid in Audiology Marketing
If you’re an audiologist and interested in SEO to attract more patients, you need to know that most SEO firms are selling you a placebo. You know what I’m talking about, the online version of a little white sugar pill that does nothing but spike your blood sugar… Yup, it’s big scam in online marketing.
Most SEO firms focus on doing a few outdated things on your website, the basic on-page keyword placement that looks good, but in today’s highly competitive marketplace does little to help you dominate your local market.
These faux SEO services, stuff in a few keywords, switch up the headers, tweak a few other outdated things Google left behind 5 algorithm updates ago and say, “Voila! Your audiology SEO is complete!”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. And as an audiologist who is totally busy building your practice, you don’t have much time to analyze whether or not their alleged SEO tweaks actually do get more patients for your practice. Which is what you hired them to do, right?
So how can you judge whether or not you’re getting real medical search engine optimization treatment… or just the placebo?
Get educated about what really goes into medical practice SEO. Discover the 7 most common SEO mistakes and hold your firm accountable for the results:
Mistake 1: Not Being Clear about Your Audiology SEO Goals
Your patients want tangible results: hearing aids that improve their ability to hear and boost their quality of life. You need tangible results from your audiology SEO company, too. They must understand what you want, and set up a system for tracking whether or not they’re getting results. Some obvious goals would include:
- Getting more patients through better local SEO
- Better search rankings when someone types “audiologist in your town” into a search engine
- Higher organic website traffic and more new patient phone calls into the office
Mistake 2: Not Demanding Helpful SEO Analytics
Again, let’s assume that the ultimate goal for your audiology search engine optimization is to get more patients through the door who buy more hearing aids. Ask your SEO firm specifically how they track which keywords and key phrases are working—or not working—to drive more people to schedule appointments with you.
MedPB has a very specific tracking and analysis system that directly connects the number of incoming patient calls and emails (both new and repeats) and links those calls directly back to our efforts. You see the concrete ROI.
If you aren’t getting good analytics, you’ll never know what you can do to improve your results.
Mistake 3: Keyword Stuffing and Awkward Keyword Placements
Over a decade ago, you saw this a lot: text on audiology websites that was peppered with [Your Town] audiologist to the point of silliness. Sure, it makes sense to mention that combination of words in logical places around your website. But if your SEO company is just dropping that all over the place where it doesn’t read naturally, Google and other search engines will recognize it as keyword stuffing and penalize it in search results—meaning potential patients won’t find you.
Google likes high-quality, high-value, natural, useful, regularly-updated content that helps people solve their problems. Your target keyword and phrase list should naturally spring from quality content and the natural search language your patients use. This will drive organic search results to your audiology practice.
Mistake 4: Using the Same Title Tag or Meta Description on Every Page
Let’s explain this one a little bit: You can see the title tag at the top of the tab open in your browser. If you have an audiology website with different pages for different services, each title tag should correspond to each of those services and not simply be a restatement of [Your Town] audiologist repeatedly. For example, a page about hearing aid fittings should say “Hearing Aid Fittings in [Your Town]”.
The meta description is a 160-character miniature sales pitch built into each page on your website—this unique text should contain keywords that should talk only about what’s on that particular page and not be a copy from other pages on your website.
These two simple SEO tactics make it easier for search engines to index your pages, and it also shows how relevant your pages are to your target audience when they share links on Facebook, Twitter, email or when they bookmark your website for future reference.
Mistake 5: Not Going Mobile
It’s not news that Google search algorithms actually give “mobile-friendly” websites a big boost in search rankings over websites that look horrible on mobile devices. One of the first things your audiology SEO team needs to do is make sure your website is mobile friendly—if not, get that fixed fast.
Mistake 6: A Poorly Organized Website Structure
Make sure your website has a clear site map, that none of the internal links are broken, and that it’s logically organized and easy to navigate. Not only do search engines like Google give preferential treatment to such websites, it sure helps your potential patients get what they want and makes it easier for them (and you) to share useful content over social media.
Mistake 7: Not Having Relevant, Unique Content
One of the most important, bottom-line issues with SEO for doctors and audiologists is that you need high-value, unique content. Think about it—if you were researching something, you’d want to find helpful, authoritative information that enhances your life and ability to make good choices.
Your potential patients want the same thing, and Google has their back with every new search algorithm updated to cull out useless content from their search results. Consider informative how-to blogs and even videos. Add to-the-point and helpful articles that people will want to share.
Why is SEO Important to Your Audiology Practice?
Without effective SEO, your site won’t be speaking Google’s language and it won’t get ranked correctly. There will be a breakdown in communication between what you see yourself as an expert in and what Google sees. Which means patients won’t find you. Instead, they’ll find competitors whose websites speak SEO fluently.
Effective SEO basically boils down to having an up-to-date website built for SEO. One designed and written, from the get go, in Google’s language as well as from the patient’s perspective to demonstrate you’re the local hearing expert.
How do you keep your website code and content up to date?
Here are the ABCs.
A. Google is constantly changing how it sorts web pages, and it’s key to track these changes and update your site code every few months.
B. Google ranks the value of websites like colleges rank professors who want tenure. Publish or perish. Which means to continue to be seen as the expert, you need regular articles added to your site.
C. The same goes for your Google Business Profile. Google expects it to be updated regularly too with new and accurate content.
Why don’t most SEO firms do the above?
Because you need the right staff, and it takes a lot of time to stay on top of Google’s constant changes, write articles regularly, and manage your Google Business Profile.
How Do You Pick the Right SEO Firm?
Pick one that speaks your language. Sounds obvious, but most SEO firms talk about the number of clicks and impressions they’ll generate for your practice. If that matters to you, that’s great. But 99.7% of all medical practice owners aren’t looking for clicks and impressions, they’re looking for new patients, new patient appointments.
To start, pick a marketing firm to help you with your audiology SEO that talks in the same language as you, in terms of getting more new patients in the door. A marketing firm that specializes in your vertical and speaks Google so you don’t need to.
What SEO services should you pay for?
This is the important stuff hardly anyone does.
In the hearing aid market, there are a lot of new low-cost hearing devices claiming to be every bit as good as a fully functional hearing aid. As you know, these devices work for some things like streaming music, but fully functional they are not.
The same is true in the world of SEO. Some audiology SEO firms do the same thing. They sell you SEO but it’s only SEO lite, at best. Think lite beer or worse.
Do you need to pay monthly for audiology SEO?
The simple answer is yes if you want your site to continue to show up on Google and generate new patient leads. If you’re working with a marketing firm that avoids the mistakes mapped out above, you should be getting a steady stream of new patients in the door. Which means the ROI on your SEO should be so high you’d be happy to pay monthly.
Here at MedPB our Audiology SEO helps drive down our clients’ cost per lead so low that many of our clients’ ROI is 8-1 and for some it’s 16-1. Yes, for every dollar they spend on SEO they make back 8 or even 16 in new revenue.
Next Steps
When you examine a patient and prescribe a new hearing aid, you know you’ll be judged on one key criterion. Results.
Which is exactly how SEO firms should be judged. Wouldn’t you agree?
The key is agreeing on what results you are paying for. Is it rankings, page views, or something else?
Isn’t it just new patient phone calls? Isn’t that the one thing that really matters to your practice, the number of new patients calling as a result of your Audiology SEO?
If you want to spend money on SEO, there are thousands of charlatans out there ready to take your money. If you want new patients calling, make sure that is the primary measurement criteria your online marketing firm uses. Or talk to online marketing experts with a track record of success at MedPB.
Achieve more. Talk to us.
