SEO for Health (Medical) Niche – Tips and Research

Search engine optimization (SEO) has developed into a major industry in the online world. Even the number of people using Internet worldwide has increased exponentially and in the same way people searching for medical and health information has increased.

       This condition has eventually lead to the emergence of huge number of health and medical sites and as a result, competition between the sites to rank well for health based keywords has also grown up.

All these conditions obviously mean that SEO experts in health are in huge demand.

Some Useful points and Data:

• Many pharmaceutical companies are trying to rank for drugs and Medicines and spending huge money online for brand promotion and sales.

• Lot of doctors are eager to rank for their offline consultation services in their local areas. 
  
  For example ; plastic surgeon in Canada, liposuction doctor in New York and so on.

• There is also a huge number of top quality content related websites and there are more websites in the list. This is why it is merely impossible for small and medium sized websites and blogs to outrank these high authority medical sites.

• The interesting thing in health niche is that be it any keyword, either short one or long tail keyword, if you search in Google, there is 95 % possibility that a Wikipedia result will feature in the first page. 
  
  

See this google SERPS for the keyword “heart attack”

 

• Also, Google is so particular about the spam in the health niche, because the information is so sensitive and has a huge affect on public health. Just imagine, when you search for some treatment, and you end up visiting a fake site (wrong info site) that’s ranking top. Imagine what the circumstances would be if you followed the instructions and suggestions on that website! Scared ??? Maybe we don’t’t know what is happening at the back end of Google search engine.
  

3 important things you should consider before you invest in health/ medical niche

• Are you providing authentic and correct information – if you are thinking of starting a content based website.

• Is your product (drugs or health product) genuine (for instance, has it received the FDA approval) – if you want to start e-commerce site

• Have you real doctors and board certified physicians willing to work online – if you want to start online medical consultation site.

Above 3 points are basic things and you may require more things to start an authentic medical site.

 

Difficulty in Getting Medical Content Writers:

It is very difficult these days to get an online content maker for health niche. Reasons are many, one of them being that doctors who are the ultimate authority of the subject are very rarely seen online due to offline works.

Also content that is made by a person who is having non medical background cannot be trusted in terms of correctness of the article.

Importance of Google Authorship Markup (Google Plus):

People who are browsing the Internet for medical information are seeking information from authentic sources and people (doctors and health professionals). So Google Authorship Markup will be really helpful to fulfill the confidence of the reader. Even Google is thinking seriously about this and recently they announced (via Google former CEO – Eric) privately about the preference for articles that are linked to verified Google plus profiles.

So from this, we predict that in near future, if the articles have to rank well then there will be a huge demand for verified medical professionals.

Note : Even the CTR (click through ratio) will be affected with the Google plus profile linking to the medical content.

Will update this article with more Tips and Research Info – Stay tuned !