Most prospective patients rely on Google search engine results to find the needed services. Healthcare brands need to increase their search engine rankings to enhance visibility and win more market share. Link-building is one of the most effective methods of appearing on the first page of the search engine and garnering a significant amount of organic traffic.

Organic link building is a challenging endeavour in SEO. Healthcare link-building is even more challenging. You must deal with strict regulations, high competition on search engine results, and life-changing subject matters that are too sensitive to reveal. 

Why Link-Building is Important For Healthcare Companies

Link-building is obtaining links from other websites that link to you. Think about inbound links as votes for your content. Since this aspect of SEO is not directly under our control it tends to be harder than On-Page SEO and thus moves Google’s and Bing’s rankings. 

Increase Referral Traffic 

Effective link-building techniques help you generate traffic from other websites. That happens when internet users click on the backlink, redirecting them to a page within your website. 

Improve Domain Authority

Search engines prefer sites that are helpful to internet users. If credible and reputable organizations add a link to any content within your website, the authority of your domain will improve. This will increase trust from both the target audience and search engines. 

Enhance Site Visibility

With the increased domain authority, you will rank higher for more keywords in search engines. This will enhance the visibility of your Healthcare brand and will result in increased traffic. 

7 Link-Building Tips That Healthcare Companies Should Know

The success of your link-building strategies relies on the following actions:

1. Blogging Outreach

To boost your website’s link profile, consider contributing expert content to well-known healthcare industry websites. Reach out with a thoughtful topic pitch. If accepted, you can bring readers straight to your page through the backlink embedded in the post. Blogger outreach is an effective way of earning quality links that will help strengthen its SEO value.

Difficulty: Hard

Blogging outreach requires you to invest tens of hours in two to three months to obtain a quality placement. You need to shortlist the potential placements, reach out to all of them (and receive very little response), negotiate/brainstorm on the topic and finally create assets for activation.

Insider Tip:

Popular bloggers receive tons of spam emails and tend to disregard them. We suggest using LinkedIn and first developing relationships with healthcare bloggers before the initial outreach.

2. Have an FAQ Section

Healthcare companies looking to incorporate SEO into their digital marketing strategy should consider building an FAQ section. Most searches start with a question, especially for medical queries, where most searches are for symptoms. 

FAQs put your site in a prime position as a reliable source of information for medical and dental queries on Google searches.

Difficulty: Easy

You can gather good questions for the FAQ section using your expertise or external tools such as AnswerThePublic and SEMRush for keyword research purposes. Your business will be prominently featured in search results by incorporating honest, high-quality content into the page structure.

Insider Tip:

Hire an expert to review your FAQs medically. This will help with the E-A-T algorithm and rank answers faster.

3. Use EDU Hyperlinks

With the ability to boost website authority and SERP positioning, link-building is essential for medical professionals looking to appear on Google’s first page. 

Edu backlinks are particularly beneficial due to their increased trustworthiness in the eyes of Google as experts, authorities, and reliable sources. 

Acquiring .edu domains provides an essential signal from one site or content piece promoting another, showing mutual respect between sites, which will generate higher SEO rankings when done correctly.

Difficulty: Medium or Extremely Hard

Depending on the type of.edu link, it can be somewhat easy to obtain it, for example, a scholarship submission. It can be tough if you aim for an institution to quote your research.

Insider Tip:

Medical Scholarship can be an effective way to build .edu links and help the community.

4. Utilize the Local Directory Listing

Making the right connections can make a difference in your medical practice’s success. To ensure you’re building solid backlinks, take advantage of online directory sites that offer high domain authority. Register your business with relevant information – such as links to websites or social media platforms. 

Excellent local directory listing boosts search engine optimization while giving potential customers an easy way to find out more. 

Difficulty: Easy

It’s a fairly straightforward process that shouldn’t take more than a few work days.

Insider Tip:

Directory links are the original black hat links and can be spammy. DO NOT hire someone to build thousands of directory links. At best, it will be a waste of money. At worst, it will hurt your rankings.

5. Unlinked Brand Mentions Count

When it comes to SEO, links from authoritative sites are incredibly valuable. Unlinked brand mentions are when your brand is mentioned on published websites but with no clickable website link attached. While Google gives some recognition for unlinked addresses, that’s only a scratch at the surface. Luckily, it’s a way to become truly recognized as an authority site. 

Always take prompt action with unlinked brand mentions and request those links. Doing so will provide greater credibility and trustworthiness, which should be recognized in today’s competitive marketplaces. 

If a website mentions your brand, they see value in your service, product, or perspective.

Difficulty: Medium

If you are active with your marketing, especially PR, chances are that someone will mention your brand.

Insider Tip:

If you don’t have specialized tools to monitor your brand reputation, at least use Google Alerts to ensure you know immediately if someone mentions your brand online.

6. Use Quality Infographics

Infographics provide an efficient and creative way to communicate complex messages. Not only can infographics capture viewers’ attention, but they are also beneficial for SEO ranking when incorporated into external websites. 

Difficulty: Easy

You will need to gather useful medical content and resources to design it. Yet as far as link building goes, this is one of the easiest methods.

Insider Tip:

Infographic links have a minimum effect on Search Engine rankings. Think firstly about humans and infographics you can use for other marketing channels. For example, if you are creating an infographic for Lead Magnet Purposes, it is worthwhile to invest in it. Creating an infographic solely for the purpose of submission to infographic websites won’t yield any results.

7. Invest in Video Content

Unleash the potential of video content to captivate your audience and generate positive engagement. Embedding videos into blog posts or web pages boost interactivity within your site while subtly reinforcing a know, like, and trust relationship with viewers. You could even dare ask for links directly to your videos from referenced authors – nothing ventured, nothing gained after all.

Video-enriched blog posts increase the chance of a website ranking at the top of Google’s search results. Not only does video content add value to readers, but it also boosts on-page time – an important metric for achieving higher rankings (according to some).

Difficulty: Easy

This is under your control, and video production these days is not as expensive as it was.

Insider Tip:

Videos can take a lot of time and, thus, resources. We found creating one long-form content per month and then dividing it into small pieces works well. For example, you can record 30 min interview with an expert and then use the quotes to generate smaller videos.

8. Bonus: Analyze your successful competitors backlinks

If you can find competitors to your Healthcare Brand that are successful at Medical SEO you can analyze their backlink profile. You are looking for quality links that you can match. Sometimes you also might get an idea of the type of the placement that you can replicate. Essentially, by leveraging the research your competitors have already done, you can strategically build your own link profile, ensuring you’re on par or even surpassing them in terms of online visibility.

Difficulty: Medium

It takes manual work to firstly sift through competitor backlinks and then to go after the placements. Yet it’s not as hard as doing it yourself.

Insider Tip:

Merge backlinks of a few of your competitors in one table. That way you can remove the duplicates and not analyze the same link over and over. You can also highlight duplicates. If each one of your competitor has a link on the same placement, that is a good sign that you can match this link.

Hire someone else to do it for you consistently.

In addition to understanding the technical aspects of link building, the biggest resource spent is time.

Instead, consider hiring us. We will do it efficiently and let you concentrate on what you do best. It will save time and, therefore, money.