6 Ways Healthcare Businesses Can Use PR For SEO

Businesses rely heavily on their internet presence and PR is a crucial part of enhancing brand awareness.

Healthcare businesses may consider finding a healthcare communications agency that can align their PR campaigns with SEO practices to lead to more traffic being driven to their website. 

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of improving your rankings in Google and other search engines. Healthcare brands require this to drive more traffic to their website and increase their lead prospects, especially with the current pandemic, demand is higher than ever.

Some brands may not have the time to focus on their SEO strategy, despite the huge benefits of making these changes, the current global situation has left many with stretched man-hours. You can relieve this strain by hiring an award-winning Search Engine Optimisation company to do the leg work for you.

It’s good to be aware that SEO does not produce instant results but with the right implementation and some patience, by following these 6 simple steps, you can begin to see your traffic grow and the quality improves, ensuring you are more visible to your target audience and those searching for your services.

High-Quality Backlinks

A backlink is when another website places a hyperlink on their site that takes a user to a relevant page on yours. Search engines see these links as an endorsement from the site towards your brand.

This is also referred to as ‘PageRank’ and Google will use this to compare you to your competitors when you are trying to rank for the same terms. This is the most effective way to gain higher traffic.

You need to be aware when placing these links, nowadays you must place with high-authority websites to be able to create results. Using a PR agency can hugely aid with this and can help you build those backlinks in high numbers.

It isn’t enough to simply have a hyperlink placed on a site, it needs to be contained within well-written, relevant content. Even with the most compelling, comprehensive articles, if the website doesn’t fit, this could provide no positive effect or even be counterproductive. Always ensure the hosting domain is relevant to your product or service.

Ensuring Brand Association

Any marketer will tell you the importance of brand association. Making sure the public are aware of your name and the connection with your services or products is one of the key elements to driving sales.

But did you know this is also important in SEO? Search engines need to know your brand and your services too. When your PR team has successfully gotten your name mentioned in popular media outlets, the public will quickly begin to associate products with your brand.

This will cause habits to change in search engines from the user, for example, instead of previously searching for ‘migraine relief’ they will type ‘Nurofen migraine relief’.

Not only will these organic searches improve your ranking, but search engines will begin to recognise what you offer and push you higher in search results.

This means when a user searches for a product or service you provide, but without your brand name, you are more likely to appear in their search results. Therefore, this provides the potential for sales from someone who was unaware of you previously.

Referral Traffic From Third Parties

You can’t always rank for every keyword you want to, especially if you are new to the SEO game and these keywords are highly competitive.

Instead, utilise your PR team to have guest posts placed on websites that do rank for these keywords and are relevant to your brand.

With a well-placed backlink in these posts, traffic will come through to your website from the hosting domain’s higher organic traffic.

Create Your Own Keywords

Each time you create a new product or service, new terms will also be generated. Using PR to establish awareness of this will benefit your SEO.

When a user has seen your new product or service, along with the new terminology in media placements, they will then search this new phrasing.

As this language is unique to your brand and no others should be trying to compete with this, you will appear high on search results.

Reclaim Previous PR

You may not have the time or resources to implement all the points previously mentioned but there are still quick ways you can get a backlink.

Search for sites that have previously mentioned your brand and contact them to ask for a backlink. This can be via email, phone or even social media, if the page has an author, always try to contact them directly.

This won’t bring a 100% success rate, after all, websites have no obligation to backlink to your website, but there is no harm in asking.

Even if a website doesn’t place a link, it isn’t time wasted, keep these contacts for when you launch a new campaign. As you have already established a relationship with these authors, they will be more likely to feature you in the future and place a backlink.

Social Proof Your Site

Using positive views of your company from others builds credibility towards your brand and adds to ‘SEO social proof’.

If you have featured on well-known, highly authoritative outlets, you should let your visitors know. Place their logos on your homepage, this way, visitors will see you as having higher authority and are more likely to engage with your content and spend longer on your site.

Dwell time plays a vital role in SEO, this is how long a visitor spends on your site before returning to their search results or clicking off. You can increase this time by providing engaging blog content and news articles.

Catering your content to provide solutions to your visitors, most searchers are looking for answers to problems. Break your paragraphs up and provide clear headings, users don’t want to have to filter through large chunks of content to find what they are looking for.

By following these tips, you will soon be able to see a difference in traffic to your website that should provide you with more leads and therefore revenue in the future.