SEO for Eye Doctors

Search Engine Optimization for eye doctors, SEO for short, is the smart way to maximize your Web site’s potential at reaching new patients. A recent VisionMonday.com quick survey found that 50 percent of eye doctors expected to spend a lot of effort in marketing their practice, especially online. Your potential patients are looking for you online, and using SEO on your Web site will help them find you faster.

SEO Tips and Strategies

Be sure you are well-versed in your state board’s rules and regulations for marketing your eye practice. Be sure that you are using SEO practices that are safe and ethical, without being misleading in any way. Be wary of sneaky SEO practices, like social media and blog comment spam, that will be detrimental to your Web site.

SEO Tactics

Choose Keywords Wisely: As an eye doctor, you provide a lot of services: from contacts to glasses to glaucoma testing and everything in between, eye patients have many concerns. Work to choose keywords that highlight the strengths of your particular practice. For example, if you have an extensive collection of high-end, trendy eyeglasses, that may be a selling point for a potential patient. Also be sure to consider your location, particularly if you are in a large city with a lot of different neighborhoods. Patients will be searching for the neighborhood eye doctor, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to talk about your practice’s location. Finally, make sure that you are using your keywords in your headlines, and make sure you have a cleanly designed Web page. All of that will be factors that a search engine is looking at when determining your page rank.

Give Them Something to Read: Start a blog! It doesn’t need to be incredibly fancy, just informative and using the keywords you picked out. Having a blog will help you create more indexed pages on your Web site, and companies that blog have 434 percent more indexed pages than companies that don’t (Hubspot 2010). Search engines will give your Web site more weight as you gain more and more pages. Blog marketing is a great way to improve your SEO and promote your eye care practice.

Linkbuilding: Your page rank will be determined in part by the amount and quantity of links that point to your Web site. Network with other eye doctors to share links to each others’ pages; link to the pages of experts beyond your scope of practice, and ask them to do the same for you. Having these links will demonstrate to the search engines that yours is a Web site worth reading. Be wary, however, of link farms and low quality business directories that can actually penalize your site. Remember that it will always be quality over quantity.